Piston engines powered every significant Second World War air battle. Calum Douglas, who has written a brilliant book on the race for engineering supremacy, joins Al Murray and James Holland to explore the story of the men at the forefront of the battle.
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Al Murray and James Holland explore the converted tanks used at Normandy. Also up for discussion are parachute decoys, the dangers of back-flash and who killed Michael Wittmann.
James Holland reads a chapter from Suite Francaise, the title of a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin, who was tragically murdered before she could complete all five volumes.
Brigadier George Chatterton’s memoirs, read by Al Murray, tell the extraordinary story of his time as a soldier for the British Army who then went on to become the Commander of the Glider Pilot Regiment during the Second World War.
Chapter 11: The Cauldron, by Zeno In September, 1944, the British 1st Airborne Division found itself in a fierce battle for the Dutch city of Arnhem. Al Murray reads the story of a single platoon trapped in the smoking ruins