The Second World War

The Second World War is Stephen Bedard's narrated history of the conflict, and its recent episodes cover the pivotal months when a European war became a global one. The approach is explanatory and orderly. Bedard lays out the context first, at times in plainly numbered points, and lets the facts carry the drama. His episode on Pearl Harbor starts with the base itself: why Oahu mattered, what the Pacific Fleet kept there, which airfields surrounded it, and what American planners expected its presence to deter. Then the frame widens. 'Japan’s Blitz Across Asia and the Pacific' pushes back on the idea that Pearl Harbor was the whole of Japan's entry into the war, setting it beside strikes within hours on Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Thailand. The Hong Kong passage is especially vivid. British, Canadian, Indian and local defenders were overwhelmed after a siege that ended in surrender on Christmas Day 1941, a date survivors remembered as Black Christmas. The Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles get specific credit. Then the lens tightens. In 'The USS Arizona and Her Captain: The Final Moments', Bedard turns to the ship's captain, whom he describes as a distant cousin, and follows him from his appointment to the Naval Academy at seventeen through early postings aboard other ships. It is military history told partly as family history, and he says so plainly. 'The World at War: December 1941' goes the other way, taking a snapshot of every front at the end of the year. Its account of the East shows the show at its most useful: Barbarossa as the largest invasion in history, Leningrad besieged, Moscow threatened, then an early winter, Siberian reinforcements and a Red Army counter-offensive that broke the myth of German invincibility. Not every episode involves combat. 'The War-time Birth of the United Nations' treats the declaration signed in Washington on January 1, 1942 as a moment that may have been as decisive as any battle, because it bound the Grand Alliance, deepened Anglo-American coordination, signalled to occupied peoples and neutral states, and planted the seeds of a post-war order. The format also stretches to interviews. Ronald Drabkin, author of 'Beverly Hills Spy', joins Bedard for 'From War Hero to Spy: The Story of Frederick Rutland', a conversation about a man whose work getting new Mitsubishi planes to land and take off safely turned into espionage. Drabkin's picture of canvas aircraft tipped off a carrier deck by a gust of wind is the kind of concrete detail a guest brings. A listener new to the show could start with the Pearl Harbor episode and follow the numbered run forward. Several episodes close the same way, with a plain 'Thank you, and God bless.'