World War II Unwound
Little known or forgotten stories from World War II. The spies, heroes, decision-makers and the moments that changed everything. Hosted by U.S. Navy Veteran and World War II historian Alan Best
World War II Unwound
Not One Step Back - Stalin, Zhukov, and The Battle That Turned the War
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Episode Title: Not One Step Back — Stalin, Zhukov, and The Battle That Turned The War
Season 2, Episode 4 — The Decision Makers
Two million.
Two million people died in and around the city of Stalingrad between August 1942 and February 1943. German soldiers. Soviet soldiers. Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian troops. Civilians. People who died in the fighting, in the cold, in the rubble, in the prisoner of war camps that swallowed the survivors of both sides.
Two million people. Five months. One city.
Before Stalingrad, Germany was advancing. After Stalingrad, Germany was retreating. The momentum of the Eastern Front — the most brutal and consequential theatre of the entire war, where eighty percent of German military casualties occurred — shifted at Stalingrad and never shifted back.
And it shifted because of two decisions.
The first was Josef Stalin's. As the German Sixth Army drove toward the city that bore his name, Stalin issued an order of brutal simplicity: Not one step back. Every soldier who retreated without orders would be shot by blocking detachments positioned behind the Soviet lines. Every man would hold. Every man would fight. The city would not fall.
The second was Marshal Georgy Zhukov's. While Soviet soldiers died by the tens of thousands inside the burning city — buying time with their lives — Zhukov was secretly assembling over a million men, nine hundred tanks, and thirteen thousand artillery pieces for a counterattack the Germans never saw coming. The plan: strike both flanks simultaneously, close the pincers behind the Sixth Army, and trap three hundred thousand German soldiers with no way out.
Stalin's decision was born from terror and will. Zhukov's was born from patience and genius. Together, they produced the most significant turning point on the most significant front of the most destructive war in human history.
On January 31st, 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus — the first German Field Marshal ever to be taken prisoner — surrendered to Soviet forces in the ruins of the city he had been sent to capture. Hitler wept. And the long retreat to Berlin began.
In this episode, Amanda and Harry take you inside the battle, the decisions, the men, and the moment the war turned.
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Welcome to the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network, where every story matters, every truth deserves to be told, and every question is worth asking. I'm Alan Best, four episodes into season two, and every decision we've examined has been large. D-Day, Pearl Harbor, Dunkirk, the decisions that shaped the Western War. Today we go somewhere different, the Eastern Front. And I want to be honest with you before Harry and Amanda get into it, the Eastern Front is not the same war. The scale is different, the brutality is different, the human cost is different in ways that are genuinely difficult to absorb. The Battle of Stalingrad lasted five months, it killed over two million people. Germans, Soviets, Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, soldiers and civilians, in a city that both sides had decided it was more important to hold than to save. Two decision makers are at the center of this story. Josef Stalin, the dictator who issued an order that said simply, not one step back, and Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the commander who designed the counterattack that turned the tide of the Eastern Front and arguably the entire war. Two men, two decisions, and a city that became the hinge on which the Second World War turned. I'll hand it over to Harry.
SPEAKER_02Thanks, Alan. I want to give you a number, and I want you to sit with it for a moment before I say anything else. Two million. Two million people died in and around the city of Stalingrad between August 1942 and February 1943. German soldiers, Soviet soldiers, Romanian and Italian and Hungarian troops fighting alongside the Germans. Soviet civilians who had not been evacuated. People who died in the fighting, in the cold, in the rubble, in the prisoner of war camps that swallowed the survivors of both sides, two million people in five months, in one city, on one front of one war. Stalingrad was not the largest battle of the Second World War by every measure, but it was the turning point. Before Stalingrad, Germany was advancing. After Stalingrad, Germany was retreating. The momentum of the Eastern Front, the most brutal and consequential theater of the entire war, where 80% of German military casualties occurred, shifted at Stalingrad and never shifted back. And it shifted because of two decisions. One made by a dictator sitting in Moscow, who issued an order so brutal in its simplicity that it has become one of the defining documents of Soviet military history. Not one step back. And one made by a marshal who saw, in the German obsession with taking a city that bore Stalin's name, the strategic opportunity that would end the Sixth Army. Stalin's decision was born from terror and will. Zhukov's was born from patience and genius. Together they produced the most significant turning point on the most significant front of the most destructive war in human history. This is Stalingrad.
