This year’s We Have Ways Fest has an incredible line-up of speakers. For the latest news and announcements about more speakers, get WHWF6 Festival Updates delivered straight to your inbox!
WE HAVE WAYS FEST 2026 | 11 – 13 September
The UK’s No. 1 Second World War Festival
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Photo credits: Thanks to Stuart Bertie and Katharine Hill
Al Murray is the co-host of We Have Ways Of Making You Talk. With his alter-ego, The Pub Landlord, Al is one of the most recognisable and successful comics in the UK. He is a regular on many popular British television programmes. Al is also a keen historian and aficionado of the Second World War.
James Holland is the co-host of the podcast We Have Ways Of Making You Talk. He is the best selling Second World War historian in the UK. He has published more than 20 books about the conflict and is the BBC’s regular expert on all Second World War matters. As well as hosting We Have Ways Fest, James runs Chalke History Festival – the largest history festival in Europe.
Edward Abel Smith is a writer, documentary filmmaker and podcaster. He is the author of several books, including Ian Fleming’s Inspiration, The British Oskar Schindler: The Life and Work of Nicholas Winton, and Angels of Prague.
He was a producer of Murder at the Post Office, a documentary for Sky based on his 2023 article for the Daily Express, and co-created Lucy Letby: Was There Ever A Crime, a podcast with more than one million downloads. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday, The Times, The Guardian and The Washington Times. He has also been a guest on BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service, as well as numerous history podcasts.
Edward lives near the South Coast of England with his wife, two daughters and their dog, Vesper.
Katherine Carter is a curator and historian who has managed the house and collections at Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s country home, for 12 years. A commentator and adviser on the life and legacy of Sir Winston Churchill, she lectures internationally and appears frequently in print and broadcast media. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts, and is a Churchill Fellow of Westminster College, the site of Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri.
Her first book, Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm, published by Yale University Press, has received rave reviews and critical acclaim. Literary Review magazine called it “a stimulating and enjoyable work that shows us interwar politics from an unfamiliar angle”, while The Critic Magazine remarked that it had been written “with such relish that one can smell the cigar smoke exude from every page”.
Niall Cherry was born in London in 1959 and recalls becoming interested in military history as a schoolboy from watching such classic war films as ‘The Battle of Britain’ and ‘A Bridge Too Far’. He later found out that one of his grandfathers fought in the Great War, serving as a chemical corporal at Loos in 1915 and ended up as a Captain. His father served in the REME in the 1950’s and Niall continued in the family tradition by serving in the RAMC. During his time he qualified as a Combat Medical Technician Class 1 and an instructor in First Aid and Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare and ended as a Senior NCO.
Deeply interested in the major conflicts of the 20th Century he has visited numerous battlefields including the Western Front, Arnhem, Gallipoli, Normandy, the Bulge, the Falkland Islands and North Africa. He is a longstanding member of the Western Front Association, the Military Heraldry Society and 23/144 Parachute Field Ambulance Old Comrades Association. He also has the honour of being the only non Arnhem veteran to be Secretary of the Arnhem 1944 Veterans’ Club and was Secretary of the Arnhem 1944 Fellowship for over 10 years. He is a volunteer helper at Airborne Assault Duxford and Treasurer of the Central Lancs branch of the PRA. He has now authored or co-authored 21 books and is one of the team of battlefield guides at Leger Holidays. Finally and by no means least, a serial contributor to the You Tube channel WW2TV.
Gordon Corera co-hosts The Rest is Classified podcast with former CIA analyst David McCloskey, which uncovers stories about spies, secrets, and national security. He spent twenty years as the BBC’s Security Correspondent reporting on intelligence, security and conflict from across the US, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, covering pivotal events from 9/11 to the invasion of Ukraine. Gordon’s books include MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service, Russians Among Us, and The Secret Pigeon Service. His most recent book is The Spy in the Archive: How one man tried to kill the KGB.
Jonathan Fennell is Professor of the History of War and Society at King’s College London, Co-Director of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War and President of the international scholarly society, the Second World War Research Group.
He is the prize-winning author and editor of four books on the history of the Second World War, the most recent of which, Collapse: A Global History of the Second World War, 1931-1941, publishes with Penguin (Viking) in the summer of 2026. Collapse is the first volume of a new landmark trilogy on the conflict that shaped the twentieth century.
