Tag: WWII

The Prisoners of Peddocks Island (episode 194)

You may have heard stories about the Confederate prisoners who were held at Fort Warren on Georges Island during the civil war.  In this episode, we’ll explore a different island that housed prisoners during a different war.  Our story will start with the only soccer riot in recorded Boston history, which broke out at Carson Beach in South Boston on July 16, 1944.  It will end up with Italian war prisoners confined at Fort Andrews on Peddocks Island in Boston Harbor.  Along the way, we’ll meet bootleggers, artillerymen, Passamaquoddy seal hunters, opium fiends, and Portuguese-American fishermen.  We’ll also be taking a virtual visit to one of my personal favorite places in the Boston area, and one that is on the brink of being sold off to luxury hotel developers.


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Miss Mack, from Wellesley to the WAVES (episode 106)

In honor of Veterans Day, we’re talking about the women who served in World War II in a Navy outfit called the WAVES.  Specifically, their commanding officer, Mildred McAfee (later Mildred McAfee Horton).  When the war started, she was president of Wellesley College, but before it was over, she would be the first woman to become a commissioned officer in the US Navy, commanding a force of nearly 100,000 people.


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Classics: Holidays on the Harbor (Episode 60)

If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ll know that the Boston Harbor Islands are one of our favorite local destinations.  This week, we’re sharing three stories from the Harbor Islands, all of which originally aired within the first 20 episodes of the podcast.  We’ll hear about the zoo shipwreck, a hermit who made her home on the harbor, and the secret Harbor Island base where Nazis were smuggled into the country after World War II.

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Episode 39: Tragedy at Cocoanut Grove

The 1942 fire at Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub killed a staggering 492 people, making it the deadliest fire in Boston history and one of the deadliest fires in US history. For Boston, it is the deadliest modern disaster of any type. Only the smallpox epidemics of the early 1700s and the 1918 Spanish flu rival it for loss of life.

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Episode 5: Secret Nazis on Boston Harbor!

At the end of World War II, the Allied powers raced across Germany, competing to capture technology related to Nazi super-weapons and the scientists who developed them.  The US military operated a secret program that located high-value scientists, smuggling them into the US and falsifying their wartime records.  For many of the scientists who went on to work on the Manhattan Project or the space race, their first stop in America was a secret base in Boston Harbor.

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