HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-01-27T12:06:45.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?
items: Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Two
items: He shot down 3 planes in 4 minutes: meet the WW2 pilot you won't have heard about
items: Terror in the deep: how Hitler's U-boats pushed Britain to the brink
items: Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict"
items: "England is invincible": How the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain
items: The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy
items: A hill to die on: why the Allies almost failed in the battle of Monte Cassino in WW2
items: Dudley Clarke: the spy who hoodwinked Hitler
items: Liberating WW2 Naples: triumph and tragedy

The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?
type: item
date: 2026-01-23T15:30:41.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical people
subject: Second World War battles
subject: Soldiers
subject: Wartime Britain
description: Britain’s War Office thanked the SAS for its remarkable efforts in WW2 by abolishing it – yet soon realised the error of its ways. Gavin Mortimer tells the story of how the elite unit reinvented itself to confront the challenges of the postwar world
encoded: “Light-hearted banditry”, “ruthless pirating”, a “phantom army” – it’s fair to say that the Special Air Service (SAS) didn’t always attract the most complimentary headlines. In the white heat of the Second World War, when this and other British special forces achieved unlikely successes through a series of daring raids, disparaging press reports could be discarded as merely tomorrow’s chip paper. Nonetheless, they fuelled the impression that the SAS operated outside the rules of the regular British army, and were used as ammunition by some who aimed to whip special forces into line – or even shut them down altogether. That threat became a reality after the conflict ended. David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, coined a description – “freemasons of mediocrity” – for a certain kind of staff officer who looked upon his men with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. These ‘freemasons’ regarded the SAS and other irregular outfits – the Long Range Desert Group and the Chindits – at best as private armies, at worst “café gangsters”. This view extended to the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), which spent the spring of 1944 waging a bloody guerrilla campaign in the Aegean to tie down German troops ahead of the invasion of France. Its actions prompted a sharp exchange between Winston Churchill and Simon Wingfield Digby, the Conservative MP for West Dorset. “Is it true, Mr prime minister,” enquired Wingfield Digby, “that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats?” “If you do not take your seat and keep quiet, I will send you out to join them,” retorted Churchill. One could argue that Churchill was the founding father of Britain’s special forces. It was he, shortly after coming to office in May 1940, who instructed the formation of a commando force to launch a “vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive” against the Axis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/p…

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Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Two
type: item
date: 2026-01-07T15:00:58.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical events
subject: Second World War battles
subject: Soldiers
subject: Wartime Britain
description: As the conflict with Nazi Germany raged on, British tram drivers tuned in to Tchaikovsky and waitresses revelled in Wagner. But why? Alexandra Wilson explores the surprising Second World War obsession with opera
encoded: Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The soprano Joan Hammond, who sang the title role that night, later recalled that there were always newcomers in the audience wherever the Carl Rosa performed, searching for something different to do – but also for some kind of transcendental escapism. Invariably, they cheered the singers to the rafters. Surprising though it may seem to us today, opera was hugely popular during the Second World War. This was part of a broader surge of interest among the British in the so-called high arts – a sudden and rather urgent desire to ‘become cultured’ and to enjoy the best that life had to offer – when every day might be your last. Guy Ramsey reported in the Daily Mail in 1943 that “every day in every way Britain’s musical and dramatic taste is becoming more and more ‘highbrow’”. Tram drivers were listening to Tchaikovsky, waitresses were revelling in Wagner, and operas were drawing large audiences at provincial theatres. This war, Ramsey wrote, was more personal than any before it, and felt closer to home. Serious times called for serious art, and popular variety shows no longer seemed in step with the national mood. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2X2FXR2webready-9f2accf-e1767623285427.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph shows a man in a cap with round glasses and a cigarette in his mouth sitting on one of many stools outside a theatre. In front of him to the right, a billboard advertises the Sadler's Wells Opera" title="Stools for hire by people queueing for Sadler’s Wells Opera Company performances at the New Theatre, 1943. Tickets started at just 1/6 (about £4 today) (Image by Alamy)" /> Workers’ playtime Opera had already enjoyed reasonably wide popularity in Britain during the interwar years. In Lond…

