WW2 podcasts: 9 top episodes about the Second World War

Seventy-five years on from victory in Europe, the figure of Winston Churchill continues to dominate British perceptions of the war years. Andrew Roberts authored a major new biography of the prime minister back in 2018 and we caught up with him soon after to discuss his findings and tackle some of the debates that continue to swirl around him.

We’ve covered the Holocaust several times on our podcast over the years, but for a comprehensive overview of the Nazi genocide, this would definitely be the place to start. In our 2017 interview, filmmaker and author Laurence Rees answered – as the title suggests – the key questions that remain about the mass killings of Jews and other minorities in WW2. Having interviewed numerous perpetrators and survivors while making BBC documentaries, Laurence offered his own distinctive perspective on these events.

• Auschwitz and the Holocaust: 5 more podcasts to listen to
• Holocaust denial on trial: the story of Irving v Lipstadt

An amazing story from an amazing storyteller. Ben Macintyre is one of the masters of WW2 popular history and was an excellent choice to write the authorised history of the SAS in the conflict. In our discussion from 2016 he described some of their incredible escapades in the fight against the Axis. That conversation is followed by an interview with Norman Ohler on how drugs fuelled the Nazi war machine – another extraordinary tale.

The history of WW2 is filled with ingenious intelligence operations and this 2019 episode explores one of the most fascinating of those. Historian Helen Fry explained how German prisoners of war had their conversations bugged by their British hosts and revealed some of the secrets that were divulged.

Sir Max Hastings is one of the world’s most successful historians of WWII and always brings a fresh perspective, even to familiar topics. His 2019 book examined the iconic story of Operation Chastise and in our interview he highlighted both the heroism of the Dambusters and the devastation their mission wreaked on those below.

• How successful was the Dambusters raid?
• The legacy of the Dambusters

Back in 1998 Antony Beevor revolutionised WW2 popular history with his bestselling narrative account of the battle of Stalingrad. Since then he’s produced similarly brilliant works on several other battles and campaigns, most recently his 2018 history of Operation Market Garden. In our extensive interview, he explained why Arnhem was a bridge too far for the Allies.

Few Allied actions in the war are as controversial as the February 1945 bombing of the city of Dresden, which killed over 20,000 people and devastated one of Germany’s architectural and cultural jewels. On the 75th anniversary of the raid, Sinclair McKay laid out the full horror that the bombs inflicted and considered the moral questions thrown up by the events – to which the answers are anything but simple.

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In Britain our focus is dominated by the existential clash against Nazism, but this was of course a global war and the battles in the east were often as terrible – if not more so – than those closer to home. In an episode released just last month, Saul David relayed the brutal events of the 1945 battle for the island of Okinawa and argued that the blood shed there was crucial in the US decision to use atomic weapons.

• Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War?
• The battle for Okinawa: one Marine’s story