SPEAKER_00Harry. I want to start with why Stalingrad. Because I think most people understand that it was important without fully understanding why Hitler and Stalin both decided that this specific city was worth what it cost. Help me understand the strategic logic.
SPEAKER_02The strategic logic has two layers, one that was genuinely rational and one that was almost entirely symbolic, and the tragedy of Stalingrad is partly that the symbolic layer came to dominate the rational one for both sides. The rational layer first, Stalingrad, the city on the Volga River in southwestern Russia, was a significant industrial center. It produced tanks, artillery, and other war materials in quantities that mattered for the Soviet war effort. It sat astride critical supply and communication lines, and most importantly, it was positioned on the western bank of the Volga, the great river that served as a vital artery for Soviet logistics, moving oil from the Caspian Sea north and supplies south. Cutting the Volga at Stalingrad would have serious consequences for Soviet supply capacity. The German summer offensive of 1942, Operation Blue, was designed to capture the Caucasus oilfields and cut Soviet supply lines. Stalingrad was a significant objective within that broader strategic context, that's the rational layer, the symbolic layer is what made it catastrophic.
SPEAKER_00The name Stalingrad.
SPEAKER_02The name. Stalin's city. The city that bore the name of the Soviet dictator who had promised his country that Germany would not prevail. For Hitler, capturing Stalingrad became a statement, not just a military objective, but a symbolic humiliation of Stalin personally. For Stalin, defending it became an obligation that went beyond strategic calculation. A Soviet retreat from the city that bore his name would have meant something, psychologically, politically, symbolically, that no amount of military logic could fully justify. Both men allowed the symbol to override the strategy, and the result was that both sides committed forces to the battle at Stalingrad in quantities that the city's actual strategic value never justified. And neither was able to step back from that commitment once it had been made.
SPEAKER_00Tell me about the state of the Soviet military in the summer of 1942. Because I think there's a version of this story that assumes the Soviets were strong, and that's not accurate for this period.
SPEAKER_02In the summer of 1942, the Soviet military was in a state of genuine crisis. The German invasion of June 1941, Operation Barbarossa, had been devastating beyond anything the Soviet High Command had publicly acknowledged. In the first six months of the war, the Red Army had lost over three million men as prisoners alone, with additional millions killed and wounded. Entire army groups had been encircled and destroyed. The Soviet officer corps, already devastated by Stalin's purges of the late 1930s, which had executed or imprisoned a significant proportion of the most experienced commanders, was learning how to fight a modern war against the most capable army in the world at catastrophic cost. By the summer of 1942, the Soviets had stabilized the front, had survived the first winter, had produced a remarkable amount of new equipment from factories relocated east of the Urals, but they were not yet the force that would eventually drive Germany back to Berlin. They were a force that was learning, improving, hardening, but still capable of being badly beaten by a German offensive conducted with full weight.
SPEAKER_00Which is what Operation Blue was.
SPEAKER_02Operation Blue, the German summer offensive of 1942, was conducted with full weight in its initial phases and achieved significant territorial gains. The German advance towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus simultaneously was, from a purely logistical standpoint, overextended. Germany was stretching its supply lines across enormous distances while fighting on multiple fronts. But in the summer of 1942, those vulnerabilities were not yet apparent in their full dimensions. What was apparent to Stalin in Moscow was that the German army was advancing toward a city that bore his name, and his response was Order 227.
SPEAKER_00That's the not one-stepback order.
SPEAKER_02Issued on July 28, 1942. Order 227, known by its date designation and by the phrase that defined it, was one of the most brutal command documents of the entire war. Stalin wrote it himself. It began with a frank assessment of the military situation that was, by Soviet standards, almost shockingly honest, acknowledging that Germany had captured Soviet territory, Soviet cities, Soviet population and resources, and that the situation was serious. It then proceeded to the order itself, not one step back without orders from higher command. Panic mongers and cowards must be liquidated on the spot. Every commander, every political officer, every soldier must understand we cannot retreat further. Blocking detachments, units positioned behind the front line whose specific function was to shoot Soviet soldiers who retreated without orders, were formalized and expanded. Penal battalions, units composed of soldiers who had committed military offenses, sent on the most dangerous assignments as a form of punishment, were established at the army level.
