World War II

One December night in 1942, a Nazi parachutist landed in a Cambridgeshire field. His mission: to sabotage the British war effort....

Dan Mills and his platoon of snipers flew into Southern Iraq, part of an infantry battalion sent to win hearts and minds. They were soon fighting for their lives....

At Victoria station the R.T.O. gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked 'This is your enemy'. I searched every compartment, but he wasn't on the train....

When Guy Sajer joins the infantry full of ideals in the summer of 1942, the German army is enjoying unparalleled success in Russia. However, he quickly finds that for the foot soldier the glory of military success hides a much harsher reality of hunger, fatigue and constant deprivation....

The second volume of Spike Milligan's legendary recollections of life as a gunner in World War Two sees our hero into battle in North Africa - eventually....

In 1944, David Render was a 19-year-old second lieutenant fresh from Sandhurst when he was sent to France. Joining the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry five days after the D-Day landings, the combat-hardened men he was sent to command did not expect him to last long.... 

The best-selling story of Britain's most courageous and most famous flyer, the Second World War hero Sir Douglas Bader.... 

Between dusk and dawn on the night of March 24-25, 1944, a small army of Allied soldiers crawled through tunnels in Germany in a covert operation the likes of which the Third Reich had never seen....

Richard Freiherr von Rosen was a highly decorated Wehrmacht soldier and outstanding panzer commander. After serving as a gunlayer on a Pz.Mk.III during Barbarossa, he led a company of Tigers at Kursk....

The seventh and last volume of Spike Milligan's memoirs sees our hero returning from war and Italy...but to what? Listen to find out....

Sarah Helm chronicles Atkins’s extraordinary life and her singular journey through the chaos of post-war Europe. Brimming with intrigue, heroics, and the horrors of war, A Life in Secrets is the story of a grand, elusive woman and a tour de force of investigative journalism....

The Nuremberg Interviews reveals the chilling innermost thoughts of the former Nazi officials under indictment at the famous postwar trial....

Back to those haunting days in Italy in 1944, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, with lava running in great red rivulets down the slope towards us....

Few perspectives epitomize the sheer drama and sacrifice of combat more perfectly than those of the fighter pilots of World War II. As romanticized as any soldier in history....

Historian and World War II expert Donald Miller brings us the story of the bomber boys who brought the war to Hitler's doorstep. Unlike ground soldiers, they slept on clean beds, drank beer in local pubs and danced to the swing music of the travelling Air Force bands....

A definitive new edition of a classic memoir, published in association with the RAF Museum. Guy Gibson was the leader of the famous Dambusters raid and Enemy Coast Ahead is a vivid, honest account, widely regarded as one of the best books on World War II....

From his humble Yorkshire childhood, via the battlefields of Burma and the peaks of the Himalayas, to becoming the NHS and the nation's hero during Lockdown, Captain Tom Moore's story is a journey for all of us....

Before Bletchley Park could break the German war machine’s code, its daily military communications had to be monitored and recording by "the Listening Service"....

Colditz - the dreaded POW camp was supposed to be impregnable....

It is difficult to find another soldier's story to equal Captain Darrell Watt's in terms of time spent on the field of battle and challenges faced....

Colditz Castle was Nazi Germany’s infamous "escape-proof" wartime prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful Allied prisoners were sent. Despite having more guards than inmates, prisoners tirelessly carried out their campaign to escape....

It made Changi seem like heaven.'There was a place far worse than Changi – Singapore's Outram Road Gaol....

The son of a Hull butcher, Neville 'Timber' Wood volunteered in 1939, at the age of 18, to join the British Army's Tyne-Tees 50th Northumbrian Division....

Pierre Clostermann DFC was one of the oustanding Allied aces of the Second World War. A Frenchman who flew with the RAF, he survived over 420 operational sorties, shooting down scores of enemy aircraft while friends and comrades lost their lives in the deadly skies above Europe....

We see a perspective of D-Day which deserves to be added to the historical record, in which ordinary German troops struggled to make sense of the onslaught that was facing them....

