James Holland
speaker
21,811 appearances
47 recordings
7 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 2d ago
James Holland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 44 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 10.
Appearances
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Hello and welcome to our series of Family Stories, the podcast written by you, the listener.
Today we're bringing you a whole range of stories and accounts, from a sailor sunk off Lisbon, the reality behind Anzac Digger Life, and a forgotten letter from the Commentary Blitz.
First up we have this story from Will, who writes, I want to tell you about two men whose stories I've spent the last few months piecing together.
One is my grandfather, one is my wife's.
They never met, served in completely different parts of the war, and neither family knew the full story of what either man had actually been through, until my father in law found a stack of log books in the loft.
My wife's grandfather was Stanley Paul Smith, Stan, a spitfire and Mustang pilot who flew with forty three squadron across North Africa, Tunisia, Malta, Sicily, and Italy between nineteen forty two and nineteen forty four.
And then with 611 Squadron, from Arnhem through to the end of the war.
Towards the end of his life, with his memory going, he said something out of nowhere that nobody in the family understood at the time.
There was these poor buggers in the water.
I never forgot that.
That was it.
He never explained it.
When the log books came down from the loft, I went looking for what he meant, and found it, a log entry from the twenty seventh of March 1943, after a torpedo bomber intercept off the Algerian coast.
I saw two aircraft floating and in flames, men in water waving.
Convoy fired on us.
Italian aircrew in the water.
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