SPEAKER_00The Soviet army was threatened with death from behind if it retreated, and death from the front if it didn't.
SPEAKER_02That is the precise and accurate description of what Order 227 created. Blocking detachments were not a new concept, they had existed in various forms earlier in the war, but Order 227 formalized and expanded them with a specificity that left no ambiguity. A Soviet soldier at Stalingrad faced German fire from the front, and the knowledge that retreat without orders meant the blocking detachments behind him. The order was read to every unit in the Soviet military. It was not a secret communication, it was a statement of policy directed at every man in the Red Army. You will hold.
SPEAKER_00Harry, take me into the battle itself. Because Stalingrad wasn't a conventional military engagement. The way it was fought, the specific nature of the combat in that city, was different from almost anything else in the war.
SPEAKER_02Stalingrad introduced the world to what Soviet soldiers called Rattenkrieg, Rat War, urban combat of a specific and terrible character. The city had been a significant industrial center with large factory complexes, apartment blocks, warehouses, and the infrastructure of a major Soviet city. The German bombardment in August 1942 turned much of it into rubble. And rubble, as both sides discovered, is extraordinarily difficult terrain for a conventional military force to operate in. The things that made the German army so effective in open terrain, armored mobility, combined arms coordination, air support, were severely diminished in the ruins of Stalingrad. A tiger tank in an open field dominates everything around it. A tiger tank in a ruined city block can be destroyed by a single soldier with an anti-tank weapon firing from a basement window. The Germans were forced to fight in the way the Soviets had become expert in. Small unit, close quarters, building by building, room by room. The Soviets called it hugging the enemy, staying so close to the German lines that German air power and artillery couldn't be used without destroying German positions as well.
SPEAKER_00So they were fighting over individual buildings?
SPEAKER_02Individual floors of individual buildings. Individual rooms within individual floors. Pavlov's house, a four-story apartment building in central Stalingrad, was defended by a Soviet garrison of approximately 25 men against repeated German assaults for 60 days. 25 men, one building, 60 days. The sergeant who commanded the defense, Yaakov Pavlov, became one of the most celebrated figures of the Soviet war. Dukov later noted that more Germans died trying to take Pavlov's house than died in the entire fall of Paris. That comparison captures something essential about the difference between Stalingrad and the war in the West. This was not a battle of maneuver and strategy. It was attrition in its most basic and brutal form. Who can endure more? Who can absorb more loss and keep fighting?
SPEAKER_00And the answer was the Soviets.
SPEAKER_02The answer, ultimately, was the Soviets. But not simply because of courage or endurance, or Order 227's blocking detachments. The deeper answer is Zhukov. Because while the Soviet forces inside Stalingrad were holding, at catastrophic cost, with Order 227 providing the political infrastructure of terror that prevented organized retreat, Georgi Zhukov was doing something in Moscow that the Germans had completely failed to anticipate.
SPEAKER_00Tell me about Zhukov. Because he's one of the most important figures of the entire war, and I think Western audiences often don't know him the way they know the Allied commanders.
SPEAKER_02Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov was born in 1896 in a small village in the Kaluga region of Russia, the son of a shoemaker, formerly educated only to the age of 11, who enlisted in the Imperial Russian Cavalry in 1915 and fought in the First World War. He joined the Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War, rose through the Red Army on the strength of ability rather than political connection, which was both impressive and dangerous in Stalin Soviet Union, and by the late 1930s was one of the most capable armoured warfare commanders the Red Army possessed. In 1939 he commanded Soviet forces in the Battle of Khalkin Gol, a forgotten conflict against Japan on the Mongolian border, and won a decisive victory using combined arms tactics that foreshadowed exactly what he would later do at Stalingrad. He was blunt, demanding, technically brilliant, and possessed of a physical and moral courage that impressed even people who feared him. Stalin feared him in the specific way that powerful men fear people they know are more capable than they are in a specific domain. He also needed him in exactly that same way.
SPEAKER_00How did Zhukov survive Stalin's purges? Because almost every other capable commander didn't.
