In this short film, Chris Lloyd looks into the story behind the Spitfire that crashed into a Welsh mountain outside the town of Caerphilly during a training flight on 7 November 1941. Lloyd explores how the community of the town came together to remember a man, Canadian pilot Sergeant Ivan Raymon...

On 29 December 1940 London experienced one of its worst nights of the Blitz. German bombers dropped tens of thousands of bombs, destroying more of London than the city's famous Great Fire of 1666. The following morning, a photographer took a picture through the smoke and fire of Saint Paul’s Cath...

Narrated by Tom Selleck: Sunday, December 7, 1941 was a beautiful morning on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. A few sailors and soldiers were already up and playing a game of football near Pearl Harbor. Others were sleeping in their barracks or aboard ships after a late night of partying in Honolulu....

Salisbury Plain is the Ministry of Defence's largest training ground, covering an area the size of the Isle of Wight. Dan Snow is shown around the Plain by MOD archaeologist Richard Osgood, to explore how British, Commonwealth and Allied troops prepared for the two great wars.

Veterans from both sides of the conflict retell their experiences of fighting in the Battle of Anzio in Italy and in the Battle of Arnhem during Operation Market-Garden.

Operation Market Garden was the Allied operation to end the Second World War by Christmas 1944. The brainchild of Bernard Montgomery, it involved the combined use of airborne and armoured divisions carving a path through the Netherlands, securing several vital bridges, bypassing the formidable Si...

Happy Birthday Victor Gregg - he has turned 100 this week. Victor volunteered to join the army before the Second World War and he fought all the way through - from clashes with the Italians in North Africa in 1940 to being captured 75 years ago this autumn at Arnhem. He was a Prisoner of War in D...

In the winter of 1941 an alien-seeming object was spotted by an RAF reconnaissance pilot flying a lone unarmed Spitfire across the French coast. Balanced upon the cliffs near Le Havre was what appeared to be a giant convex dish, directed across the Channel at the war-torn British coastline. With ...

In 1940 the Polish resistance decided it needed to send an agent to Auschwitz concentration camp. They were desperate to find out what was going on in a place that even by that stage of the war had an evil reputation. Historian Jack Fairweather tells the story of Witold Pilecki the Pole who volun...

Professor Mary Fulbrook's book Reckonings won the 2019 Wolfson History Prize for its unique approach to the Holocaust, and in particular, those who perpetrated the atrocities. Fulbrook claims that the West German justice process was far too lenient on many ex-Nazis, who had condemned thousands or...

Peter Snow explores the part Dover Castle played in Operation Dynamo in 1940, the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk.

From 1929 to 1939, Edgar Feuchtwanger lived across the street from Adolf Hitler in a bourgeois building in Munich, Germany. From his bedroom, the young Jewish boy had a view of the Führer across the avenue on the second floor. A schoolboy in Munich at the time, Edgar witnessed the rise of Nazism ...

Professor Frank McDonough has just written a monumental history of the Third Reich. He is a world leading expert on the domestic side of Hitler's Germany. In this filmed podcast Dan asks Frank why and how Hitler was able to establish and sustain his rule within Germany.

In the 1930s Germany, one of the World's richest, most technologically-developed and culturally-sophisticated countries, was transformed into an extreme authoritarian state under its dictator Adolf Hitler. His unbridled ambition would plunge the World into a war bloodier and more destructive than...

In the summer of 1940 Britain fought a battle for survival against the might of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. This Battle of Britain would see German air attacks on British airfields, cities, factories and docks. Brave RAF pilots intercepted these raids, but Britain was not alone. Among the RAF and Allied ...

Of all the clubs in the world, perhaps the most extraordinary is the Guinea Pig Club, a group of Second World War veterans that suffered terrible injuries and were then treated by pioneering surgeon Archibald McIndoe. Today there are only a handful left. Dan visits Jan Stangreciuk, one of the few...

Max Eisen was only 15 when he and his family were taken from their Hungarian home to the infamous Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the Second World War. All of his relatives were killed; only Max survived to see VE Day and eventual liberation. 74 years on from being liberated, he talks about t...

On 1 April 1945, as the Second World War in Europe was reaching its end, one of the bloodiest battles in the whole conflict commenced on a small island south of mainland Japan. It was the Battle of Okinawa. Saul David comes on the show to provide a fascinating rundown of this truly horrific battle.

The campaign for Okinawa, located just 350 miles south of Japan, was one of the bloodiest of the war. US land forces faced a Japanese defence occupying a system of tunnels, caves and fortifications exploiting the natural defensive advantages of the hilly southern region of the island. At sea, ves...

Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were two talented, courageous, and strikingly attractive women who fought convention to become the only female test pilots in Hitler’s Germany – eventually being awarded the Iron Cross for their services to the Luftwaffe. Both were brilliant pilots, both...

Of all the chapters of the Second World War, none are as daring, nor as intriguing, as the Air War. In the skies over Europe, some of the most iconic aircraft to ever take flight, did battle in a life or death struggle for supremacy. Today most of these aircraft are gone, but at the Royal Air For...

Andrew Roberts shares a selection of items from his Winston Churchill collection, documenting the fascinating life of one of Britain's most iconic figures.

The Spitfire remains one of the most iconic aircraft of the Second World War. Although their turnaround time was longer than the Hurricane (29 minutes), they were faster. This made them a good match for the Messerschmitt bf 109s. In an attack on a German formation, the Hurricanes would focus thei...

Hawker Hurricanes accounted for 60% of German losses in the battle of Britain. They were the most numerous fighter aircraft which the RAF deployed, partly owing to their rapid turn-around time (it took them only 9 minutes to be refuelled and re-armed). Dan Snow provides an overview of the 'workho...