World War II victory in North Africa

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese VietCong guerrillas built a vast network of tunnels in the south of the country as part of the insurgency against the South Vietnamese government and their American allies. The tunnel network was a key base and shelter for the North Vietna ...  Show more

On 27 January 1945, prisoners at the Nazis’ largest death camp were freed by the Soviet Union’s Red Army.General Vasily Petrenko commanded one of the four units that liberated Auschwitz.The Nazis murdered 1.1 million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1941 and 1945. Almost a mi ...  Show more

Peter Royle, 103, endured a month of solid fighting in the hills outside of Tunis in 1943. Eventually the Allies prevailed and took more than 250,000 German and Italian prisoners of war. They declared victory in Tunisia on 13 May. Peter came close to dying many times. He recalls ...  Show more

November 11, 1918. At exactly 11 AM local time, the shooting stops. It’s eerily quiet for the first time in a long time. World War I has finally come to an end today after Germany and the Allied nations signed an armistice not long before. The final battle of the war, known today ...  Show more

As some of you may know, I am also a First World War historian, and the academic history of the war can be very different from the public perspective, which dwells on the first two years of the war. 

Forgetting the victories of 1917 and 1918 is not new; it is something ...

If you cast your mind back to episode 187, I discussed the war in the North African desert in 1940-41 with Robert Forczyk. The war in the North African desert was pure mechanised warfare and, in many respects, the most technologically advanced theatre of World War II. It was a ...