
The Chindits
During World War Two, an unconventional special force was formed. Known as the Chindits, they fought behind enemy lines in Burma, now Myanma...
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More than 50 first-hand accounts of significant moments in WW2. Looking back at almost six years of global conflict, from Hiroshima to the Holocaust.

During World War Two, an unconventional special force was formed. Known as the Chindits, they fought behind enemy lines in Burma, now Myanma...

On 9 August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing at least 74,000 people. It led to the end of World Wa...

Between September 1943 and June 1944 in World War Two, the Italian capital Rome was occupied by German soldiers. Italy had surrendered and t...

The end of the Second World War in Europe came on 8 May 1945, after more than five years of conflict. British Prime Minister Winston Churchi...

On 30 April 1945 Adolf Hitler killed himself in a bunker in the German capital Berlin as Soviet Red Army soldiers closed in. But first he ma...

In April 1944, the Allies planned Exercise Tiger to practise their landing on France's Normandy beaches ahead of D-Day. During the rehearsal...

In 1980, Australian author Thomas Keneally stumbled across the story of Oskar Schindler while buying a briefcase in Beverly Hills, in the US...

Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis during World War Two. Once Soviet troops reached Buda...

During World War Two, a Japanese American battalion became one of the most decorated army units in US military history. The 442nd Regimental...

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who risked her life to save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War Two. Iren...

Charles Norman Shay was a field medic in the United States Army when he landed on the Normandy beach codenamed Omaha on D-Day. On June 6, 19...

In 1944, a young Irishwoman called Maureen Flavin drew up a weather report that helped change the course of World War Two. Maureen was worki...

Between 1932 and 1945, hundreds of thousands of women and girls across Asia were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army. R...

The Mount Vesuvius eruption that buried Pompeii in 79AD is well known, but far fewer people know about the last time the volcano erupted in...

In August and September 1939, tens of thousands of children began to be evacuated from Paris. The move, part of France's 'passive defence' t...

In 1940 a daring rescue operation began to help Allied servicemen escape from Nazi-occupied France. French resistance fighter Roland Lepers...

In 1937, Japan invaded China committing atrocities including the Nanjing Massacre. Wang Jingwei was a Chinese national hero and second-in-co...

In 1949, Mildred Gillars – otherwise known as Axis Sally – became the first woman in American history to be convicted of treason. The former...

In December 1939, fascist Norwegian politician Vidkun Quisling travelled to Berlin from Oslo for a secret meeting with Adolf Hitler. Quislin...

In the autumn of 1945, World War II surrender ceremonies took place across the Japanese Empire. The one in China was held at the Forbidden C...

Vogue's war correspondent Lee Miller found herself in Adolf Hitler's Munich apartment when the news broke that he was dead. Earlier that day...

On 25 January 1933 the last legal communist march was held in Berlin. Just a few days later Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Soon...

In the early hours of 17 May 1943 a bold World War II attack destroyed two dams in the Ruhr Valley in Germany's industrial heartland, causin...

Beginning in 1940 thousands of German children were evacuated to camps in the countryside to avoid the bombs of World War Two. These camps w...

Peter Royle, 103, endured a month of solid fighting in the hills outside of Tunis in 1943. Eventually the Allies prevailed and took more tha...

In May 1943, the uprising in the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw in Poland came to an end. The Germans had crushed the uprising and deported survivi...

In 2009, Rudolf Brazda, one of the last known survivors of the Pink Triangles, returned to the former site of Buchenwald concentration camp...

Despite facing malnutrition, starvation and disease, Christopher John Huckstep's father set up a school in the Japanese internment camp wher...

The 1 September 1939 was Kitty Baxter’s ninth birthday, it was also the day her life and millions of other people’s changed with the beginni...

In 1937, Japanese forces entered Shanghai - spelling the end of a period when the Chinese city had been a thriving commercial centre governe...

How sex, jazz and 'fake news' were used to undermine the Nazis in World War Two. In 1941, the UK created a top secret propaganda department,...

Hear how the BBC reported the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France on June 6th 1944. The operation was a crucial step in the liberation o...

Eyewitness accounts of the Allied landings on the coast of Normandy during World War Two on 6 June 1944. The massive operation was a crucial...

Japanese troops reached the Chinese city of Nanjing in December 1937. The violence that followed marked one of the darkest moments in a stru...

At the end of WW2 much of Germany's capital had been destroyed by bombing and artillery. Almost half of all houses and flats had been damage...

Thousands of Allied troops parachuted into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in September 1944. At that point, it was the most ambitious Allied...

Mountaineers risked their lives to camouflage churches and palaces in the great Russian city during World War Two. The city was besieged by...

Soon after Hitler ordered the invasion of Hungary in March 1944, the Nazis began rounding up hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Most w...

Italy's great works of art were threatened by bombing and looting during World War Two. But a plan known as 'Operation Rescue' was devised t...

Around 80 thousand women and girls volunteered to join the Women's Land Army during the Second World War. They helped provide vital food sup...

Hear from one of the German prosecution lawyers who helped put Nazi war criminals on trial 20 years after World War Two had ended. Gerhard W...

On 17 June 1940, a packed British troopship was sunk off the coast of France by German bombers. The ship had just picked up thousands of Bri...

In 1942, the fascist government of Romania deported 25,000 of its Roma citizens to the former Soviet territory of Transdniestria. Half of th...

Tens of thousands of Polish officers were secretly executed in the USSR during World War 2. The German occupying forces reported the first m...

On March 15th 1939, the German army occupied Czechoslovakia. Witness hears the story of one young boy who watched the German troops march in...

During World War Two, a young Jewish woman, Sara Ginaite, escaped from the Kaunas Ghetto in Lithuania to fight the Nazis, With her husband M...

Yelena Malyutina was a Soviet female bomber pilot who fought in WW2 and was wounded in action in 1944. She was in one of the three Soviet wo...

In September 1943, Partisan fighters in Italy began organising in large numbers to help the Allies defeat Nazi Germany and rid their country...

In June 1940, German forces, having swept across Belgium and Holland, and into France, were closing in on Paris. In the face of the German a...

During World War Two, Soviet propaganda promoted a heroic feat that never happened. It was the story of a small ill-equipped unit who destro...