SPEAKER_02He survived partly through luck, partly through the protection of officers who valued him enough to shield him, and partly because the catastrophes of 1941 made Stalin's capacity to purge his best commanders suddenly very expensive. When the Germans were advancing on Moscow in the autumn of 1941, Stalin needed Zhukov. The decision to put Zhukov in command of the defense of Moscow, which succeeded in stopping the German advance in December 1941, established the pattern for their working relationship throughout the war. Stalin controlled, Zhukov executed, both of them understood the terms, neither was comfortable with them, but both were constrained by them. And at Stalingrad, within those constraints, Zhukov produced the most consequential piece of operational planning of the entire war.
SPEAKER_00Operation Uranus.
SPEAKER_02The counter-attack that encircled and destroyed the German Sixth Army. Its conception and planning is a masterpiece of military thinking, and its most remarkable quality is what it required Zhukov and the Soviet High Command to do for months before a single soldier moved.
SPEAKER_00They had to wait, while the city was being destroyed around them.
SPEAKER_02They had to wait. While Soviet soldiers were dying by the tens of thousands inside Stalingrad, while the factory district was being contested, building by building, while the Volga was being crossed and recrossed under German fire to resupply the defenders. While Stalin was demanding action and the entire Soviet propaganda apparatus was focused on the city's symbolic importance. Zhukov and his fellow planner Alexander Vasilevsky were building something in absolute secrecy. The plan depended on a strategic insight that was both obvious in retrospect and genuinely brilliant in conception. The German 6th Army at Stalingrad was extended deep into Soviet territory. Its flanks, stretching north and south along the Don River, were held not by German divisions but by Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian forces. Allied forces that were less well equipped, less well trained, and significantly less capable of withstanding a concentrated armoured assault than the German units at the center. Zhukov's insight was this: don't attack the strongest point. Attack the weakest, hit the flanks, encircle the Sixth Army entirely, and then destroy it from the outside in.
SPEAKER_00How did they keep it secret? Because they were moving enormous forces.
SPEAKER_02The secrecy of Operation Uranus is one of the most impressive operational security achievements of the entire war. Zhukov and Vasilevsky assembled over a million soldiers, nearly 900 tanks, over 13,000 artillery pieces, and supporting air forces, all of it positioned for a two-pronged attack that would close behind the Sixth Army like a pair of pincers. They moved forces at night, they imposed strict radio silence, they created elaborate deception operations to suggest that Soviet reserves were being positioned north of Moscow rather than south toward Stalingrad. German aerial reconnaissance missed the buildup entirely or misread what it saw. Field Marshal von Paulus, the German 6th Army commander, had virtually no intelligence warning of what was coming. His flanks were extended, his reserves were committed to the urban battle inside the city, and on November 19, 1942, 1,100 Soviet artillery pieces opened fire simultaneously on the Romanian 3rd Army north of Stalingrad.
SPEAKER_00The Romanian line broke.
SPEAKER_02The Romanian line collapsed in hours. The following day, the Southern Pincer, targeting the Romanian 4th Army south of the city, achieved the same result. Within four days, the two Soviet-armoured spearheads had closed behind the 6th Army at a small town called Kalach on the Don. 330,000 German and Axis soldiers were encircled. The hunter had become the hunted, and Paulus, trapped in the ruins of the city he had been sent to capture, faced a decision that would define the final chapter of the battle.
SPEAKER_00Could he have broken out?
SPEAKER_02In the immediate aftermath of the encirclement, the first days of late November 1942, there was a genuine window. Paulus's armoured forces still had fuel and ammunition. The Soviet encirclement was not yet fully consolidated. Several of his senior commanders urged an immediate breakout attempt to the southwest, abandoning Stalingrad but saving the army. Paulus requested permission from Hitler. Hitler refused. He ordered the Sixth Army to stand fast, to hold Stalingrad as a fortress, trusting Goering's promise, Goering again, that the Luftwaffe could supply the encircled army by air. 300 tons of supplies per day would be needed. The Luftwaffe never managed more than a hundred. The army's fuel, ammunition, food, and medical supplies dwindled through December and into January. The winter temperatures dropped to minus 30 Celsius. The relief attempt, Operation Winterstorm, a German armored thrust toward the encirclement, came within 40 miles of the pocket and was stopped. Paulus held his position as ordered. His army starved and froze in the ruins of the city it had spent five months trying to take.
