If you like military history and podcasts, then I would like to recommend that you give War Stories a listen. It is a new production from two members of the Military Writers Guild, Adin Dobkin and a serving Army National Guardsman who posts publicly under the nom de guerre, Angry Staff Officer. Seeking to bridge the gap between military history that focuses on engagements or battles, and broad sweeping analysis, Dobkin and ASO tell stories that link specific instances with a broader narrative arc. In doing so, they hope to “engage the human interest angle while also tracing broader trends in warfare, through balancing narrative and dialogue.”
The first season of the podcast is tracing the development of modern tank warfare from its dawn on the battlefields of France in the First World War, through the present day. The result is Basil Liddell Hart meets This American Life. Dobkin and ASO both have engaging personalities and military history nerd-wit in abundance. They bring a youthful perspective leavened by recent military experience and the perceptive eye of today’s well-trained and highly educated military officer corps.
The first four episodes begin with doomed British cavalry charges on the Somme battlefield in 1916, to George Patton’s first combat experiences at the St. Mihiel salient in 1917, to the clash of Russian and German inter-war tanks in the Spanish Civil War, to the baptism of fire of the American tank destroyer corps in Tunisia in 1943.
The results are both informative and quite entertaining. My only (minor) quibble is that it would help to have some maps and photographs to go with the narrative to help pin down places, faces, and tank silhouettes. If you appreciate the fact — as Dobkin and ASO do — that the Soviet T-34 tank owes its existence to the American engineer J. Walter Christie, this is the podcast for which you have been searching.
