The best podcasts for World War II buffs

Hello there, I’m Faith Jacobs, an openly autistic and disabled advocate! I’m the host of CoffeeBreak: A Retro-Spective Pod, and the writer behind CoffeeancomicsProductions which has produced and published three original neurodivergent led audiodramas, Chaotic Idiots: the series, Tir Na Noc brotherhood, and of course, Faithfully Yours Mozart: The Courtship. Beyond the scripted fiction world, I am also an unapologetic and proud autistic advocate, speaking out against the current harmful and destructive lingo that has been prevalent with regards to Autism and varying other disabilities. More than that I am also a researcher into history, especially World War Two history. Relevant now more than ever, I believe this portion of history needs understood. We cannot repeat it and often, as society chooses to forget what was sacrificed so that they might actually have a future, I will not. And I hope you shan’t either. Interviewing Stephen Haggard was written as an honoring memorial to a complicated individual whose life was a tapestry of possibilities and yet was cut short by tragedy in the wake of an era that didn’t understand mental health nor the strain of the war’s fatiguing heaviness. Stephen died February 25th, 1943 and left behind him A story that has been slowly re emerging but also a mounting amount of questions that shall remain unanswered. What is worse, Stephen Haggard has been left out of the history of World War Two for far too long, his story suppressed, his legacy impossible to trace. And I did it for three long years on my own and out of an accident. I was researching Mozart when I stumbled upon Stephen in the titular role for a 1936 film titled Whom the Gods Love, by Basil Dean. I was endeared to the charming young man playing Mozart on screen. Thinking I had seen him somewhere before, I looked him up and it turned out I hadn’t. But what I found was so much more than I imagined and upon reading his memoir from WWII, I was invested in finding out who Stephen Haggard had been. Follow along the journey to creating a play, that left the most indelible mark upon my heart.

Born March 21st, 1911 and killed in the line of in duty in February 1943, Interviewing Stephen Haggard invites its readers into the honest and most profound thoughts and viewpoints of a Father, a poet, an author, and a Soldier's memoir to his children, I'll Go to Bed at Noon: A Soldier's Letter's to His Sons, published 1940 in the Atlantic Journal. Here, his most poignant and candid of words are thoughtfully and respectfully reimagined in the form of a fictional Radio Interview with a fictional interviewer, in June of 1940. Taking nothing away from the real thoughts of the actual man called up to face the darkness of Hitler's Nazi regime, the play before you asks questions of which you may be compelled to answer: Will you remember Stephen Haggard and What does it mean to carry the weight of a legacy that has largely been forgotten by time? "And time, more time, give me more time!" Cries Fastidious. --- The Story: Enter BBC journalist, Edith Thatcher, a young late twenty some American who finds herself caught in the crossfire of London on the verge of rationed food, chaos, evacuations, and bombings, in the summer of 1940; her task a simple one, following a grand performance of a play in New York in the early 30's, she wishes to find and interview the co-star of Ethel Barrymore's Whiteoaks, Mr. Stephen Haggard, a London local, and what a piece of luck at that. In a race against the clock; and with time running out, Mr. Haggard awaits his turn to be called to the frontlines for training, what might our ambitious interviewer find as she gets to know the charming and ever elusive, Stephen Haggard? --- The Author would like to note that this is a work of fiction based on real words and letters left behind by a complicated personality, Stephen Haggard was not interviewed in actuality in the year 1940, Edith Thatcher is entirely fictitious, the settings and the characterization of some individuals, are inspired by real people, real places, and the interactions are based on surviving personalities from written literature of those who lived in such tumultuous times. With that, the meeting, the radio interview and subsuquent situations, etc, is entirely fictitious and a product of the authors imagination. --- As a side note: it is part of the history for World War II, in a most dramatized format. —- Enter BBC journalist, Edith Thatcher, a young late twenty some American who finds herself caught in the crossfire of London on the verge of rationed food, chaos, evacuations, and bombings, in the summer of 1940; her task a simple one, with a chance encounter regarding Mr. Haggard, a London local, and what a piece of luck at that. In a race against the clock; and with time running out as dear Mr. Haggard awaits his turn to be called to the frontlines for training, what might our ambitious interviewer find as she gets to know the charming and ever elusive, Stephen Haggard?

Those whom do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it in all fashions. And that is the truth.