World War II Unwound

Little known or forgotten stories from World War II. The spies, heroes, decision-makers and the moments that changed everything. Hosted by U.S. Navy Veteran and World War II historian Alan Best

World War II Unwound is a history podcast hosted by Alan Best, with 12 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Alan Best hosts World War II Unwound, a history show with 12 episodes published.

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  Episode #5

  The Desert Fox's Last Argument - Rommel, The Atlantic Wall, and The Decision That Wasn't Made

  Aug 15, 202627 minS2

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Desert Fox's Last Argument — Rommel, The Atlantic Wall, and The Decision That Wasn't Made Season 2, Episode 5 — The Decision Makers He was right. Erwin Rommel — the Desert Fox, the most celebrated German general of the war — spent months in the winter and spring of 1944 walking the beaches of France, studying the Atlantic Wall, and making one of the most compelling strategic arguments of the entire war. Put the tanks near the coast. Position the armored reserves within striking distance of the beaches. Because in 1944, Germany no longer owns the skies over France. Allied fighter-bombers are hunting every tank column that moves in daylight. By the time a centrally-positioned Panzer reserve receives permission to move and fights its way through Allied air attack to reach the coast, the beachhead will already be established. The battle will already be lost. The only chance of defeating the invasion is to fight it at the waterline — on the first day, in the first hours. His superiors disagreed. Hitler kept personal control of the most powerful armored reserves and required his own authorization before they could move. On June 6th, 1944 — D-Day — Hitler was asleep. His staff were reluctant to wake him. The Panzer reserves sat in their dispersal areas while the beachhead was being established. By the time the release order came, it was afternoon. The divisions that moved toward Normandy in daylight were immediately attacked from the air. The beachhead held. Exactly as Rommel had predicted. And where was Rommel on the day that proved him right? In Germany. Visiting his wife on her birthday. Having assessed — from the same weather forecasts that hadn't predicted Eisenhower's narrow window — that the invasion was unlikely in the coming days. The man who argued most forcefully that the first day would decide everything spent the first day of the invasion away from his command. This episode tells the full story — the Panzer doctrine argument, the Atlantic Wall, D-Day itself, and the final chapter that ended in a German forest on October 14th, 1944, when two generals arrived at Rommel's home carrying a message from Hitler and a cyanide capsule. His son Manfred was fifteen years old. In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the most consequential correct decision that wasn't made in the entire Second World War. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com

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  Episode #4

  Not One Step Back - Stalin, Zhukov, and The Battle That Turned the War

  Aug 11, 202632 minS2

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: Not One Step Back — Stalin, Zhukov, and The Battle That Turned The War Season 2, Episode 4 — The Decision Makers Two million. Two million people died in and around the city of Stalingrad between August 1942 and February 1943. German soldiers. Soviet soldiers. Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian troops. Civilians. People who died in the fighting, in the cold, in the rubble, in the prisoner of war camps that swallowed the survivors of both sides. Two million people. Five months. One city. Before Stalingrad, Germany was advancing. After Stalingrad, Germany was retreating. The momentum of the Eastern Front — the most brutal and consequential theatre of the entire war, where eighty percent of German military casualties occurred — shifted at Stalingrad and never shifted back. And it shifted because of two decisions. The first was Josef Stalin's. As the German Sixth Army drove toward the city that bore his name, Stalin issued an order of brutal simplicity: Not one step back. Every soldier who retreated without orders would be shot by blocking detachments positioned behind the Soviet lines. Every man would hold. Every man would fight. The city would not fall. The second was Marshal Georgy Zhukov's. While Soviet soldiers died by the tens of thousands inside the burning city — buying time with their lives — Zhukov was secretly assembling over a million men, nine hundred tanks, and thirteen thousand artillery pieces for a counterattack the Germans never saw coming. The plan: strike both flanks simultaneously, close the pincers behind the Sixth Army, and trap three hundred thousand German soldiers with no way out. Stalin's decision was born from terror and will. Zhukov's was born from patience and genius. Together, they produced the most significant turning point on the most significant front of the most destructive war in human history. On January 31st, 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus — the first German Field Marshal ever to be taken prisoner — surrendered to Soviet forces in the ruins of the city he had been sent to capture. Hitler wept. And the long retreat to Berlin began. In this episode, Amanda and Harry take you inside the battle, the decisions, the men, and the moment the war turned. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com

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  Episode #3

  The Order That Made No Sense - Hitler, Dunkirk, and The Decision Nobody Can Fully Explain

