WWII podcast sets sights on stories that offer lessons for future wars

What happens when a retired Navy captain and a military historian walk into a bar? That’s what Capt. William Toti and Seth Paridon, hosts of the “Unauthorized History of the Pacific War” podcast, wanted to find out in 2022.

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

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, “riff[s] on the strategic concepts and the battle plan,” the retired officer said. “I’ll pull it up to the strategic level and try to put it in context that way.”

Toti’s “riffs” have more substance than that, however. His 26-year Navy career included “tours 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),” according to his biography. “He 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.”

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

Some answers have been edited for clarity.

You and your co-host Seth Paridon started the podcast back in 2022. What was your initial motivation to do so?

He and I were both on a Fox TV show together called “The Lost Ships of World War II.” It was an exploration of footage that was filmed and paid for by Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen.

Fox took this footage and I was the Navy analytical talking head. He was the historian. We got canceled after eight episodes — which is not surprising for a World War II TV show. We were commiserating after the show got canceled and said, “You know, it’s sad, because [Seth] has done over 4,000 oral histories.” 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.

I’m not a historian, but I’ve been interested in WWII, particularly the submarine service, since I was a midshipman. After the movie “Jaws” [featured] the story of Indianapolis, I ended up commanding the submarine Indianapolis and got to know the survivors of the cruiser. And that’s really when I got pulled in deeply into the WWII history world.

We were commiserating after the TV show gets canceled and we said, “Podcasts are kind of hot. Maybe we should try that? We’ll do it for a few months, there will be no listeners and we’ll quit. But at least we’ll have tried.” Our plan was to start at Pearl Harbor and then move chronologically through the war.

If we had 1,000 viewers we would have been happy, but within a few months — I have no idea how since we didn’t pay for any advertising, we didn’t do anything, it’s all word of mouth, as far as I can tell — we had 5,000 subscribers. Now we have close 40,000.

We’re getting several thousand views an episode and we’re getting close to crossing the 10 million views threshold. We’ve already crossed the 1 million audio downloads threshold. There’s 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’s this group of people, family members, who wondered what they did.

We’re trying to put together truthful, character-based stories that haven’t been told, to bust myths as we come across them and expose truths that people would find hard to believe. What we don’t do is an academic script reading over video. Our concept was two guys talking about World War II. That’s the way we tried to frame it, and it seems to have worked.

Can you give a little bit of background on how you structure the episodes?

Seth [Paridon] does the background research, because he’s got it all at his fingertips. He has a million pages of archive material and over 4,000 oral history video interviews that have been transcribed. He’s got footage and he’s got photographs, so he kind of frames what he thinks the talking points are going to be for an episode and we decide together what subjects we’re going to review.

He’ll do several hours to maybe a couple of days of research per episode, and I’ll spend a few hours editing it and then we just kind of talk through it thematically. We know where we want to hit each plot point. We also know how many pages it takes for a two-hour segment. So, sometimes we go fast, sometimes we go a little long, but generally we try to target it to two hours.

We actually wanted to cut it back, thinking two hours was too long. We were actually getting hate mail saying why did you cut it down? [Laughs] So, we went back to two.

When you look at the Pacific War, it’s a swirling mass of battles, geography, personalities and bloodshed. How do you cull it down into digestible episodes?

We assume people have no knowledge when we go into each episode. And by the way, I’m not sure they’re digestible, on average. Would you listen to me for two hours? I don’t think I wouldn’t listen to me for two hours! [Laughs]

We try to tell a story in an understandable way by focusing on the people. Every one of those guys and gals came back suffering from PTSD. We didn’t know what that was called back then. And so what did they do? They self-medicated with alcohol. There were way more suicides than we want to admit. Among the Indianapolis crew alone, there were 12 suicides, including the captain who was court-martialed. They didn’t think about it. They just kind of buried it because they believed that was the best way to deal with it.

Many of these stories maybe got written down, recorded in history books and forgotten. That’s the great thing about Seth — he hasn’t forgotten. He has it at his fingertips.

If you talk to high school kids about World War II, they’ll know Pearl Harbor or dropping the atomic bomb, but they don’t know anything else about the Pacific. We hope our episodes reach some of them and help bridge that gap.

“Unauthorized History” has put out over 200 episodes in the past two-plus years. Are there any episodes in particular that stand out to you?

I love [Adm. Chester] Nimitz. I love [Adm. Raymond] Spruance. I have a love-hate relationship with [Adm. William] Halsey. I think Halsey said horribly racist things that were counterproductive, but early in the war, in the Guadalcanal campaign, he was vital. There are those kind of personalities that are not monolithic. It’s not: “This is a good guy. This is a bad guy.”

Halsey was good at the beginning, and then the war passed him by. It got too complicated for him and he didn’t know how to fight in any longer. After 1943 Halsey was probably doing more harm than good. He was only a morale builder, not a strategist.

