Historian Johan Wennström reveals Sweden's Stay Behind organisation — a clandestine resistance network of farmers, factory workers, and gamekeepers trained in radio communications, sabotage, and escape routes, all prepared for a Soviet occupation that officially could never happen because Sweden was neutral. The episode gets into the operational detail of how the networks were structured, how recruits were selected from civilian life, and how Sweden quietly coordinated with NATO despite its public neutrality. A genuinely surprising story that most listeners won't have encountered before.

Christian Parkinson pushes back on the standard narrative of British incompetence and Boer invincibility in the 1899-1902 war — arguing that the early conventional phase included significant British victories at Talana Hill, Elandslaagte, and Belmont that tend to get buried under the Black Week disasters. This is a corrective that takes the tactical specifics seriously rather than defaulting to 'lions led by donkeys,' dismantling reputations on both sides by showing that the Boers were not uniformly brilliant and the British not uniformly hopeless. The revisionist angle is well-argued and refreshing for a conflict usually presented as unrelieved humiliation.

Ben McIntyre — the best popular writer working on intelligence history — tells the story of Vladimir Kouzichkin, a KGB officer in revolutionary Iran who became a British asset (codenamed Agent Redwood) and exposed Soviet networks across the Middle East. The 1981 context is sharp: Washington feared a Soviet move on Iran, and Kouzichkin's intelligence reshaped Western understanding of Soviet capabilities in the region. McIntyre's trademark is making the personal motivations of spies as vivid as the operational detail, and Dan Snow gives him room to do that here.

Dr Eve MacDonald joins Tristan Hughes for a proper treatment of the First Punic War — the 23-year struggle for Sicily that turned Rome into a naval power. The episode covers the corvus boarding bridges, the Battle of the Aegates Islands, and how Rome built and lost entire fleets learning to fight at sea. MacDonald is a genuine Carthage specialist and the operational detail on the naval engagements is well above what you'd expect from a general ancients podcast.

Jack Cheevers, who spent a decade on this research, unpacks the bureaucratic knife-fight between CIA and State Department factions over whether to support or remove Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. This is intelligence and policy history at the sharp end — the inter-agency dysfunction that shaped the trajectory of the entire Vietnam War. The episode benefits from Cheevers' access to newly available documents, and Andrew Hammond keeps the questioning tight on the operational consequences rather than letting it drift into Camelot mythology.

Ray Harris Jr. covers the October 1942 Battle of Cape Esperance — the first time the US Navy won a night surface action against the Japanese in the Solomons campaign. At 29 minutes this is tight and focused, covering the tactical setup, the cruiser engagement off Savo Island, and why it mattered for the broader Guadalcanal fight. A good corrective to the assumption that every 1942 night battle ended in American humiliation.

The finale of Lions Led By Donkeys' six-part Imjin War series — Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea in the 1590s. An under-covered conflict in Anglophone podcasting, and the series format means this conclusion benefits from five episodes of built context.

First-hand testimony from Marine Arlon Jenkins, who survived Pearl Harbor and then fought through Guadalcanal, Guam, and Iwo Jima — a combat record that spans essentially the entire Pacific island-hopping campaign. The oral-history format is raw and unpolished, but the breadth of his experience makes it valuable primary-source material.