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of the international bestsellers Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 and Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire. Her latest book is Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.
Katja is a columnist for Berliner Zeitung and a regular contributor to British and American news outlets such as the BBC, Bloomberg, The Telegraph and The Guardian. She co-hosts the German history podcast Reichs & Republics and publishes a biweekly Substack newsletter called ZEITGEIST.
Brian Lavery was brought up in the shipbuilding town of Dumbarton, descended from four generations of shipyard workers. He worked in Chatham Historic Dockyard and the National Maritime Museum, where he is a Curator Emeritus. He started with the study of the sailing navy and its ships, including including his classic books Ship of the Line and Nelson’s Navy. He designed the replica of the Susan Constant of 1605 which is now undergoing a 35-year refit in Virginia.
He developed his interest though many other periods and has published extensively on the navies of the Second World War, with Hostilities Only on the training of sailors during an unpresented naval expansion, In Which They Served on wartime officers, Two Navies Divided on the comparison between the Royal and United States navies, and books on the cruiser Belfast, River class frigates and assault landing craft – all of which combine personal stories and recollections with accessible technical history. He has lectured on cruise ships, including Sea Cloud and Queen Mary 2.
He was consultant for the film Master and Commander and the TV series Empire of the Seas. He advised David Grann on his international best-seller The Wager. He has appeared on Time Team, Timewatch, Combat Ships and other TV series.
John C. McManus is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T). This professorship is bestowed by the University of Missouri Board of Curators on the most outstanding scholars in the University of Missouri system. John is the first ever Missouri S&T faculty member in the humanities to be named Curators’ Distinguished Professor.
As one of America’s leading military historians, and the author of fifteen well received books on the topic, he is in frequent demand as a speaker and expert commentator. In addition to dozens of local and national radio programs, and podcasts, he has appeared on Cnn.com, C-Span, the Military Channel, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Netflix, the Smithsonian Network, the History Channel and PBS, among many others. He recently completed a major three volume history of the U.S. Army in the Pacific/Asia theater during World War II.The first volume in the series, Fire and Fortitude, received the prestigious Gilder Lehrman Prize in Military History.
His current project is a major new biography of General Matthew Ridgway. John is the host of three podcasts, Someone Talked! in tandem with the National D-Day Memorial, World War II Live alongside Kevin Hymel, and We Have Ways of Making You Talk in the USA with Al Murray and James Holland. John also serves as the official historian for the U.S. Army’s 7th Infantry Regiment (Cottonbalers).
Marc Milner is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Brunswick, where he served as Chair of the History Department, and Director of the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society. Prior to coming to UNB Marc was an official historian NDHQ in Ottawa, working on RCAF maritime air operations and the RCN in the Second World War. In 2016 he was awarded The Admiral’s Medal for contributions to Canada’s maritime awareness, and was appointed an Honorary Colonel in the RCAF.
Marc is best known for his work on naval history, including North Atlantic Run, The U-Boat Hunters, and Canada’s Navy: The First Century. His Battle of the Atlantic won the C.P. Stacey Prize. He has written the Battle of the Atlantic entry for various compilations and companions to the Second World War. Marc’s recent work is on the Normandy campaign. Stopping the Panzers won the BGen James Collins Book Prize by the US Commission on Military History for 2014-15. His latest book, Second Front: Anglo-American Rivalry and the Hidden Story of the Normandy Campaign, was published in May 2025 by Yale UP.
Clare Mulley is an award-winning author and public historian focused primarily on female experience during the SWW. Her debut, The Woman Who Saved The Children, won the Daily Mail Biographers’ Club Prize and chronicles the life of Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children.
In The Spy Who Loved, Clare evaluates the achievements of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, Britain’s first female special agent in WWII. This led to Clare receiving Poland’s cultural honour, the Bene Merito. The Women Who Flew For Hitler is a gripping dual biography of Nazi Germany’s only female test pilots, the fanatical Nazi Hanna Reitsch and secret resister Melitta von Stauffenberg. Most recently, Agent Zo explores the life of Elżbieta Zawacka, aka Zo, the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi German-occupied Poland, and who resisted both Nazi and Soviet regimes. Agent Zo won the Polish Foreign Ministry History Book prize 2025, was short-listed for the Women’s Prize, and took Military History Magazine’s Silver Award 2025.
