{"id":78694,"date":"2025-03-24T23:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T23:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/uncategorized\/2025\/03\/24\/wwii-podcast-sets-sights-on-stories-that-offer-lessons-for-future-wars\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T15:54:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T15:54:27","slug":"wwii-podcast-sets-sights-on-stories-that-offer-lessons-for-future-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/veterans\/military-history\/2025\/03\/24\/wwii-podcast-sets-sights-on-stories-that-offer-lessons-for-future-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"WWII podcast sets sights on stories that offer lessons for future wars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What happens when a retired Navy captain and a military historian walk into a bar? That\u2019s what Capt. William Toti and Seth Paridon, hosts of the \u201cUnauthorized History of the Pacific War<\/a>\u201d podcast, wanted to find out in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years later, what started as a lark has turned into a powerhouse program \u2014 hovering at the number seven slot for top military podcasts in the world<\/a>, approaching 10 million listeners and accumulating a die-hard fanbase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paridon, the former staff historian at The National WWII Museum for 15 years, provides the story arc for each episode while Toti, who served more than 26 years in the Navy,<\/a> \u201criff[s] on the strategic concepts and the battle plan,\u201d the retired officer said. \u201cI\u2019ll pull it up to the strategic level and try to put it in context that way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toti\u2019s \u201criffs\u201d have more substance than that, however. His 26-year Navy career included \u201ctours as commander of Fleet Antisubmarine Warfare Command Norfolk, as commodore of Submarine Squadron 3, and as commanding officer of the nuclear fast attack submarine USS Indianapolis (SSN-697),\u201d according to his biography<\/a>. \u201cHe served for more than nine years in the Pentagon, including tours as special assistant to the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, as Navy representative to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and as deputy director of the Navy War Plans Cell, Deep Blue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toti recently spoke to Military Times about plans for the pair\u2019s podcast and his key role in exonerating Charles McVay, captain of the World War II heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis<\/a>, which has the unpleasant distinction of being known as the worst naval disaster in U.S. history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some answers have been edited for clarity.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You and your co-host Seth Paridon started the podcast back in 2022. What was your initial motivation to do so?<\/b><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

He and I were both on a Fox TV show together called \u201cThe Lost Ships of World War II.\u201d It was an exploration of footage that was filmed and paid for by Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fox took this footage and I was the Navy analytical talking head. He was the historian. We got canceled after eight episodes \u2014 which is not surprising for a World War II TV show. We were commiserating after the show got canceled and said, \u201cYou know, it\u2019s sad, because [Seth] has done over 4,000 oral histories.\u201d He was the chief historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, so we had all of these oral histories from WWII veterans who had stories to tell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not a historian, but I\u2019ve been interested in WWII, particularly the submarine service, since I was a midshipman. After the movie \u201cJaws\u201d [featured] the story of Indianapolis, I ended up commanding the submarine Indianapolis and got to know the survivors of the cruiser. And that\u2019s really when I got pulled in deeply into the WWII history world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Capt. William Toti (Courtesy of William Toti)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We were commiserating after the TV show gets canceled and we said, \u201cPodcasts are kind of hot. Maybe we should try that? We\u2019ll do it for a few months, there will be no listeners and we\u2019ll quit. But at least we\u2019ll have tried.\u201d Our plan was to start at Pearl Harbor and then move chronologically through the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we had 1,000 viewers we would have been happy, but within a few months \u2014 I have no idea how since we didn\u2019t pay for any advertising, we didn\u2019t do anything, it\u2019s all word of mouth, as far as I can tell \u2014 we had 5,000 subscribers. Now we have close 40,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re getting several thousand views an episode and we\u2019re getting close to crossing the 10 million views threshold. We\u2019ve already crossed the 1 million audio downloads threshold. There\u2019s a contingent of people whose grandpa or great uncle or great grandpa went to the war, they came home, they never talked about it. And now there\u2019s this group of people, family members, who wondered what they did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re trying to put together truthful, character-based stories that haven\u2019t been told, to bust myths as we come across them and expose truths that people would find hard to believe. What we don\u2019t do is an academic script reading over video. Our concept was two guys talking about World War II. That\u2019s the way we tried to frame it, and it seems to have worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n