  Aug 3, 202629 minS2

  Send us Fan Mail Season 2, Episode 3 — The Decision Makers In May 1940, Adolf Hitler had the British Expeditionary Force cornered on the beaches of Dunkirk. His Panzers were within striking distance. His generals were urging him to finish it. He had the most powerful armored force in the world positioned to destroy or capture over 300,000 Allied soldiers and effectively end the war in the West. He stopped them. Three days. Seventy-two hours. That is the margin that made Dunkirk possible. During those three days, the Allied perimeter was consolidated, the evacuation was organized, and 338,226 men crossed the English Channel to fight another day. Those men came back. They fought in North Africa. They fought in Sicily. They came back to Normandy in 1944. The accumulated military experience of the British army — the officers, the sergeants, the soldiers who had been in the field and survived — was preserved. If they had been destroyed on those beaches, the entire trajectory of the war in the West would have been different. And to this day, nobody can fully explain why Hitler gave the order. Was it Göring — who told Hitler the Luftwaffe alone could finish the job, and wanted the glory for his air force? Was it logistics — a sound operational pause by a commander who understood the risks of overextended armor? Was it political calculation — a deliberate decision to let the British army escape, keeping the door to a negotiated peace open? Was it psychology — a first-time field commander's anxiety at the moment of maximum success? Historians have been arguing about it for eighty years. The German generals who were there couldn't believe the order was real and asked for it to be confirmed in writing. Hitler himself gave different explanations to different people at different times and never offered a complete account of his reasoning. In this episode, Amanda and Harry take you inside one of the most genuinely mysterious command decisions in the history of warfare — and come out the other side understanding it better without being entirely sure they understand it at all. That is not a failure of the episode. That is the truth of the history. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com

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  Episode #1

  We Go - Eisenhower, The Weather, and the Decision That Changed Everything

  Jul 23, 202629 minS2

  Send us Fan Mail We Go — Eisenhower, The Weather, and The Decision That Changed Everything Season 2, Episode 1 — The Decision Makers It's four in the morning at Southwick House, England, June 5th, 1944. A North Atlantic storm is battering the coast. A hundred and fifty-six thousand soldiers, nearly five thousand ships, and eleven thousand aircraft are waiting on one man's word. Dwight Eisenhower had heard every assessment, every forecast, every argument. Now the room went silent — because the decision wasn't theirs. It was his alone. He stood, walked to the window, and came back with four words: Okay. We go. Then he sat down and wrote something no one saw for decades — a note, in his own hand, accepting full personal blame if the invasion failed. He carried it in his pocket while he watched the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne board their planes for Normandy. In this episode, Amanda and Harry take you inside the room, the weather window, and the man who carried the weight of D-Day before he knew how the story would end. Season Two: The Decision Makers begins here. Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Tags: WWII, World War II, D-Day, Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower, Normandy Invasion, Operation Overlord, James Stagg, Southwick House, Supreme Allied Commander, Military History, World War 2 History, WWII Podcast

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  Episode #8

  The Catcher Was a Spy - Moe Berg and the Lecture Hall in Zurich

  Jul 14, 202623 minS1

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Catcher Was a Spy — Moe Berg and the Lecture Hall in Zurich Season 1, Episode 8 — The Spies & Secret Wars — SEASON FINALE He was a backup catcher with a .243 batting average. He was also fluent in seven languages. He held a law degree from Columbia. He read six newspapers a day in multiple languages — in the dugout — while his teammates played cards. A teammate once said of him: "He can speak twelve languages, but he can't hit in any of them." In December 1944, Moe Berg sat in a lecture hall in Zurich, Switzerland, with a loaded pistol in his jacket pocket and a cyanide pill in his shoe. Across the room, Werner Heisenberg — Nobel laureate, founder of quantum mechanics, and the man Allied intelligence believed was at the center of Nazi Germany's atomic weapons program — was about to deliver a lecture. Berg's orders were precise: listen carefully. And if anything in that lecture suggested Germany was close to building an atomic bomb, find a way to be alone with Heisenberg afterward. And do not let him leave. This is not fiction. This is the true story of one of the most extraordinary human beings of the Second World War — a man who filmed the Tokyo skyline from a hospital rooftop during a baseball goodwill tour in 1934, a decade before anyone asked him to. A man who crossed the Atlantic with a pistol that nearly fell out of his pocket at 30,000 feet. A man who was offered the Medal of Freedom after the war and turned it down — because it would embarrass him. His final words, spoken to a nurse in a Newark hospital in 1972, were a question: "How did the Mets do today?" Season One began with a man nobody wanted — who fooled Hitler's entire intelligence operation from a kitchen table in Lisbon. It ends with a man nobody expected — who sat across a dinner table from one of the most dangerous physicists alive, made a judgment call that may have changed the course of the war, and then went home and never really talked about it again. This is the Season One finale of WWII Unwound. And it is something else. In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the most genuinely unbelievable true story of the entire season. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com

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