History Bang

We're jolly excited to announce that we have just become official brand ambassadors of Dispatches Magazine, a publication for re-enactors, historians, vehicle owners, history enthusiasts, and everything in between! It's a quarterly magazine available both online and in print, and you, our lovely audience, will now be able to get a 10% discount on any of their membership plans by using the code HistoryBang10 at checkout! Link to sign up: dispatchesmagazine.co.uk/join-dispatche… If you sign up as a member today, and today only, you can purchase discounted tickets to the first Dispatches Live event on April 26th, which we will both be attending and performing a live episode of History Bang at! Along with proper historians Jack Bowsher and Robert Lyman, who will be much less silly and likely more factual. Press release regarding our ambassadorships here: dispatchesmagazine.co.uk/brand-ambassad…

Don't miss what's looking to be our most popular episode yet - Operation Mincemeat: Britain's plan to hide their invasion of Sicily by dropping a body off of Spain to make Germany think they were invading Greece... confused yet? Good! That's the idea. open.spotify.com/episode/3WUEOo…

Australian tunneller Sapper Michael Francis Lynch was killed in action on this day in 1918. I didn’t notice it at first, but I’ve since realised there’s something unusual about his headstone. Can you spot it too? 📍 Menin Road South Military Cemetery 🇧🇪

Episode 12 is now live, and we're looking at tank myths with Nicholas Moran, aka The Chieftain. At least, we're trying to... we did get side-tracked a lot. In fact, we ended up covering everything from why Fury was a good film to making bets on the development of next generation Main Battle Tanks (Ahem, we owe you £20 @Chieftain_armor). open.spotify.com/episode/75HHCw…

Episode 10 is now live To many people the Dunkirk evacuation is seen as the bookend to the British involvement in the Battle of France, and that we didn't have a substantial presence in the European Theatre again until Italy, a little over three years later. Whilst Operation Dynamo certainly deserves the recognition it gets for saving hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives, there were not only >100,000 BEF soldiers still in France following the evacuation, but ~40,000 more were to arrive over the following days... only to be evacuated again less than a week later. As Paris fell and the French government saw the writing on the wall, they informed Churchill that they would shortly be seeking an armistice with Hitler and that he'd best get his men out while they still could. open.spotify.com/episode/6r3SGE…

It's perhaps a well known anachronism from the film Zulu that the 24th Regiment of Foot was not yet renamed the South Wales Borderers, and thus most people assume this to be the reason that they shouldn't have all been depicted with Welsh accents. However, the regiment had in fact moved to Brecon, Wales in 1873, 5 years before the Battle of Rorke's Drift; however, by then only ~1/4 of the regiment were Welsh. There's often a little more to these little anachronisms than is obvious on the surface - and it also means that they almost certainly would not have been singing Men of Harlach to the Zulus, as the majority of them probably wouldn't have known the words! open.spotify.com/episode/1vmrrf…

Jolly pleased with our #SpotifyWrapped for @HistoryBangPod. Cheers to those who've followed the progress so far!

The Battle of Bossenden Wood (1838) - often referred to as "the last battle on English soil" - was more than a little unusual. open.spotify.com/episode/6ih278… When John Nichols Tom, a Cornish maltster and failed solicitor, turned up in the sleepy Kent countryside under the pseudonym (and I'm not making this up) Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay, Knight of Malta, heir to the Earl of Devon and the Kentish estates of Sir Edward Hales, nobody expected him to start a civil uprising. However, a few claims that he was the second coming of Christ, a smear campaign in his self-published gossip mag against the Archbishop of Canterbury and a few months spent in an insane asylum later and Tom had found himself something of a cult following. Sorry... I meant "Tom had founded himself a cult of followers", and the local constabulary weren't best pleased about it, either.

A website member recently asked if we might consider an episode on the Russification of the historic Baltic and Finno-Ugric peoples that lived in what is now modern day Russia. To that, I say, I don't know... but if we do, I know where I'm starting my research. I've read a couple of Dr Young's most recent works and can thoroughly recommend them to anyone interested in learning more about paganism and Christianisation, from post-Roman Britain to the early modern Baltics, the Northern Crusades, interpretatio romana, and the surprising syncretism between folk religions and Christianity. - Bill

A few weeks ago we debated the Maginot Line: was it a complete waste of time, money and resources? Or underattedly brilliant and never had the chance to prove itself? Could the Saar Offensive have ended the war in 1939? Was it all Belgium's fault? open.spotify.com/episode/42RnmE…

Next week's episode on Rorke's Drift is now available to subscribers! In writing this episode we learned that the Zulu name kwaJimu, meaning "Jim's Land", whilst not a direct translation, did in fact recall the same namesake as the English - James Rorke. open.spotify.com/episode/1vmrrf…

If this publication of the time is to be believed, then the German infiltrators of Operation Pastorius were "highly-skilled saboteurs". Although surely a good propaganda win for the US, this could hardly have been further from the truth! Find out more - open.spotify.com/episode/0IrNt0…

Well, there's half a dozen episodes of History Bang out now, so I guess we're really doing this! Best we get some kind of social media presence going, eh? To those discovering this from the Squire account, who have yet to experience the podcast, go here - tinyurl.com/HistoryBang