Clare also contributes to historical documentaries for the BBC and other broadcasters, has judged several literary prizes, and writes for publications including the Spectator, TLS, Literary Review, Slightly Foxed, and BBC History Magazine.
John Orloff is an acclaimed American screenwriter known for creating and adapting complex stories in widely disparate genres. He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his writing on HBO’s “Band of Brothers”, as well as an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his screenplay for “A Mighty Heart”, the Michael Winterbottom film based on the kidnapping and death of reporter Daniel Pearl.
He spent most of a decade researching, creating, writing, and producing MASTERS OF THE AIR, an epic nine part miniseries Executive Produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, chronicling the 100th Bomber Group’s odyssey in the European Theater of World War Two.
Orloff is fourth generation Hollywood (his great-grandparents were radio comedy team Fibber McGee and Molly) and grew up in LA, but he now lives by a river in the Berkshire mountains in Western Massachusetts.
David Stahel is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales and teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, Australia. He is the author/editor of many books on Germany’s war against the Soviet Union, seven of which were published by Cambridge University Press. He has appeared in numerous television documentaries including shooting on location in Russia (prior to 2014).
His series of books covering the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 are standard works for the field: Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (2009); Kiev 1941 (2012); Operation Typhoon (2013); The Battle for Moscow (2015) and Retreat from Moscow (2019).
His most recent publication is The Cambridge Companion to the Nazi-Soviet War (2026). His forthcoming book is an in-depth examination of Army Group Centre’s collapse in the summer of 1944 (due 2027).
Terry Stiastny is an author, journalist and broadcaster. Her first history book, Believable Lies, tells the story of Britain’s Political Warfare Executive during the Second World War and its radio propaganda that mixed truth and deliberate deception. Terry reports on British politics for Times Radio and is a frequent commentator on Monocle Radio. She’s the author of two political thrillers; her first, Acts of Omission, won Political Fiction book of the year in 2015.
Before that, she was a BBC journalist for many years, working in Westminster, Brussels, and Berlin and reporting from many other countries. She has an M.Phil in International Relations from St Antony’s College, Oxford.
Julie Summers is the best-selling author of fifteen works of non-fiction. Her best-selling book Jambusters inspired the ITV drama series Home Fires, which ran for two seasons in 2015-16 and had a regular television audience of over six million. She was listed in the Sunday Times as one of only four women in the top fifty historians in Britain.
Born on the Wirral and brought up in Cheshire, Julie spent the first half of her career working in the art world. However, she had always wanted to be a writer. Her first book, Fearless on Everest; The Quest for Sandy Irvine was published in 2000 to critical acclaim, followed by The Colonel of Tamarkan, a biography of Brigadier Sir Philip Toosey, the ‘real’ colonel who built the Bridge on the River Kwai. Since then she has focused on women’s stories from the Second World War and has written Stranger in the House, When the Children Came Home, Fashion on the Ration, and Dressed for War, the biography of Vogue’s wartime editor, Audrey Withers. She is currently working on the women behind the preparations for D-Day. She describes herself as an historian but primarily a storyteller.
Rowland White is the author of six critically acclaimed, bestselling works of military aviation history. on subjects that range from pinpoint Mosquito missions in the Second World War to the first flight of the Space Shuttle.
He is currently working on a new book about the legendary Swordfish raid on Taranto harbour in November 1940, for publication in 2027. He wishes he had time to write more books but works full time at Penguin Random House where he gets to publish brilliant books by other people, including astronauts, explorers, athletes, spies and rock stars.
He lives near Cambridge and probably needs to get his act together with social media.
Steve is the Regimental Researcher at the Green Howards Museum and a battlefield guide. With an MA in British First World War Studies from Birmingham University, Simon’s research credits include titles such as John Powell’s 2018 study of General Sir Edward Bulfin, Hugh Sebag-Montefiori’s 2016 look at fighting on the Somme and Terry Finnegan’s 2015 assessment of the American battlefield experience during the First World War.
GREEN HOWARDS ON SICILY – SATURDAY THE ARSENAL
Also known as Alexandra, Princess of Wales’s Own Yorkshire Regiment, the Green Howards made their mark on Sicily in 1943. Steve Erskine has worked with the Green Howards Regimental Museum for several years, and now takes us out to Sicily….