SPEAKER_00Hitler promoted him to Fieldmarshal.
SPEAKER_02On January 30, 1943, the tenth anniversary of Hitler's accession to power, Hitler promoted Friedrich Paulus to General Feldmarshal. The promotion was not entirely ceremonial. It carried a specific implication that Hitler made explicit in private communications. No German field marshal had ever been taken prisoner. The promotion was a signal, an expectation. Paulus was expected to fight to the last or die in the ruins rather than surrender, he chose differently. On January 31, Paulus surrendered to Soviet forces. He was the first German field marshal in history to be taken prisoner. Twour hours later, the final German resistance in the northern pocket collapsed. The Battle of Stalingrad was over. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad was announced to the Soviet people on February 2, 1943. The reaction, in a country that had endured nearly two years of catastrophic defeat, enormous territorial loss, and human suffering on a scale that the Western Allies had not experienced, was extraordinary. Church bells rang in Moscow for the first time since the revolution. Stalin was celebrated as the architect of the victory. Which was partly true, in the sense that Order 227 had held the city, and mostly false, in the sense that the strategic genius that destroyed the Sixth Army was Zhukov's. The Soviet propaganda apparatus gave Stalin the credit. Zhukov received recognition, significant recognition, genuinely earned, but within a framework that always kept Stalin at the center. The man who had issued the order that said not one step back claimed the victory that Zhukov's planning had actually won.
SPEAKER_00How did the German public receive the news?
SPEAKER_02With shock that was genuine and profound. Goebbels's propaganda apparatus had been managing the German public's understanding of the Eastern Front with considerable skill. Victories had been celebrated, and defeats had been minimized or reframed. The fall of Stalingrad could not be reframed. Hitler's government had publicly committed to the city's capture. The Sixth Army's destruction was announced with three days of national mourning. The first time Germany had formally mourned a military defeat since the beginning of the war. The psychological impact on the German population was significant and lasting. Stalingrad was the moment when the narrative of German invincibility, which had sustained public morale through three years of war, began to crack in ways that subsequent German victories could patch but never fully repair.
SPEAKER_00What happened to Paulus?
SPEAKER_02Paulus spent the rest of the war as a Soviet prisoner. He was treated relatively well, by Soviet standards for German prisoners, which is a qualification that requires acknowledgement, since Soviet prisoner of war conditions were frequently brutal, and the mortality rate among German prisoners in Soviet camps was extremely high. Paulus was housed separately from the general prisoner population, given access to materials, and eventually became a public advocate for the German surrender, broadcasting appeals to German soldiers to stop fighting, participating in Soviet-sponsored anti-Nazi committees. He was released in 1953 and died in East Germany in 1957. His decision to surrender rather than die in the ruins, the decision that defied Hitler's explicit expectation and broke the tradition of German field marshals never being taken prisoner, is one of the most debated individual choices of the Eastern Front. Was it cowardice? Was it a rational decision to preserve the lives of the survivors who could still be saved? Was it the exhaustion of a man who had watched his army destroyed by a decision that he had argued against and been overruled on? Historians continue to debate it. Paulus himself, in his post-war writings, was never entirely consistent about his own reasoning.
SPEAKER_00What happened to Zhukov after Stalingrad?
SPEAKER_02Zhukov went on to command at Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, fought in July 1943, which consolidated the strategic momentum that Stalingrad had established. He commanded the final assault on Berlin in April 1945. He was the Soviet officer who accepted the German surrender on the Eastern Front. He was celebrated, demoted, rehabilitated, celebrated again, Stalin's relationship with him, cycling through exactly the kind of dangerous oscillation that characterized Stalin's relationship with anyone capable enough to be threatening. After Stalin's death in 1953, Zhukov was rehabilitated fully and served as defense minister under Khrushchev. He died in 1974, celebrated as the greatest Soviet military commander of the war, which, by the assessment of most military historians, he was.
SPEAKER_00Looking at Stalingrad through the lens of season 2, the decision makers, what was the decision that mattered most?
