Warfare

In 1942 the British launched a 12 man raid and reconnaissance mission to the Channel Island of Sark. On the night of the 3 October, a cast of characters who gave their colleague Ian Fleming ideas for a secret agent character, James Bond, crept ashore. They escaped hours later with one German prisoner, a further two having been killed in a scuffle. That might have been the end of it. When Hitler he...

Six years of exile on a remote island blighted with unpleasant weather conditions, in lodgings far inferior to those enjoyed whilst leader of France, hardly seems fitting for the final years of Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet, in this second episode with Zack White, we hear about how this remarkable military commander came to fall so far from the top. Zack takes us through Napoleon’s loss of power, his re...

He is widely remembered as one of the most exceptional military commanders that the world has ever seen, a man whose influence was so pervasive that an entire era of European history is referred to in his name. Napoleon is just as divisive in death as he was in life, and for this first of two episodes with Zack White, we are discussing the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and his impact on France. Zack...

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union on Sunday 22 June 1941 was one of the bloodiest military campaigns mankind has ever known. Now, BAFTA winning producer and author Stewart Binns is telling the story of this catastrophic campaign from the perspective of the Soviet people. Listen as he and James explore the different perspectives on how Nazi Germany’s turn on its former ally occurred, and uncove...

In the dying days of the Second World War, a group of Georgians rose up against their German overlords on the Dutch island of Texel. Thousands of Georgians served in the Soviet forces during World War II and when captured and given the choice to “starve or fight”, some took up the German offer to don Wehrmacht uniforms. When the opportunity arose in April 1945, these Georgians rose up and slaughte...

The use of nerve agents is synonymous with Russian espionage for those of us who remember the recent poisonings of Alexei Navalny, Sergei and Yulia Skripal and the residents of Salisbury caught up in the latters’ attempted murders. The origins of this weapon, however, remain shrouded in mystery. Sergei Lebedev is a Russian novelist, currently based in Berlin. He has come onto Warfare to discuss th...

97 year old Jim Burrows OAM served as a Coastwatcher in the South Pacific during the Second World War. The Coastwatchers were an intelligence arm of the Allied Intelligence Bureau, and were set up to alert Australia of any military threat from the north. Jim was a radio operator, and spent 10 months in occupied Japanese territory. Over the last few years he has compiled the story of the Coastwatch...

In this episode from the archives, Dan sits down with James Holland to talk about Operation Argument. Taking place in February 1944, this was the biggest air battle of World War Two, and part of the US Army Air Force and RAF strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thousands of houses, 26 schools, 8 cinemas and 41 churches destroyed; 640 separate air raid sirens and almost 1180 killed. Plymouth is not the first city to come to mind when you mention the Blitz, and probably not the second or third, either. But, eighty years after this southwestern port city faced 59 separate air attacks, Dr Harry Bennett from the University of Plymouth is on Warfare to tell us...

The last major confrontation of the Second World War, and the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific theatre, the Battle of Okinawa ended in Allied victory but with massive casualties on both sides. To take us through the battle and explore the use of kamikaze pilots by the Japanese and the Atomic bomb by the United States, James welcomed Saul David onto Warfare. Saul is a professor of Military...

Our traditional understanding of the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 hinges on studies of Chamberlain and his fellow statesmen, but what about the general population? Frederick Taylor's latest book, 1939: A People’s History (The War Nobody Wanted), details the reactions and fears of ordinary British and German people in the face of the slide to war, between the Munich Crisis of September...

During almost a century of life, Prince Philip dedicated seven decades to the service of Great Britain as the partner of Queen Elizabeth II. But in this episode of Warfare we’re going further back, to his time in the Royal Navy. Alex Churchill gives us a glimpse into the Duke of Edinburgh’s service during the Second World War, and the insight that this gives us into his character. © Matteo Omied /...

