Best Podcasts on the First World War

The First World War destroyed the European order that had existed since Waterloo and gave birth to the 20th century as we know it — producing the Soviet Union, the collapse of four empires, the mandate systemMandate System Full Description:A mechanism established by the League of Nations after World War I to administer former Ottoman and German territories. “Class A” Mandates—Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan—were considered nearly ready for independence but placed under temporary control of France or Britain until they could “stand alone.” In reality, Mandates were colonies by another name. Critical Perspective:The Mandate System was hypocrisy institutionalized. The same powers that carved up the Middle East for their own advantage claimed they were acting as benevolent trustees. No timetable for independence was set; “readiness” was defined by the mandatory power. Iraq was granted nominal independence in 1932, but with a British client king and treaty that preserved British military bases and oil control. The Mandate was not the road to freedom but the road to neocolonialism.
Read more that still shapes the Middle East, and the conditions that made a second world war almost inevitable. Explaining History has produced over fifty episodes on the Great War, examining it from every angle: the diplomatic failures that caused it, the military innovations that shaped it, the global scale that is so often forgotten, and the peace that failed to end it.

Browse by theme below, or start anywhere — every episode stands alone.

The Road to War (1870–1914)

The war did not come from nowhere. These episodes trace the decades of arms races, imperial rivalry, shifting alliances, and nationalist pressure that made European catastrophe increasingly likely — and the final miscalculations of 1914 that made it inevitable.

Public Opinion and International Relations 1890–1914

In the decades before the war, the role of public opinion and the press in shaping the foreign policy of European powers became increasingly decisive. This episode explores how and why mass media made the path to war harder to reverse.

Schlieffen, Moltke and German Strategy 1914

Germany and Austria-Hungary failed to coordinate their military strategies in the decade before war. This episode examines the Schlieffen PlanSchlieffen Plan Full Description Germany’s pre-war strategic plan to fight a two-front war against France and Russia. Devised by Chief of Staff Alfred von Schlieffen, it called for a rapid knock-out blow against France through neutral Belgium, before turning east to deal with the slower-mobilising Russian army. The plan required the violation of Belgian neutrality, which brought Britain into the war, and its modification by Moltke the Younger in 1914 contributed to its failure at the Marne. Critical Perspective The Schlieffen Plan has been used to argue that the First World War was “inevitable” once mobilisation began — a war caused by timetables rather than decisions. Historian John Keiger and others have challenged this fatalism, arguing that political decisions rather than military logic determined events at every step. The myth of the unstoppable plan served postwar German politicians who wished to escape responsibility for the decision to go to war., its modifications under Moltke, and how a blueprint designed for quick victory instead created the conditions for four years of stalemate.

The German Invasion of Belgium: 1914

In the first weeks of the war the outdated Schlieffen Plan required the German Army to rapidly cross Belgium. Instead of the anticipated light resistance, the Belgians fought hard — and German atrocities against civilians turned world opinion against the Reich from the outset.

The Western Front: Technology, Attrition and Breakthrough

The Western Front was the war’s central killing ground — a line of trenches stretching from the Channel to Switzerland that barely moved for four years. These episodes examine the weapons that defined it and the innovations that finally broke the deadlock in 1918.

Poison Gas on the Western Front 1915–18

Between 1915 and 1918 all sides used poison gas, but Germany was its greatest pioneer. By the war’s end the British, French and Americans were using it more effectively than the Germans — and the fear of gas shaped military and political thinking for decades afterwards.

German Bombing Raids on London and Paris 1917–18

Strategic bombing of the enemy’s home front began in earnest in the second half of the war, with London facing near-collapse of its air defences in early 1918. This episode explores the development of German strategic bombing and the British and French response.

Artillery and Intelligence: Breaking the Deadlock 1918

After three years of fixed positions, the war became a conflict of rapid movement again in 1918. This episode explores how military innovation in artillery and intelligence finally made breakthrough possible.

A Global War: From Egypt to Japan

The First World War was not a European war fought in European trenches. It drew in empires across four continents, reshaped the Middle East, accelerated the rise of Japan, and brought nearly a hundred thousand Chinese labourers to dig British trenches. These episodes recover the war’s global scale.

Indian Soldiers and the Defence of Egypt 1914–15

At the start of the war, Egypt and the Suez Canal were under threat from an Ottoman offensive. It was Muslim, Sikh and Hindu Indian soldiers — from a British India riven with nationalist politics — who were deployed to hold the empire together in the Sinai.

