On 2 December 1805 Napoleon Bonaparte won his greatest victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, crushing a combined Austro-Russian Allied force. Victory was total;Napoleon forever boasted this as the military success he was most proud of. In this podcast Dan chats to Ian Castle, an expert on the Battle of Austerlitz, about the engagement: how Napoleon's clever strategy unfolded, the professionalism of his Grande Armée and why the result was so significant.
In June 1940 Nazi Germany overran France and forced the British army to evacuate at Dunkirk. Severely lacking in military equipment, Britain and its Empire now stood alone against Adolf Hitler's forces. But new Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to agree to peace terms, forcing Hitler to pl...
The last great battle of the Second World War was fought on the island of Okinawa. After 83 blood-soaked days, almost a quarter of a million people lost their lives. The death toll included thousands of civilians lost to mass suicide - convinced to do so by Japanese propaganda. I invited Saul Dav...
Dan chats to Volker Wiedermann, a German writer and literary critic, about the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The Republic, established in the aftermath of the First World War, was an unlikely formation and was quickly attacked from all sides, especially as it tried to propagate radical ideas about go...