SPEAKER_02That question is harder than it looks. Stalin's Order 227 was a decision, brutal, morally horrifying in its mechanism, but functionally effective in preventing the organized collapse that might have allowed Germany to take the city and consolidate the encirclement. Without Order 227, without the combination of political terror and genuine fighting will that held Stalingrad while Zhukov planned, Operation Uranus had nothing to encircle the Germans around. The city had to hold. Order 227 helped hold it. But the decision that changed the war, the decision that converted Stalingrad from a grinding attrition into a strategic catastrophe for Germany, was Zhukov's. The patience to wait, the discipline to keep the planning secret for months, the strategic insight to attack the flanks rather than the center, and the operational skill to execute a two-pronged armoured encirclement of 300,000 men with the precision that made it irreversible in days. If one decision changed the Eastern Front, it was that one.
SPEAKER_00And Hitler's refusal to allow a breakout.
SPEAKER_02And Hitler's refusal to allow a breakout, which takes us back to last week's episode in an unexpected way. Last episode, we examined a Hitler decision that nobody can fully explain: the Holt Order at Dunkirk that allowed 300,000 Allied soldiers to escape. At Stalingrad, Hitler made the opposite error with equal consequence. He refused to allow 300,000 German soldiers to attempt the escape that might have saved them. The Holt Order gave Britain its army back. The Stalingrad Standfast Order destroyed Germany's. The same commander, the same instinct to hold rather than move. Two decisions with mirror image consequences for the opposite sides of the war.
SPEAKER_00That parallel just changed how I understand both episodes.
SPEAKER_02It should, because it suggests something important about Hitler as a decision maker that season 2 keeps returning to from different angles. The Holt Order and the Stalingrad Stand Fast were not obviously wrong at the moment they were made. Both had arguments behind them. Both reflected a genuine, if flawed, strategic logic, and both produced catastrophic results for Germany. Not because Hitler was always irrational, but because he had specific patterns of thinking. The refusal to retreat, the belief that will could substitute for logistics, the tendency to trust his own instincts over his general's professional judgment, that produced brilliant outcomes in some contexts and catastrophic ones in others. Dunkirk and Stalingrad are the two most consequential expressions of those patterns. And together, they explain more about why Germany lost the war than any single military analysis could.
SPEAKER_00Four episodes into season two, and this is the one that's going to take me the longest to process. Two million people. Five months. It resists comprehension in a way that I think is actually important to acknowledge rather than push through. Two million people died at Stalingrad. More than the entire Second World War cost America, Britain, and France combined. On one front, in one battle. And at the center of it, two decisions. Stalin's not one step back. Brutal, terroristic, morally undefendable in isolation, but functionally effective in holding the city that needed to hold. And Zhukov's operation Uranus, patient, brilliant, secretly assembled over months while the city burned, executed with a precision that sealed 300,000 German soldiers in a trap they never escaped. What I keep thinking about is the patience. Zhukov knew what he was planning. He knew it would work if the city held long enough. And he had to watch the city being ground to rubble for months. Soviet soldiers dying by the tens of thousands. While he waited. Because acting too soon would have meant acting before the trap was ready. And a trap sprung too early is not a trap at all. Not one step back. Operation Uranus. Two decisions. Two million dead. The hinge of the war. Before Alan closes us out, Zhukov's genius at Stalingrad was partly tactical and partly the patience to wait. To not act before the moment was right. Even while everything around him was burning. Can you think of any other instances in World War II where this kind of patience was critical? Send your thoughts to beststorypublishing at gmail.com. We read everything. And patience, in my experience, is one of the most underrated qualities in any decision maker at any scale.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Amanda, and that's episode four of season two of World War II unwound here on the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network. Stalingrad, two million people, not one step back. Operation Uranus, the hinge of the war. I hope you'll take a moment today to sit with that number, two million, and what it means. Thank you for being here. Visit us at beststorypublishing.com and as Amanda said, send your thoughts to Beststorypublishing at gmail.com. Next week on World War II Unwound, we leave the Eastern Front and return to the West, to the coast of France, to a German field marshal who understood exactly what the Allied invasion would look like, and spent months arguing with Hitler and his own high command about how to stop it. Erwin Rommel, the desert fox, his last great campaign, and the disagreement with Hitler about armor doctrine that may have cost Germany its best chance of defeating the Normandy invasion, the Atlantic Wall, next week. Until then, keep asking questions, keep digging deeper, and never stop being curious. I'm Alan Best, and this is the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network.