The best military history podcasts for serious listeners

Military history has the largest and the least discriminating audience of any history subgenre. That combination produces a lot of audio, and the quality range is enormous, because a show can be gripping and completely unreliable at the same time.

There is a quick test that works surprisingly well. Listen for whether the show ever tells you how it knows. A host who says "the surviving accounts disagree" or "this figure comes from one source and it is probably inflated" is doing history. A host who narrates a cavalry charge in the second person is doing something else, which can be entertaining and is not the same thing.

The long-form ones

Hardcore History is the entry point for almost everyone and deserves its reputation with a caveat. Dan Carlin is explicit that he is not a historian, he cites his sources out loud, and the four-hour episodes are genuinely immersive. Blueprint for Armageddon on the First World War is the best long-form military audio anyone has made. Treat it as a superb way into a subject and then read the people he cites.

The Rest Is History is not a military show but does military subjects constantly, and Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook are both working historians who argue with each other in public. The Alexander, Hannibal and Fall of Rome runs are excellent.

History of the Second World War by Wesley Livesay is the one for people who want the whole thing in order, week by week, in proper depth. Hundreds of episodes. It is a commitment and the payoff is that the war stops being a set of famous moments and becomes a continuous thing.

The specialists

We Have Ways of Making You Talk is Al Murray and James Holland on the Second World War, and it is the best-natured show in the genre. Holland is a serious historian, Murray asks the questions a smart amateur would ask, and they are very good on the unglamorous parts. Logistics, fuel, mud.

The Old Front Line is Paul Reed walking the First World War battlefields and talking about what is still there. Quiet, granular, and the closest audio gets to standing on the ground.

Warfare from History Hit spans everything from antiquity to the present with a working academic on most episodes. Best used by subject rather than as a subscription.

The Ancients, also History Hit, is the one for classical warfare, and Tristan Hughes is consistently good at getting a specialist to explain their actual evidence.

The ones to approach with care

There is a large tier of shows built on dramatic narration and about an afternoon of research. They sound authoritative and they will teach you things that are not true. You will recognise them by the total absence of hedging, the perfectly round casualty figures, and the reconstructed dialogue.

Not a moral failing. Just worth knowing which shelf you are on.

What happens after Blueprint for Armageddon

Almost everyone in this genre hits the same wall. You finish the great long-form series, you have opinions about the Somme, and then you want the next thing and the next thing is another eighty-hour commitment.

The gap in the genre is the short piece. Twelve minutes on one battle or one commander or one weapon system, done properly, with the uncertainty left in.

HearLore is a listening library of short narrated entries, and this is a well-covered corner. The Battle of Waterloo, about fourteen minutes, is the day in full including the parts that were luck. Napoleon, about nineteen minutes, is the longest of these and the one that makes the rest of the period legible. The Normandy landings, about sixteen minutes, is the operation rather than the beach. Trench warfare, about eleven minutes, is the system rather than the sentiment, which is the version that actually explains 1916.

Further back, the Roman legion, about eleven minutes, is the machine that won the Mediterranean, and the Second Punic War, about thirteen minutes, is the war it nearly lost. Hannibal, about twelve minutes, and Alexander the Great, about thirteen, are both better as people than as campaign maps. Genghis Khan, about eleven minutes, is the most successful commander in history and the one Western military education skips. Samurai, about thirteen minutes, is a class rather than a costume, and the entry is good on the gap between the two.

For the twentieth century, the Cold War, about twelve minutes, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, about twelve, are the two to start with, and the Manhattan Project, about fifteen minutes, is where the whole discipline changes shape.

Each entry ends by pointing at what it touches, which in this subject is usually the war that caused it. Waterloo pulls back to Napoleon and forward to the Congress of Vienna. Trench warfare pulls in every direction at once.

Start with Waterloo on the walk home. Fourteen minutes and you will know why the timing of the rain mattered.

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