Category: WW2 Podcast

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Angus attended a special event at the Green Howards Museum. They started at the regimental war memorial in Richmond (Yorkshire) at 6.30 a.m., which was when the Green Howards landed on Gold Beach. The day was packed with discussion about the regiment and their role on D-Day. It closed…

More than 132,000 Allied troops landed on the Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944. Through their efforts, the tide of the war turned for the final time to favour the Allies. But how did the Allied army get to the shores of Normandy? The contribution of Landing Craft to D-Day is often overlooked. Andrew Whitmarsh…

6th June 1944 saw the largest seaborne assault in human history: D-Day. While much has been written about the operation as a whole, little detailed attention has been paid to the battle for Sword Beach itself, the easternmost of the amphibious attack areas. For this episode, I am joined by Stephen Fisher. Stephen is a…

As the Allied forces prepared for the monumental invasion of Normandy, concealing the massive build-up of troops in Britain from the Germans became increasingly challenging. To mislead German intelligence about the timing and location of the invasion, the Allies devised a series of elaborate deception plans. The most audacious of these schemes aimed to convince…

On the morning of May 20, 1941, the Germans launched Operation Mercury. The invasion of Crete was the largest airborne operation yet attempted during the war, with thousands of Fallschirmjäger deployed. Key to the operation’s success would be the capture of the airfield at Maleme. Outnumbered and having suffered horrendous casualties, when the airborne troops…

In this podcast episode, we will discuss the different approaches to command and control of the British Army and the German Army. From a management point of view, both organisations developed different doctrines to deal with the ‘fog of war’ or ‘friction’, which affected how commanders responded as a battle unfolded. We’ll do this by…

In this podcast episode, I’m looking at the work of LCI’s, Landing Craft Infantry. These are not the smaller Higgins Boats we see storming the Normandy beaches in Saving Private Ryan but large beaching craft intended to transport and deliver fighting troops, typically a company of infantry or marines, to a hostile shore once a…

Operation Jubilee, the Dieppe Raid on the coast of France, was a disaster in 1942. However, it did highlight the need for more reconnaissance before any other amphibious operations were mounted. In London, a small group of eccentric researchers, experimenting on themselves from inside pressure tanks in the middle of the London air raids, explored…

The Indian Army was the largest volunteer army during the Second World War. Indian Army divisions fought in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy – and went to make up the overwhelming majority of the troops in South East Asia. Over two million personnel served in the Indian Army. I’m Angus Wallace, and in…

From late 1944, an ungainly piece of equipment was introduced into service in the British and Canadian armies. Referred to at the time as the ‘Valentine 17-pounder SP’, and later as the ‘Archer’, it was a tracked vehicle with an open compartment at the front and a large gun facing to the rear. Joining me…