Australian military history, grounded in place.
Thanks For Your Service Podcasts is a focused Australian military history show built around conversations with a research historian, authors, memorial groups, and a heritage organisation. Its recent run ranges from Bletchley Park links and Burma campaign service to rural Victoria airfields, war animals, submarines, and local avenues of honour.
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Thanks For Your Service Podcasts is an Australian military history show built from patient conversations and concrete historical detail. Its centre of gravity is service, memory, and the records that keep both visible. The show’s recent subjects stretch well beyond familiar campaign summaries. One conversation links Australia to Bletchley Park and Allied signals intelligence. Another looks at animals in war and the National Day for War Animals in Australia. Borneo, the Burma campaign, German and Japanese submarines in Australian waters, and Japanese flights over Melbourne and Hobart give the series its wider Second World War range. The home front matters just as much. Cressy Aerodrome, the Kingston Avenue of Honour, and prisoner-of-war and internee camps in the Goulburn Valley show how rural Victoria sits inside larger wartime histories. The show often begins by locating a place before moving into the records, people, and surviving traces attached to it. That habit gives the conversations a useful groundedness. Listeners hear about memorial trees, airfield remains, book research, camp museums, and family military history. The approach is respectful, but not abstract. Deaths, disappearances, internment, service animals, and battlefield hardship are handled as part of the historical record. The pace is conversational and explanatory. Guests are given room to define organisations, describe sites, and connect local stories to wider military events. The show suits a listener who wants Australian military history with names, locations, and primary-context texture rather than broad mythmaking. It is especially strong where public remembrance, family records, and overlooked wartime infrastructure meet. Thanks For Your Service Podcasts stands apart by making small places feel historically consequential without overstating them. It treats military history as something still held in towns, a museum, books, associations, and family records.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants Australian military history explained through specific places, records, memorials, and informed guest conversations. It also fits family-history researchers and remembrance-minded history listeners.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its local-to-national lens: Cressy, Kingston, the Goulburn Valley, Bletchley Park links, Burma, and Borneo all sit inside one Australian service-history frame. It favours careful context and named historical traces over broad battlefield shorthand.
Thanks for your service. Our focus is on historical topics relating to the Australian military.
A wartime flight over Melbourne noticed the roof colours; your curiosity deserves that level of detail.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
David Kenyon connects Australia's wartime code-breakers with Bletchley Park, Japanese codebook weaknesses, and the BRUSA network.
Australia's role in the Bletchley Park story comes through a focused conversation with David Kenyon, a research historian at the site. The episode first separates Bletchley Park's cover name, Government Code and Cipher School, from the signals intelligence work carried out there…
A Kingston avenue of trees becomes a living record of service, memory, and one soldier's hope for peace.
Kingston's Avenue of Honour gives the episode a grounded historical focus, with trees along Kingston Road in Central Victoria standing as a memorial to people who served in war.
A thoughtful account of Australia's overlooked Burma campaign, centred on the Waspies' morale work near the front.
Australia's place in the Burma campaign comes through as a story of people too easily left at the edge of wartime memory: servicemen and women, news correspondents, war artists, Qantas crew and Red Cross nurses.
A Shepparton-centred episode traces seven wartime camps and the human cost of waiting to go home.
Thanksforyourservice Podcast 82 follows John Gribbon through the wartime history of Victoria's Goulburn Valley, where nearly 10,000 prisoners of war and internees were held in seven purpose-built camps during World War II.
A grounded look at German U-boat activity and Japanese military flights bringing World War II into Australian waters and skies.
Thanks For Your Service makes its 81st episode feel close to home, tracing how World War II reached Australian waters, ports, and city skies. The conversation moves from German U-boat activity off Australia to Japanese military flights over Melbourne and Hobart, with Jason…
Outnumbered units, remembered under fire.
Battle maps, war films, and patient context.
War news, tested against military reality.
Antique European history, read aloud.
Thanks For Your Service Podcasts #88 centers on Bletchley Park, the wartime home of the Government Code and Cipher School from 1939 to 1946, and Australia's own 1942 signals-intelligence buildup.
On Thanks For Your Service episode 87, Nigel Orsop links Purple Poppy Day on 24 February to animals’ wartime service.
Michael Veitch tells Thanks For Your Service host David that Borneo’s 1945 campaign remains little discussed, even by veterans returning after six years of war.
Thanks For Your Service Podcasts 85 visits the Kingston Avenue of Honour in Victoria just before Remembrance Day 2025.
["Thanks For Your Service Podcasts 84 revisits the Burma campaign, the Australian side of the Forgotten War, through Qantas's Double Sunrise flights, the Waspies, and RG Casey.", "Dr Daryl Moran, co-editor with Andrew Kilsby of In the Fight: Australians in the War in Burma 1942-1945, says about 5,000 Australians served there across different roles and services.", "He says Australia had no official RAAF squadrons in Burma, which helped leave the theatre outside the national story in the way Kokoda is remembered.", "The episode also tees up Resolute, Moran and Kilsby's next book on the Australian air war in Burma, which they say tracks about 1,700 names and close to 300 deaths."]
Thanks For Your Service Podcast 82 focuses on World War II prisoner-of-war and internee camps in the Goulburn Valley, Victoria, where John Gribbon says nearly 10,000 people were held across seven camps.
Thanks For Your Service episode 81 centers on the German U-boat U-862 and the Japanese submarine I-25, both discussed as part of Australian wartime history.
Historian Jim Claven describes Imbros as a Gallipoli base that hosted Allied headquarters, aircraft and rest camps.
Ian W Shaw tells host David that his 2010 book on Radji Beach grew from his mother and two aunts serving in the Air Force in WWII, and that 21 of 22 Australian nurses were shot on the beach.
Author Peter Burgess discusses who were the first Australian soldiers to land at Gallipoli in 1915.
Author Michael Veitch discusses his book 'The Battle of the Bismarck Sea' and why this pivotal WWII battle has been forgotten.
Senior War Historian David Sutton discusses Australia's involvement in the 1941 British Operation Exporter against Vichy French forces in Syria and Lebanon.
Mark Latchford discusses his grandfather's letters from World War One special missions in Persia and Russia, which inspired his book.
An interview with intelligence historian Kate Reid-Smith about the little-known WWII MI6 agency Secret Intelligence Australia.