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He shot down 3 planes in 4 minutes: meet the WW2 pilot you won't have heard about
type: item
date: 2025-12-19T09:00:18.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Column
subject: Historical events
subject: Second World War battles
description: "Everyone cried unashamedly at the news of this young pilot’s death", writes Kavita Puri
encoded: If you stroll across the green swathe of the Maidan in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) – past the monumental marble Victoria Memorial built to honour that Empress of India – and keep heading south, the city noise fades, and so too does the bustle. Off Debendra Lal Khan Road by the Tolly Canal, and opposite the zoological garden, are the gates of Bhowanipore Cemetery. Walk through them and you enter a world of order and peace. At the back, beyond lines of graves from the 19th and 20th century, are the headstones of young, mainly British men who fought in both world wars and died here. Many perished from diseases such as malaria and smallpox; some were killed in accidents, and one was apparently murdered while off duty. Also here are the graves of 14 Scottish soldiers from the Black Watch battalion who died in the cyclone of 16 October 1942 in Midnapore, west of Kolkata, as well as troops from a merchant ship hit by the Japanese in the Second World War. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 On one headstone is etched the name of a man I had heard about from elderly Indians and British people who had lived in the city during the war. Arthur Maurice Owers Pring – known to everyone simply as Pring – was a pilot in the Royal Air Force. He was killed at the age of just 22 while defending Calcutta from an aerial bombing attack by Japanese forces. This dark chapter opened on 20 December 1942, when Japanese fighter planes filled the skies. Navigating by moonlight, a force of eight Imperial Japanese Army Air Service medium bombers, code-named ‘Sally’ by the Allies, scattered their weapons around the city. The oil plant at Budge Budge, on the Hooghly river south-west of the city, was one of the places hit. Raids continued the following night, and on 23, 24 and 28 December – the most devastating assault coming on Christmas Eve. The city was largely undefended militarily. A detachment of Beaufighters from …

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Terror in the deep: how Hitler's U-boats pushed Britain to the brink
type: item
date: 2025-11-03T09:00:20.000Z
creator: Roger Moorhouse
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical events
subject: Naval battles
subject: Second World War battles
description: Did German U-boats conduct a ‘clean’ campaign during the Second World War? Or were they guilty of routinely murdering survivors in the water? Roger Moorhouse weighs the evidence
encoded: On the night of 13 March 1944, the Greek-registered steamship SS Peleus was en route from Freetown to Buenos Aires when she was hit amidships by two torpedoes, launched by a German U-boat, U-852. The twin-masted merchantman, of around 5,000 tons, swiftly began to sink, her internal bulkheads ruptured by the detonations. Within three minutes, the Peleus disappeared below the surface, leaving the surviving members of her 39-strong crew clinging to rafts and flotsam in the darkness. As sinkings go during the naval war, it was unremarkable, one might even say routine. But what followed would set it apart. Soon after, U-852 surfaced close to the debris field, hoping to identify her prey and glean some information. Her captain, 27-year-old Kapitänleutnant Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck, ordered one of his men – who spoke some English – to come up to the bow to question one of the survivors. After learning the identity of his target, Eck gave the order for U-852 to move away. But then he changed his mind. Eck was nervous. Prior to his departure from port, he had been given a lecture from his superiors on the perils of passing through the Atlantic Narrows, around Ascension, and was told that all four of the previous patrols undertaken by his predecessors had ended with the vessels being sunk. Due to the heightened risk of air attack he was urged to take every precaution to avoid being spotted by enemy aircraft. Even debris from a sinking, it was stressed, could give away his position. Calculating that he could be only some 200 miles away by daybreak, when the wreckage of the Peleus would doubtless be spotted, he made the decision to attempt to destroy the debris. He brought a party of his men up on deck and ordered them to open fire on the rafts and other debris with machine guns. In the moonless night, they were largely firing blind, but the operation continued for hours, with grenades being thrown and U-852’s anti-aircraft gun even being brought to bear. The number killed by these act…

