500 episodes listed below
War history with mud on its boots.
WW2 Pod: We Have Ways of Making You Talk treats the Second World War as lived experience and strategic machinery at once. Recent episodes move from Japanese diplomacy and imperial ambition to Audie Murphy’s exhausted infantry war, HMS Belfast, Vichy trials, bunkers, and coastal guns.
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WW2 Pod: We Have Ways of Making You Talk is a conversational Second World War history show that treats campaigns, leaders, weapons, and individual experience as parts of the same story. It is fast, but not shallow. Recent episodes move between the grand and the granular: Japan’s path toward war with America, the internal pressures behind imperial policy, HMS Belfast, bunkers, Vichy show trials, German coastal emplacements, the Gustav Line, Anzio, Rome, France, Germany, and Audie Murphy’s progression through combat. The show is especially good at making operational detail feel dramatic rather than decorative. Rivers matter. Roads matter. A graveyard beside a field can suddenly become the whole war in miniature. The Japan series examines a state trying to walk a diplomatic tightrope while already trapped by ambitions in China, pressure from America, public-private double language, and figures such as Matsuoka. It resists the easy comfort of inevitability. The Audie Murphy episodes have a different force. They follow a soldier from Texas through exhaustion, wounds, dead friends, battlefield promotion, and the awful habit of turning living men into tactical numbers. The effect is grim, but the show rarely becomes ponderous. Dry banter and sharp incredulity keep breaking through, often just long enough to let the next hard detail land. There is room for a joke about ludicrous coastal guns and room for a serious account of shells, casualties, and command decisions. That mixture is the point. The show understands that war history is machinery and memory together: supply lines, fortifications, diplomatic conferences, resentment, fear, fatigue, and someone trying to get two yards through shellfire. It suits listeners who can handle density and prefer their history argued through, not polished into simple lessons. The result is informed, scruffy, morally alert military history with a strong feel for both map-room consequence and human damage.
Made for: For listeners who want Second World War history with tactical detail, moral argument, and lived experience in the same frame. It suits people who enjoy long-form military history that can handle maps, memoirs, diplomacy, hardware, and dark irony.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its scale-shifting: it can explain a campaign line, a diplomatic failure, and one exhausted soldier’s moment of fear without treating any of them as separate subjects. The conversation feels learned, loose, and morally awake.
The World War II podcast with comedian Al Murray and historian James Holland. We Have Ways of Making You Talk dives deep into WWII history, exploring key battles, forgotten front lines, and incredible untold stories. Whether you're fascinated by the Battle of Britain, the D-Day landings, or the Eastern Front, this show offers a rich, detailed look at the war that shaped the modern world. Al and James bring a unique blend of expert knowledge and humour, discussing everything from the Third Reich, Churchill's leadership, and the Fall of Berlin, to World War 2 tanks, fighter planes, and naval battles. Expect historical insights, lively tangents, and discussions on iconic second world war events…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Al Murray and James Holland connect wartime decisions, battlefield mechanics, and personal consequences with unusual detail and a steady current of humor.
Al Murray and James Holland move between the scale of a campaign and the experience of the people caught inside it. Their multipart account of Audie Murphy follows combat through Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, Rome, and France, using his memoir to connect battlefield movement with…
A foxhole loses a friend; Al Murray and James Holland make you stay with the cost.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A graveyard attack and a casualty count frame Murphy's exhausted push toward Germany.
Audie Murphy's war has moved past any clean idea of triumph. By January 1945, after a hip wound, he is back with Company B of the 15th Infantry Regiment as a field-commissioned second lieutenant, reunited with Martin Kelly, the last man left from the original platoon.
A foxhole death near Cisterna gives Murphy's approach to Rome its hardest turn.
This third part of the Audie Murphy series stays locked on one tired push toward Cisterna and the road to Rome, and that tighter frame makes the foxhole wound hit especially hard.
The Gustav Line turns the Italian campaign into a lesson in attrition.
The piece keeps its focus on the mechanics of the Italian campaign, showing how Sicily's airfields widen air power, pull German strength and material away, and still remain a secondary effort.
Murphy's Sicily story lands hardest where malaria, command, and first contact meet.
The episode works best when it stays close to Audie Murphy's memoir and the hard reality of the Allied advance in Sicily: a scouting patrol, two Italian officers, and Murphy's first kill give the account its bite, while the hosts keep malaria and disease in view as part of the…
Operation Fuller starts to unravel as missing fighter escorts and a close-range torpedo attack expose the plan's fragility.
Operation Fuller comes into view as a chain of decisions losing contact with reality. At 3,500 yards, ships are being straddled, the bearing is slipping, and a torpedo attack follows.
Japan's leaders press toward war while trying to leave the blame behind.
The final chapter of Japan's Road to War keeps its attention on Japanese leaders who make war feel inevitable while still dodging the cost of what follows.
A WW2 commemoration discussion that becomes a family reckoning.
How To Commemorate WW2 treats remembrance as something harder than ceremony, asking how to honor a war whose dead cannot be folded neatly into one national story.
Outnumbered units, remembered under fire.
Battle maps, war films, and patient context.
War news, tested against military reality.
Antique European history, read aloud.
Hosts Al Murray and James Holland discuss WWII commemoration with guests Angela Finlay, author of 'In My Grandfather's Shadow', and Henry Montgomery, grandson of Field Marshal Montgomery.
This episode recounts the beginning of the naval chase between the British battleship Hood and the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941, as narrated by a junior naval reserve lieutenant serving on the destroyer Tartar.
This fourth part of 'Japan's Road to War' examines the final diplomatic collapse before Pearl Harbor.
This episode explores the historical and cultural significance of the battleship HMS Hood, contrasting it with modern naval vessels like aircraft carriers.
This episode discusses the strategic decision-making behind sending the battleship Bismarck on a solo mission during World War II, weighing risks against the deteriorating Atlantic situation.
Al Murray and James Holland discuss their recent WWII-related activities, including visits to HMS Belfast, German coastal guns in Norway, and stories about women's roles in the war.
This episode explores Japan's path to war in the lead-up to World War II, focusing on historical events and military decisions.
This episode explores Japan's diplomatic and cultural factors, particularly the concept of Honne & Tatemae, that led to its involvement in World War II.
This episode examines the controversial Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka and his aggressive diplomatic approach toward the United States during Japan's path to World War II.
This episode explores Japan's complex political landscape and dissent leading up to World War II, using a novelist's diary entry from 1941 as a starting point.
Audie Murphy: Germany (Part 4) follows Murphy from the Colmar Pocket near Strasbourg to VE Day, with the 15th Infantry Regiment fighting through snow, forests, and the Rhine frontier.
Murphy opens with Audie Murphy's memoir words to Helen Back about men coming and going, being left alone, and feeling burnt out, emotionally and physically exhausted.
The episode stays with Sicily, Italy, and the Gustav Line.
Audie Murphy's own words open the episode.
WW2 Pod: We Have Ways of Making You Talk covers the second half of the Channel Dash, as Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Prinz Eugen race from Brest toward Wilhelmshaven in daylight.
A naval officer recounts the moment in May 1941 when his destroyer received an urgent signal revealing the breakout of the German battleship Bismarck and cruiser Prinz Eugen into the Atlantic.
This episode explores personal and family commemoration of WW2 through an interview with Angela Finlay, who discusses her German grandfather's role as a Wehrmacht general and the complexities of growing up with this heritage in the UK.