Japan and the First World War

Hostilities in Europe had global consequences. Japan, allied to Britain, saw its chance to expand power in China at the expense of both Chinese sovereignty and European imperialists in Asia — a watershed moment in the long story of Japanese expansionism.

China and the First World War

Nearly a hundred thousand poor Chinese labourers dug British trenches on the Western Front. China’s government hoped the war would allow it to reclaim territory — but when those hopes were dashed at Paris in 1919, the fury that followed helped give birth to Chinese nationalism.

The Ottoman EmpireOttoman Empire ottoman-empire The Islamic empire centred on Istanbul that ruled Anatolia, the Arab Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe from the fourteenth century to its dissolution after the First World War. Its collapse created the modern states of the Middle East, Turkey, and the Balkans in ways that continue to shape regional politics. At its peak in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire encompassed an enormous territory from Hungary to Yemen, from Algeria to the borders of Persia. It was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state governed through the millet system, which granted non-Muslim communities (Christians, Jews) significant autonomy in their internal affairs in exchange for taxes and political loyalty. The nineteenth century brought simultaneous challenges: nationalist movements among the Balkan populations — Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians — used the language of national self-determination to carve independent states from Ottoman territory, with Russian and Western support; the empire lost more than a third of its European territory in the 1877–78 war with Russia. Attempts at modernisation and reform — the Tanzimat reforms, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 — failed to arrest the decline and produced new tensions between Turkish nationalist modernisers and the empire’s Arab, Armenian, and Kurdish populations. The First World War was catastrophic: the empire entered on the German side, suffered the Armenian Genocide (1915–23), lost the Arab provinces to British-led forces, and was dissolved by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) — replaced by the Turkish Republic under Ataturk, whose territorial integrity was established by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). The Ottoman Empire’s collapse created the modern Middle East in ways that are still unfolding. The borders drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the subsequent mandates reflected French and British strategic priorities rather than the population distributions, administrative traditions, or political aspirations of the peoples concerned. The result was a set of states whose internal social compositions were incompatible with the nation-state model imposed on them: Iraq with its Sunni-Shia-Kurdish divisions, Lebanon with its confessional arithmetic, Syria with its minority-dominated military, Israel-Palestine with its overlapping claims. These incompatibilities were not caused by the Ottoman Empire — which governed diverse populations through systems of autonomous administration — but by the particular form of its destruction and replacement. The ongoing instability of the region reflects, in significant part, the unresolved consequences of those decisions made in London and Paris between 1916 and 1920. and the First World War 1914

Between August and October 1914, the Ottoman Empire tried to play both sides against each other. Germany eventually forced its hand. The Ottoman entry into the war would ultimately destroy a five-century empire and reshape the Middle East permanently.

The Peace and Its Failure (1919)

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was one of history’s great missed opportunities — a chance to build a stable world order that was squandered by conflicting ambitions, nationalist pressures, and American withdrawal. These episodes examine the men who made the peace and why it failed.

Lloyd George and the British Empire Delegation in Paris 1919

David Lloyd George led the British and Empire delegations with the instincts of a shrewd political operator rather than a visionary statesman — determined to expand the British Empire while managing the competing pressures of public vengeance and long-term stability.

Woodrow Wilson and the Founding of the League of NationsLeague of Nations Full Description:The first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. Its spectacular failure to prevent the aggression of the Axis powers provided the negative blueprint for the United Nations, influencing the decision to prioritize enforcement power over pure idealism. The League of Nations was the precursor to the UN, established after the First World War. Founded on the principle of collective security, it relied on moral persuasion and unanimous voting. It ultimately collapsed because it lacked an armed force and, crucially, the United States never joined, rendering it toothless in the face of expansionist empires. Critical Perspective:The shadow of the League looms over the UN. The founders of the UN viewed the League as “too democratic” and ineffective because it treated all nations as relatively equal. Consequently, the UN was designed specifically to correct this “error” by empowering the Great Powers (via the Security Council) to police the world, effectively sacrificing sovereign equality for the sake of stability.
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In the aftermath of the war, utopian visions of a world without war informed a generation of diplomats. Wilson’s League of Nations was the product of that vision — and its failure to prevent another catastrophe reveals the limits of idealism when confronted with national interests.

The Legacy of the First World War

The war destroyed the European civilisation that existed before 1914, spawned Nazi Germany and the USSR, and created the conditions for decades of further conflict. This episode surveys the full weight of the war’s legacy and asks what, if anything, was gained from four years of catastrophe.

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