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Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict"
type: item
date: 2025-09-03T08:00:44.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Fascism
subject: Hiroshima
subject: Second World War battles
description: On the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, broadcaster Kavita Puri – presenter of a new BBC Radio 4 series on the Second World War in Asia – considers why this was the conflict’s forgotten theatre
encoded: Matt Elton: Your new series, exploring fighting on the Asian front during the Second World War, is called The History Podcast: The Second Map. Why did you choose that name? Kavita Puri: It came to me after I met a man called Peter Knight, who is now 98. At the time of the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor [on 7 December 1941], he was a 14-year-old boy living in a terraced house in Bromley, a south-eastern London suburb. He had been following the war in Europe using a map posted on the wall alongside his dresser. After Pearl Harbor, he put up another map on the other side of the dresser – a map of Asia and the Pacific. He would sit down every evening with his mum and grandparents to listen to the BBC bulletin, hearing about places for the first time, and about this other war on the Asian front, in British colonies. And he would trace what was happening on that second map. So he was now updating two maps in tandem: one covering the war in Europe against the Nazis, and the second encompassing the war against Japan in Asia. Why has the war against Nazi Germany come to dominate how we view this conflict, at least partly to the exclusion of the conflict in Asia? I think it’s understandable: that war was close by and involved places whose names were more familiar to people in Britain. And it affected people here more directly: Peter Knight had experienced the Blitz, for example. So the European war was close to home, whereas this other war was far away. It was also a messy, complicated war – and not just because it was fought in jungle terrain, and soldiers were dying of malaria and other diseases as well as in combat. It wasn’t a neat good-v-bad situation, like the war against the Nazis. The war with Japan was essentially about two empires competing with each other, so it’s a much harder story to explain. It also involved a lot of troops from the colonies, as well as from Australia. So again, it’s a story about our empire. Historians such as Rana Mitter, who…

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"England is invincible": How the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain
type: item
date: 2025-07-02T08:00:31.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Second World War battles
description: When the Battle of Britain erupted, many Luftwaffe pilots anticipated a swift victory. Yet soon that confidence had been replaced by chronic fatigue and a crippling fear of drowning in “dirty water”. Victoria Taylor charts the mental disintegration of Hitler’s flyers
encoded: On a muggy night in late August 1940, Hinnerk Waller’s fraying tether had finally snapped. Relentlessly deployed in the Battle of Britain as part of the Luftwaffe fighter wing JG 52, Waller was paying for every nerve-wracking sortie with his sanity. Snatching hold of his Walther pistol, he sprinted into some nearby woods with the grim intention of killing himself. A few concerned airmen rose up to stop him, but their Staffelkapitän, Helmut Kühle, bade them to resume their seats. “He was a shrewd judge of character,” as Waller’s friend Ulrich Steinhilper later recalled, “and as we all sat waiting for what we thought was the inevitable shot, nothing happened.” Steinhilper added that this “was our first case of Kanalkrankheit [‘Channel Sickness’] – a combination of chronic stress and acute fatigue” that was brought on by constantly flying in the Battle of Britain. That this dramatic episode came only two months into the Luftschlacht um England (‘Air Battle for England’) – the German name for the Battle of Britain and the Blitz – highlights just how frenetic this aerial campaign had become for the Luftwaffe. Just four days after his suicidal crisis, Waller was unceremoniously flung back onto the frontline. What is most important to observe about his breakdown, however, is that it happened when the Luftwaffe was actually in its most successful phase of the aerial campaign against the RAF. Waller’s mental anguish, then, starkly demonstrates that military success and heightened morale do not necessarily go hand in hand. It also demonstrates that we should be wary about imposing British perspectives on the Luftwaffe’s mentality during the Battle of Britain. The enemy’s flaws Pointing out that the German air force was not as indefatigable as it is often presented is certainly not to downplay the monumental achievement of the RAF’s ‘Few’ in denying the necessary air supremacy and build-up of invasion barges for the Wehrmacht to invade Britain in Operation Sealion. On the cont…

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The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy
type: item
date: 2025-06-05T08:24:32.000Z
creator: Nick Hewitt
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Second World War battles
description: Ferrying troops to the beaches wasn’t the only contribution sailors made during the Allied invasion of Normandy. As we mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Nick Hewitt reveals how the Allied navies ended up fighting one of the most overlooked campaigns of the Second World War
encoded: On 30 July 1944, nearly two months into the Allied invasion of northern France, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay reflected on his command of the naval operations so far. “It may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing,” he wrote in his diary. “[But] nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution.” Ramsay died in 1945 without leaving a full memoir, but thousands of sailors could testify that nothing about their lives was “easy and plain sailing”. As late as 8 August 1944, with Allied troops poised to smash the German army in Normandy, sailors were still fighting to protect the beachhead. On that same day, the German submarine U-667 torpedoed both the US freighter Ezra Weston and the Canadian corvette HMCS Regina, the latter attack claiming the lives of 30 men. Ramsay’s words were prophetic. Today, discussions regarding sailors during the Normandy campaign mainly focus on their actions during the first day of the invasion: 6 June 1944, or ‘D-Day’. They are often absent from the wider story, despite the exhausting and dangerous campaign they fought to seize, exploit and defend the waters around Normandy throughout the summer of 1944. Read more | The road to D-Day: the masterplan The focus of the campaign was the Baie de la Seine, or Seine Bay, the huge inlet of the English Channel stretching nearly a hundred kilometres along the coast of Normandy from Le Havre in the east to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula at Cape Barfleur in the west. Within the bay lay the five assault areas or so-called ‘beaches’: Utah and Omaha for the Americans, and Gold, Juno and Sword for the British and Canadians. Through this highly congested and vulnerable body of water passed a constant stream of transport ships carrying supplies and reinforcements, without which the military could not hope to win the more widely recognised battle of Normandy on land. Defeat was unlikely, but any setback could have prolonged the war for months. As the Allied commander-in-…

