Military history podcasts based on primary sources, battlefield fieldwork, and original analysis
Australian War Memorial, photograph 015364.
BattlefieldTravels podcasts
The BattlefieldTravels podcast brings the site’s primary source analysis and battlefield fieldwork to audio. Each episode examines a battle, campaign, or tactical innovation in depth — drawing on original documents, personal exploration 280+ battlefields, and ongoing doctoral research at the Australian National University.
Episodes use AI-generated audio to present original research and analysis. All content, primary source work, and battlefield fieldwork is by BattlefieldTravels. At some stage I will turn my ~130 published articles into my own podcasts. But until then, this gives me a way to deliver in-depth research articles in an audio format.
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Episode listing
🎧 Payback time for the Marines on Guadalcanal: First Battle of the Matanikau, 18-19 August 1942
Runtime: 56 minutes
When the Marines landed on Guadalcanal on 7 August 1942, they were unopposed and left wondering what happened to the thousands of Japanese troops they expected. After a Marine patrol led by Colonel Frank Goettge was massacred, the Marines were out for blood. They got their payback at Matanikau.
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🎧 The Battle of Bloody Gulch, 13 June 1944: Easy Company’s desperate fight in the bocage
Runtime: 48 minutes
A week after the D-Day landings, the 101st Airborne Division had finally cleared the critical town of Carentan. The paratroopers knew that a German counterattack was brewing as they took up defensive positions in the bocage west of Carentan. The Germans struck on 13 June 1944 at what would become know as Bloody Gulch.
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🎧 The Foreign Legion’s Camerone in Tonkin: Siege of Tuyên Quang Nov 1884 – Mar 1885
Runtime: 78 minutes
From November 1884 to March 1885, a garrison of the legendary French Foreign Legion was besieged in the remote and crumbling citadel of Tuyên Quang in what is now northern Vietnam. The indomitable stand by the Legionnaires, and the equally legendary 300-kilometre march by Colonel Laurent Giovanninelli’s relief army are the stuff of Legion folklore.
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🎧 Lee’s Greatest Victory: Chancellorsville, Virgina, 1863
Runtime: 33 minutes
In May 1863, Robert E. Lee defied all military convention at Chancellorsville, dividing his much smaller Confederate army and sending Stonewall Jackson on a daring flank march. The result was one of Lee’s greatest victories — and one of the Union Army’s most demoralising defeats.
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🎧 Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina, 1781: Dan Morgan’s Tactical Masterpiece!
Runtime: 42 minutes
At the Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina, General Daniel Morgan turned the tide of the American Revolution in the South. Using a layered defence and feigned retreat, his mixed force of Continentals, militia, and cavalry shattered Banastre Tarleton’s elite British legion in less than an hour.
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🎧 The Dalton Gang Raid on Coffeyville, Kansas, 5 October 1892
Runtime: 17 minutes
On a quiet morning in October 1892, the Dalton Gang rode into Coffeyville, Kansas, aiming to pull off two simultaneous bank robberies. Within minutes, their daring plan collapsed in a hail of bullets, leaving four gang members dead and the town forever etched into the folklore of the Wild West.
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🎧 First Battle of Elephant Pass, Sri Lanka, 10 July – 9 August 1991
Runtime: 43 minutes
The First Battle of Elephant Pass in July 1991 marked a turning point in Sri Lanka’s civil war. Situated on a narrow isthmus linking the Jaffna Peninsula to the mainland, the fortified base at Elephant Pass was considered impenetrable—until it wasn’t. This was one of the most significant and most intense battles of the conflict, where terrain, firepower, and sheer determination collided in a desperate struggle that shocked the Sri Lankan military and reshaped the war’s trajectory.
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🎧 Operation Hirondelle July 1953: The Audacious Raid on Lạng Sơn
Runtime: 43 minutes
The French High Command in Indo-China, acting on time-sensitive intelligence, projected 2000+ paratroopers more than 100km behind enemy lines and destroyed a major Viet Minh logistic hub. They then deployed another parachute battalion, a mechanised brigade, and a naval task force to extract them again. All in the space of 72 hours. The operation did not change the course of the war, but demonstrated the decisiveness, agility and tactical excellence of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps in Indochina.