What if the Battle of Britain had not been a success for the British? What was the plan had the Nazis successfully crossed the channel? Chris Pratt is the Curator of the Museum of the British Resistance Organisation, Parham Airfield. He joined James over a video call to talk about how the Auxiliary Units that made up the British resistance were formed, how they were trained and when, or whether, t...

In early 1900, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle crossed paths in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War. Motivated in various ways by notions of duty, service, patriotism and jingoism, they were each shaped by the theatre of war. Sarah LeFanu joined Dan Snow to explore the cultural legacies, controversial reputations and influence on colonial policy of these three British writ...

Truth, rumour, conspiracy? Gill Bennett OBE had the job of sorting fact from fiction as chief historian of the Foreign Office from 1995-2005, and senior editor of its official history of British foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas. During over thirty years as a historian at Whitehall, she provided historical advice to twelve foreign secretaries under six prime ministers, from Edwa...

During the changes and troubles of the 20th century, officials in Britain faced a huge question: how could they maintain imperial power? Dr Louis Halewood has been researching the troubles faced by British policy makers, and the efforts to maintain dominance with their dominions and allies as Pax Britannica came to a close. In this episode he speaks to James from the University of Plymouth about t...

Dr. Jamie Wood and Professor Niall Mackay at the University of York are mathematicians who love history. They released a paper which sent the rest of the history world into a meltdown when they tried to use the statistics of airframe losses from the Battle of Britain to test just how close Germany might have come to victory in the battle. This is a fantastic crossover between history and maths, an...

In this episode of Warfare we hear about what was happening behind the closed doors of GCHQ during the 20th century, from somebody who has been given access to the files (a lot of them anyway!). Hear John Ferris, the authorised historian of GCHQ, and professor of History at the University of Calgary as he takes us through what he has learnt about the relationships between the governments and organ...

The existence of nuclear weapons holds their owners in a position of mutually assured destruction with one another, but how did it come to be this way, and is there a way out? Dr Jean-François Bélanger is a Postdoctoral Fellow focussing on the role of status inconsistencies in nuclear proliferation, competence and rule-adherence. Here, he talks James through the history of nuclear power, and what...

Katrin Himmler's great-uncle was Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and one of the principle architects of the Holocaust. Katrin has confronted her family legacy with a book, Die Brüder Himmler, translated into English as ‘The Himmler Brothers. A German Family History’. She is a German author and political scientist, and has also edited, together with the historian Michael Wildt, private letters fr...

Despite declaring itself neutral at the outset of the Second World War, Denmark’s experience of the war years is identifiable by its internal division. Rune Edberg is a Danish historian who specialises in the history of the many Danish resistance groups that fought to make life as difficult as possible for the occupying Nazis. In this conversation, he tells James how much of the resistance against...

From Ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Wars, The First World War, then the Second, and all the way through to modern drone warfare; in this episode Michael Williams takes a deep dive into the way that nations, in particular the United States, approach warfare. Michael, a professor of International Relations and Security, explains the American rationale, approach to and meth...

From fighting on the front line as a Junior Officer in the first days of the First World War, to commanding Allied ground forces on D-Day, the life of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery presents an individual perspective on the major conflicts of the first half of the Twentieth Century. At Chalke Valley, comedian and history graduate Al Murray spoke about his history hero, 'Monty' - his life, caree...

Almost 80 years after the raid on Dieppe on 19 August 1942, David O’Keefe has uncovered the secret mission to pinch Enigma related material which took place under the cover of the six-thousand strong landing force. In this second part of David’s conversation with James, he tells us about the outcomes of the raid and how his research has answered the long held questions of veterans of Dieppe. © Lib...

On 19 August 1942, a six thousand strong combined Allied landing force took part in a raid on Dieppe, Northern France. Sixty-seven percent of these became casualties. The raid has gone down in history as a catastrophe conceived by Lord Mountbatten. With the help of 100,000 pages of classified British military files, however, David O’Keefe has uncovered a pinch mission undertaken at Dieppe, conceal...