Special Forces In World War 2 Podcast

In the dark first months of 1942, the Japanese advance sweeps south across the Pacific, and Fiji lies squarely in its path. The islands guard the sea and air routes that keep Australia and New Zealand supplied, yet the garrison is far too small to hold every shore.
The answer is an unusual one. In the least accessible corners of the main island, a handful of New Zealanders are sent to raise small bands of guerrillas from the Fijian people, and to hide them in the bush. Their orders are not to win battles, but to buy time: to harass any landing, close the single coast road, and hold the enemy back until stronger forces can move up.
This first part follows the making of the First Commando Fiji Guerrillas. New Zealand officers and non-commissioned officers go out into the remote villages, win the trust of the Fijian people, and train them week by week as scouts and guerrillas. They must first master a country of mountains, jungle, and flooded rivers that tests the teachers as hard as the taught. This is a story of formation, of hard training and harder ground, and of an unlikely partnership forged in the villages of Viti Levu, in the shadow of an invasion that may come any day.
Source: Colin Larsen, Pacific Commandos: New Zealanders and Fijians in Action.
For maps, photographs, and the full source base behind this series, visit worldwar2-sof.com
Search terms: WW2 Pacific, Fiji Guerrillas, New Zealand commandos, jungle warfare, Viti Levu, guerrilla training, special forces history
#WW2 #WWII #PacificWar #MilitaryHistory #HistoryPodcast #Fiji #NewZealandHistory #Commandos #SpecialForces #WorldWarTwo #Podcast #History #JungleWarfare #WW2History #PacificTheatre
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June 6th, 1944. The Commandos of 1st Special Service Brigade have fought their way off Sword Beach and up to the bridges over the Caen Canal and the River Orne. Now the harder task begins. They must climb onto the high ground beyond the Orne and hold it, whatever the enemy sends against them.

This episode widens to the whole Brigade. Number 3 Commando, Number 4 Commando, Number 6 Commando, and Number 45 Royal Marine Commando, on a low ridge that is the far left edge of the entire invasion. Hold it, and the eastern flank holds. Lose it, and the enemy looks straight down onto the beaches and the crossings below.

We climb to Le Plein with Number 6 Commando as the guns of the fleet come down among their own lines. We follow Number 45 Royal Marine Commando east to Franceville Plage and the guns above Merville, into a day of street fighting that costs them dear and drives them back into the ruins in the dark. We stand with the Brigade through the loss of Lord Lovat at Bréville, through the long grinding weeks in the foxholes where the killing is close and constant. And when the enemy breaks at last, we go forward with the pursuit, across the River Dives and on towards the Seine.

This is the story of eighty-three days on the eastern flank of Normandy. Of four Commandos who came ashore separately and learned to fight as one. Of a ridge held from the sixth of June until the enemy was gone.

Drawn from the war diaries of the units themselves and from the historians who preserved this campaign, this is special forces history told in immersive, documentary detail.

Search terms: D-Day, Normandy, Commandos, 1st Special Service Brigade, Lord Lovat, Sword Beach, Le Plein, Amfreville, Bréville, Franceville Plage, River Dives, 6th Airborne Division, Operation Overlord.

#DDay #WWII #WW2 #Normandy #Commandos #LordLovat #SwordBeach #BritishArmy #RoyalMarines #MilitaryHistory #HistoryPodcast #OperationOverlord #DDay1944 #WW2Podcast #MilitaryPodcast #6thAirborne #Bréville #WarHistory #1944 #SpecialForces
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By mid-1942 the Japanese tide in the Pacific is turning, and the invasion Fiji feared never comes. But the war is not finished with the First Commando Fiji Guerrillas.
In this episode, the American forces take over the defence of Fiji, and the New Zealand-led commandos pass under a new command. They become an unexpected thing: a jungle-warfare school for the incoming US Army, running night raids and mock ambushes against their own allies, and arming their Fijian soldiers at last. Then the orders come, and the unit sails north into the Solomon Islands.
On Guadalcanal they absorb Fijians, Tongans, and Solomon Islanders into a five-nation force. On New Georgia they go to war for real, a small band whose reconnaissance behind Japanese lines becomes the key to the American advance on Munda, at a cost that begins to fall on named men. On Vella Lavella they hunt a scattered enemy through the bush. And in the end it is not battle but malaria that breaks them, until a unit worn down and used up is brought home and disbanded in 1944.
This is the story of how a garrison force raised to defend one island fought its way across others it had never heard of, and of the New Zealanders, Fijians, Tongans, and Solomon Islanders who made it.
Sources: Colin Larsen, Pacific Commandos: New Zealanders and Fijians in Action; Anna Annie Kwai, Solomon Islanders in World War II: An Indigenous Perspective; Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary; D. C. Horton, New Georgia: Pattern for Victory; and further histories of the Guadalcanal, New Georgia, and Bairoko campaigns. Recorded testimony of Solomon Islander veterans, including George Maelalo.
For maps, photographs, and the full source base behind this series, visit worldwar2-sof.com
Search terms: WW2 Pacific, Fiji Guerrillas, New Zealand commandos, Guadalcanal, New Georgia, Solomon Islands, jungle warfare, special forces history
#WW2 #WWII #PacificWar #MilitaryHistory #HistoryPodcast #Guadalcanal #NewGeorgia #SolomonIslands #Fiji #Commandos #NewZealandHistory #SpecialForces #WorldWarTwo #Podcast #History #JungleWarfare #WW2History #PacificTheatre
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They came ashore into a beach that had not been cleared, and they were still fighting three days later.