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🎧 Siege of Fort William Henry, New York, 3-9 August 1757
Runtime: 35 minutes
Standing at the head of Lake George, Fort William Henry was the scene of one of the French and Indian War’s most infamous sieges. In August 1757, Montcalm’s French and Native allies forced its surrender—only for tragedy to follow. Today, a reconstructed fort and museum bring the story of empire, warfare, and massacre vividly to life.
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🎧 The Crusades: Kerak Castle under siege, 1183-1188
Runtime: 43 minutes
High on the plateau above the Dead Sea, Kerak Castle became a symbol of defiance during the Crusades. The Crusaders called it ‘Crac des Moabites‘ (Karak in Moab). From Reynald of Châtillon’s raids to Saladin’s relentless sieges, Kerak stood at the centre of Crusader and Islamic power struggles. Walking its ramparts today reveals why this fortress dominated trade, pilgrimage, and war in the Holy Land.
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🎧 Siege of Alesia, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, ~September 52 BC
Runtime: 41 minutes
On a windswept hill in Burgundy, Julius Caesar faced his greatest test. Encircling Vercingetorix and 80,000 Gauls inside Alesia while a vast relief army advanced for battle, Caesar relied on engineering genius and discipline to secure Rome’s conquest of Gaul. The fate of Gaul — and Caesar’s future — would be decided here.
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🎧 The Son Tay Raid, North Vietnam, 21 November 1970
Runtime: 54 minutes
The Son Tay Raid, on the night of 20/21 November 1970, was a meticulously planned U.S. military operation aimed at rescuing American prisoners of war (POWs) from the Son Tay prison camp near Hanoi, North Vietnam. It was one of the most audacious operations in military history. The operation involved a joint force of U.S. Army Special Forces and Air Force personnel, plus a supporting diversionary effort by the US Navy. Despite the operation’s almost flawless execution, it failed to achieve its primary objective, as the POWs had been relocated to other sites prior to the assault.
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🎧 Pegasus Bridge 1944: Seizing the Caen Canal and Orne River bridges
Runtime: 44 minutes
In the opening minutes of D-Day, British airborne troops conducted a glider-borne coup de main assault to seize the bridges over the Caen Canal (Pegasus Bridge) and the River Orne (Horsa Bridge). Their mission was audacious but high risk: capture the bridges intact and hold them against German counterattacks until relieved, thereby securing the eastern flank of the Normandy landings.
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🎧 Ambush at Bắc Lệ, Tonkin, 1884: Catalyst of the Sino-French War
Runtime: 45 minutes
The Ambush at Bắc Lệ in June 1884 marked a turning point in the escalating tensions between France and China in northern Tonkin. In June 1884, a French column under Lieutenant Colonel Alphonse Dugenne, comprised of about 465 French troops and 284 Tonkinese auxiliaries, with a supply column of local ‘coolies’ and baggage mules, was ambushed by a much larger Chinese regular force near Bắc Lệ, on the road from Phủ Lạng Thương to Lạng Sơn. The attack was the catalyst for the Sino-French war of 1884-85 that saw French forces of the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps engaged in combat with Chinese forces across northern Vietnam, mainland China, and Formosa.
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🎧 Garryowen in Glory: A Tactical Study of Little Bighorn
Runtime: 54 minutes
The Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought over two days in June 1876. Custer’s command was annihilated, Reno’s and Benteen’s commands barely survived, and the Sioux and Cheyenne secured their greatest battlefield victory.
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🎧 Fighting for the Causeway – D-Day, 82nd Airborne Division at La Fière Bridge
Runtime: 47 minutes
La Fière Bridge and its adjacent causeway formed a natural chokepoint. To the east, the road led to Sainte-Mère-Église; to the west, it stretched across fields turned into a shallow lake by flooding, funnelling all movement through a narrow strip barely 100 metres wide. Both German reinforcements and American supply lines would have to pass through this defile. For the 82nd Airborne, holding La Fière meant holding the line between Utah Beach and the German mechanised counterattacks they knew were coming.