Obviously, I like the submarine episodes. I love the “Mush” Morton, Wahoo episode we did. I love the [Richard] Dick O’Kane episode. O’Kane is the reason I became a submariner. He came to the academy, talked up submarines when I was a junior and convinced me.

We did over 10 episodes on Guadalcanal I think are very good. No one has touched us as far as our accuracy and depth. There’s a myth that that the Navy abandoned Guadalcanal but the Navy lost almost four times as many people as the Marines did in the Guadalcanal campaign. I talk to Navy officers and ask, “Who lost more people?” Zero have gotten it right so far. They’ve all swallowed the Marine myth. Why doesn’t the Navy tell that story? Well, we’re telling it.

We’ve done four episodes now on the atomic bomb, including the best episode I’ve ever seen on the morality of dropping the bomb. We did two of those — one with Richard Frank, a leading world leading historian, and one with John Parshall. If anybody watches those two episodes and afterward does not agree with the decision to drop the bomb, there’s something wrong with their head.

Going back to the USS Indianapolis — what led you to “exonerate,” as it were, the ship’s captain, Charles McVay?

I saw an injustice and I committed myself to correcting it. I invited all survivors of the cruiser to come to the decommissioning of the [submarine] Indianapolis. They never got to decommission their ship, so I wanted them to come to mine.

They came and they stood in formation with my crew. It was incredible. Afterwards, two guys — Paul Murphy and Glenn Morgan — grab me, not quite pushing me against the wall, but metaphorically so, and said, “Bill, you’re the last captain of the submarine Indianapolis. McVay was the last captain of the cruiser. He needs you.”

When I started reviewing, I was aware, but hadn’t studied in depth the sinking. I hadn’t read [Mochitsura] Hashimoto’s book. I talked to [Capt.] Ed Beach, who was still alive at the time and was trying to get [Husband] Kimmel and [Walter] Short exonerated. He said, “Well, you know what you’re gonna have to do, right? Failure to zigzag? You’re gonna have to demonstrate that failure to zigzag didn’t hazard the ship.”

As we were decommissioning we had this actual torpedo fire control computer — it was about the size of my desk. You could program the torpedo and then it would run intercept courses and things like that.

So, what I did was run how to do this manually, as many runs of the Indianapolis’ course, with as many zigs as possible against Hashimoto’s firing solution. I just did run after run. I stopped counting after 90 of these, and in every case, at least one of Hashimoto’s torpedoes hit.

I had this data and I got assigned to the Office of the Vice Chief of Naval Operations when the exoneration language was being voted on by Congress. The Navy’s position continued to be that the court-martial was just.

These Navy JAG officers kept arguing that if that single torpedo didn’t sink the ship, Hashimoto would have gone home. I said, “You don’t understand the way this works. That first torpedo blew the bow off the ship. They were going to get sunk regardless.”

That’s what the data proves. They couldn’t do that in 1945 but we can do it now.

I was proud of my role in all of that, even though I was kind of working against my Navy. I think it was the right thing to do, and I’m happy with the way it turned out.

You’ve worked your way chronologically through the Pacific. As you approach the end of 1945, what’s next for your podcast? Is there a next?

We kept saying we were going to end in September 1945 when the treaties were signed on the Missouri. We kept saying that. And probably six months ago we started getting emails and YouTube comments — probably 150 to 200 a day — telling us that we couldn’t stop, so we gave in. [Laughs]

We know there are a lot more stories in our queue. So, we’re going to go back to 1941 again and do the stories we skipped as we went through. There’s a whole lot more submarine stories to tell and those are near and dear to my heart, obviously. But there’s a lot of stuff to tell.

There’s a guy who lives not too far from me who’s a 103-year-old veteran who served at Peleliu. He was a Seabee, and you know, generally the Seabees in World War II would go in on the fifth wave. I assumed he went in on the fifth wave and I did an episode with him and asked probably the stupidest question I’ve ever asked in my life: “By the time you got there, did you see any Japanese?”

Turns out he went in on the first wave with the Marines and he said, “Did I see any Japanese? I saw a ton of Japanese. Most of them were dead.” He was looking at me like, “How stupid are you?”

What’s your favorite tidbit you’ve come across since the launch of your podcast?

I’m not sure this is exactly upbeat but as we approach the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, I’m hoping there’s going to be an uptick in interest.

I know there are going to be celebrations and things like that, but I hope there’s also improved understanding of the most horrific war the world has ever known. Forget about learning about it — I fear we’re not interested in learning anything from it as we face other potential conflicts in the Pacific and elsewhere.

You know how sad that would be? I’m not looking for contrived meaning or linkages, but I do try to connect learnings from the Pacific War to things we need to understand today as we face new Pacific adversaries — and there are many.

Is anybody listening? That’s the question.