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A hill to die on: why the Allies almost failed in the battle of Monte Cassino in WW2
type: item
date: 2025-01-23T09:59:43.000Z
creator: James Holland
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Second World War battles
subject: Soldiers
description: In early 1944, the Allied advance in Italy was brought to a halt at a rocky outcrop called Monte Cassino. And at the heart of the bloodbath that followed, writes James Holland, was flawed leadership
encoded: For the men of the US 34th ‘Red Bulls’ Infantry Division, just getting up onto the Monte Cassino massif was an achievement. To reach this rocky outcrop, in late January 1944 those troops had crossed a two-mile-wide flooded valley, an area laced with enemy mines and overlooked by German troops in the mountains above. The weather was cold, wet and miserable, and the Americans’ route had taken them across a badly smashed causeway that offered an easy target for enemy artillery. Those troops had then traversed the bed of the Rapido river, which was impossible for tanks to cross, and clambered up into the hills and gulleys that comprise the lower reaches of the towering massif. Finally, they had slipped and scrambled their way up onto two of the ridges that cross Monte Cassino. By 6 February, the Second Battalion of the 135th Infantry, one of the three regiments of the Red Bulls, was within a stone’s throw of Point 593, the rocky outcrop at the end of one of these long ridges dubbed ‘Snakeshead Ridge’ by the Americans. The Germans launched a frenzied assault to displace them, only for the Red Bulls to counter-attack. Read more | Hell in Italy: the Allies' hardest fight of WW2? Bayonets fixed, shooting from the hip, they moved from rock to rock, picking their way through the increasingly loose and stony terrain along the narrow ridge. Bullets were zipping and pinging all around, mortars and grenades were exploding, and shrapnel and lethal shards of razor-sharp rock were fizzing through the air. “There was a lot of screaming and cursing,” recalled 23-year-old Sergeant Ralph Schaps from Minnesota. “We were not going to let the goddam krauts push us off the hill.” So close was the fighting that a rifle butt smashed into Schaps’ jaw but, somehow, he survived. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/12/GettyImages-1193060764-bf5e784.jpg" width="4516" height="3009" alt="The Benedictine abbey on Monte Cassino, established in the sixth century an…

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Dudley Clarke: the spy who hoodwinked Hitler
type: item
date: 2024-10-14T06:30:30.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Long reads (podcast series)
subject: Second World War battles
description: Robert Hutton unveils the tricks of the trade of the spy who gave the Nazis a run for their money
encoded: Dummy tanks at El Alamein, bogus generals in Algiers, sham armies on D-Day – all were ruses masterminded by World War II's master of deception Dudley Clarke. This Long Read, written by Robert Hutton, tells the story of the British soldier who made an art form of duping the Nazis. HistoryExtra Long Reads brings you the best articles from BBC History Magazine, direct to your ears. Today’s feature originally appeared in the September 2024 issue, and has been voiced in partnership with the RNIB.

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Liberating WW2 Naples: triumph and tragedy
type: item
date: 2024-09-27T06:30:21.000Z
creator: Rob Attar
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Second World War battles
description: Keith Lowe tells the story of the first major European city to be freed by the Allies during the Second World War – a tale of ingenuity and heroism, immorality and despair
encoded: When Allied forces arrived in Naples in October 1943, they found a city on its knees. Already ravaged by three years of war, Naples had been further decimated by German occupiers and now faced a desperate battle to get back on its feet as the Second World War continued to unfold around it. In this episode, the historian Keith Lowe joins Rob Attar to explore the story of the first major European city to be liberated by the Allies – a tale of ingenuity and heroism, immorality and despair. Keith Lowe is the author of Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos (HarperCollins, 2024) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones

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