Joey Jacobson, a young Jewish man from Westmount on the Island of Montreal, trained as a navigator and bomb-aimer in Western Canada. On arriving in England, he was assigned to No. 106 Squadron, a British unit tasked with the bombing of Germany. Joey Jacobson’s War tells, in his own words, why he enlisted, his understanding of strategy, tactics, and the effectiveness of the air war at its lowest point, how he responded to the inevitable battle stress, and how he became both a hopeful idealist and a seasoned airman.

A Thief and a Hero tells the extraordinary story of Gentle Johnny Ramensky: the son of Lithuanian immigrant parents who went on to become a household name as the foremost safe-blower in the country. His daring escapes from prison would further endear him to the public and eventually bring him to the attention of the British army. When the Second World War broke, he was hand-picked to join the Commandos and rechristened himself Ramsay.

Ernest "Andy" Andrews's company, part of the 1st Infantry Division, departed England on the evening of June 5. Fighting in Normandy, Andy was nicked by a bullet and evacuated to England in late July when the wound became infected. He rejoined H Company in time to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. Andy's outfit ends the war fighting in Czechoslovakia, where Andy witnesses the German surrender in early May. The war shaped Andy's postwar life in countless ways. This vivid firsthand account takes the listener along from Normandy to victory with Andy and his machine-gun crew.

It was the summer of 1944 as liberating Allied forces surged toward Paris following the D-Day landings. For a large group of downed airmen being held in that city’s infamous Fresnes Prison, they were about to face evacuation into the blackest, bloody heart of Germany and experience the most acute evil of the war. Amid great secrecy, those 168 airmen—including several from Australia and New Zealand—were transported on a filthy, overcrowded nightmare train journey which ended at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, accompanied by orders for their execution.

Bernard Montgomery, “the Spartan General”, was one of the giants of World War II. He was a field marshal, as well as an entirely powerful personality, who shaped much of how that aforementioned cataclysmic conflict turned out. If it weren’t for Montgomery’s steady hand in North Africa, for example, it would have been much harder for the Allies to prevail. Montgomery was born the humble son of a minister. As he matured, he grew increasingly bold and confident in his own abilities. He realized he was a natural leader of men—and others quickly came to realize it as well.

Most people don't realize that during the war in Europe in the 1940s, it took an average of six support soldiers to make the work of four combat soldiers possible. Most of what's available in the literature tends toward combat narratives, and yet the support soldiers had complex and unique experiences as well. This audiobook is based on personal correspondence, and it is primarily a memoir that creates a picture of the day-to-day realities of an individual soldier told in his own words.

Stuart Hills embarked his Sherman DD tank on to an LCT at 6.45 a.m., Sunday 4 June 1944. He was 20 years old, unblooded, fresh from a public-school background and Officer Cadet training. He was going to war. Two days later, his tank sunk, he and his crew landed from a rubber dinghy with just the clothes they stood in. After that, the struggles through the Normandy bocage in a replacement tank, engaging the enemy in a constant round of close encounters, led to a swift mastering of the art of tank warfare and remarkable survival in the midst of carnage and destruction. 

He was called the Hangman of the Gestapo, the "butcher of Prague", with a reputation as a ruthlessly efficient killer. He was the head of the SS, and the Gestapo, second-in-command to Heinrich Himmler. His orders set in motion the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 and, as the lead planner of Hitler's Final Solution, he chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which details of the murder of millions of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe were toasted with cognac.

In March 1943, in their first fight with the Germans, American soldiers in North Africa were pushed back 50 miles by Rommel’s Afrika Korps and nearly annihilated. Only the German decision not to pursue them allowed the Americans to maintain a foothold in the area. General Eisenhower, the supreme commander, knew he needed a new leader on the ground, one who could raise the severely damaged morale of his troops. He handed the job to a new man: Lieutenant General George Patton.

Fans of Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers will be drawn to this complex portrait of the controversial Ronald Speirs, an iconic commander of celebrated Easy Company during D-Day and beyond, whose ferocious courage and drive across three wars were matched by a devotion to duty and a hidden heart shadowed by lost love.