In our last episode we followed 1st Special Service Brigade as a whole, from the Normandy beaches to the bridges over the Caen Canal and the River Orne. Now we go back and follow the Commandos one unit at a time.

First, No. 4 Commando. We land with them on Sword Beach alongside Capitaine de corvette Philippe Kieffer's French troops, setting foot on their own soil for the first time in four years. We fight through the fortifications of Ouistreham, the anti-tank wall, the Casino strongpoint, the battery at the mouth of the Orne, and march more than fourteen kilometres under sniper and mortar fire to cross the bridges last of all the Brigade, as night falls on June 6th.

Then we turn back to the morning of June 7th and to No. 3 Commando. Held on D-Day guarding a divisional headquarters while the battle moved on without them, they are sent against the Merville guns — silenced by the 9th Parachute Battalion a day earlier, and speaking again. What follows costs them half of two troops and their second-in-command.

Both threads end on the same ground: the high ground east of the Orne, around Amfreville, Le Plein, and Hauger, where on June 8th the Germans throw fresh divisions against the Brigade to drive it off the ridge and roll up the flank of the invasion.

This is the story of how the Commandos held.

For maps, photographs, original documents, and the full source base behind this series, visit worldwar2-sof.com

#DDay #WW2 #WWII #Commandos #Normandy #SecondWorldWar #MilitaryHistory #History #HistoryPodcast #WW2History #BritishCommandos #Lovat #SwordBeach #Ouistreham #MervilleBattery #SpecialForces #WW2Podcast #Airborne #OperationOverlord #FreeFrench #Kieffer #1944 #MilitaryHistoryPodcast #WarHistory #DDay80

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June 6th, 1944. On the far eastern edge of the greatest invasion in history, the whole enterprise hangs on a single flank. Hold it, and the beachhead is secure. Lose it, and the enemy pours in from the east.

https://worldwar2-sof.com/welcome-to-world-war-2-special-forces-com/which-special-forces-operations-took-place-in-world-war-2/which-special-forces-operations-took-place-in-1944/which-special-forces-operations-took-place-in-june-1944/operation-overlord/operation-neptune/sword-beach/1st-special-service-brigade-operation-overlord/

In the darkness after midnight, the men of 6th Airborne Division drop into Normandy by parachute and glider. They seize the bridges over the Caen Canal and the River Orne in the opening minutes of D-Day, then hold on, cut off some eight kilometres inland, pressed from every side. They have taken the prize. Now they must keep it until help arrives. And help has to fight its way up from the sea.

That help is the Commandos.

This is the story of their march to the bridges. Brigadier Lord Lovat's 1st Special Service Brigade lands on Sword Beach on the morning of the sixth, four Commandos strong, into a storm of gun and mortar fire. Ahead of them lie nine kilometres of enemy-held country: false beaches and drowned men, minefields absent from every map, snipers in the trees and the corn, strongpoints dug into the villages, open fields swept by fire. They must cross all of it on foot, under crushing loads, at speed, and reach the airborne before the perimeter gives way. When the plan was first laid out, senior officers called it impossible. Some called it fanciful. The Commandos were given three hours.

At the head of the column walks a piper. His name is Bill Millin. He carries no rifle. He carries the pipes, and he means to play them every step of the way, from the surf at the water's edge to the steel spans of the bridges themselves.

Told in immersive, present-tense documentary detail and drawn from the accounts of the historians and the veterans who set the record down, this episode follows one of the most daring feats of the entire invasion, minute by minute, metre by metre, from the ramps of the landing craft to the linkup that secures the left flank of the Allied lodgement.

New here? This is part of an ongoing series on the special forces of the Second World War, built around the battle for the eastern flank of D-Day and the airborne assault on the Merville Battery. Start anywhere. Stay for the whole campaign.

#DDay #WW2 #WWII #SecondWorldWar #Commandos #SwordBeach #LordLovat #BillMillin #PegasusBridge #6thAirborne #OperationOverlord #MervilleBattery #Normandy1944 #MilitaryHistory #WarHistory #HistoryPodcast #WW2History #Airborne #SpecialForces #DDay1944

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