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🎧 Raate Road 1940: When tiny Finland humbled the mighty Red Army!
Runtime: 45 minutes
The Winter War’s most dramatic clash came in the forests of Suomussalmi and along the Raate Road. In December 1939 and January 1940, Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo’s lightly armed Finnish ski troops halted and then systematically destroyed two Soviet divisions advancing toward Oulu. What Moscow conceived as a swift thrust to cut Finland in two instead collapsed in the face of a smaller force that used terrain, climate, and tactical innovation to devastating effect.
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🎧 The 1917 Desert Gamble: T.E. Lawrence and the Fall of Aqaba
Runtime: 41 minutes
On 6 July 1917, the capture of Aqaba marked a dramatic shift in the Middle Eastern campaign of the First World War. The port of Aqaba fell to Arab Revolt forces after a daring inland campaign that defied both Ottoman expectations and desert geography. The attackers — a mobile, irregular force of Hashemite regulars and Bedouin tribesmen — had crossed over 1,000 km of some of the harshest desert terrain on earth, including the burning sands of the Nefud and the arid limestone plains around Wadi Sirhan.
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🎧 The Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, 1864: Hood’s suicidal assault
Runtime: 45 minutes
On the evening of 30 November 1864, Gen. John Bell Hood hurled his Army of Tennessee against entrenched Union forces at Franklin, Tennessee. Five hours of brutal fighting cost the Confederacy thousands of casualties and some of its finest generals.
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🎧 The Needle-Gun and the Dawn of Mission Command
Runtime: 49 minutes
How the Prussian needle gun and Auftragstaktik combined to make the Austrian storm column obsolete — and why France lost in 1870 with a better weapon. Primary source analysis of both the Austrian 1861 and Prussian 1847 infantry regulations in the original German.
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🎧 Battle of Route Coloniale 4 — Cao Bang Ridge Disaster, 1950
Runtime: 65 minutes
From retreat to annihilation — the destruction of French colonial forces on a jungle road in northern Vietnam in October 1950. One of the most comprehensive English-language analyses of this engagement available, grounded in French primary sources and personal battlefield exploration of the route itself.
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🎧 Polygon Wood, 1917: Brutal Allied ‘bite and hold’ tactics
Runtime: 47 minutes
Polygon Wood was no ordinary battlefield. Once a quiet Belgian forest, it became a wasteland of mud, shattered trees, and German pillboxes. Here in September 1917, Australian and British divisions fought a brutal fight for the Butte, using creeping barrages and bite-and-hold tactics to crush German counterattacks.
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🎧 A Day of Disaster on the Tugela Heights: The Battle of Spion Kop, 23-24 January 1900
Runtime: 47 minutes
On the night of 23 January 1900, British forces seized the critical high ground on the Tugela Heights: the heights of Spion Kop. What they failed to do was control the tactical crest, allowing Louis Botha’s Boer forces to fix them in place and massacre them on an open plateau without cover.
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🎧 Rocroi 1643: Last Stand of the Spanish Tercio
Runtime: 45 minutes
In May 1643, French and Spanish armies met on the plain south of the bastion fortress of Rocroi in what would be one of the most consequential battles of the seventeenth century. The engagement pitted France against Spain at the height of their rivalry and culminated in the defeat of the Spanish Army of Flanders. The battle did not end Spanish power overnight, but it marked a decisive shift in European warfare away from the dominance of the tercio system and toward more flexible linear tactics.
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Authored by Mick Prictor, a retired military officer with 40 years’ service, and a military historian specialising in terrain-focused analysis of tactics, doctrine, and command decision-making in land warfare. His work draws on extensive battlefield fieldwork—more than 280 sites worldwide—and one of the world’s largest private collections of historic military arms, uniforms, and equipment. About me
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