history

  • The last veterans

    As time passes we have to grab every opportunity to meet veterans of World War 2. Now, even those who only came of age towards the end of the conflict – from D-Day to VE day – are at least 98 years old. This week I went to a special event with almost a dozen

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  • Defying Hitler

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  • Gaynor Madgwick lost her brother and sister in the Aberfan disaster and was herself pulled from the wreck of the school.  She meets survivors, rescuers and members of the community tell her story and Aberfan’s using the voices of the villagers themselves. This programme hasn’t been heard since the 50th anniversary in 2016. I thought

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  • D-Day veteran Ted Owens is celebrating winning a Gold award at the New York Festival of TV and Film. The series LEST WE FORGET in which two schoolchildren travelled to France, the Netherlands and Germany with Ted was given the special prize in a documentary category. The Royal Marine Commando was hit by a shell on

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  • In the summer of 1978 two former members of a B-17 crew met to discuss their escape from death in a raid on Kassel in Germany in 1943. Sitting on a porch in Tarrytown, New York, co-pilot Bohn Fawkes turned to his navigator Elmer “Benny” Bendiner and said: “You remember that we were hit with

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  • Catch up on last night’s opening episode of #LestWeForget when you can. Next week opens on a poignant note the morning after #DDay75.https://t.co/ZJYXyOXU7z — Greg Lewis (@gregjlewis) September 19, 2019

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  • Two children interview a D-Day veteran.  His name is Ted Owens. He was a commando and a sniper. He almost died on D-Day and was wounded twice more in the Netherlands. I’ll be posting some of their clips over the next fortnight. Question one: What was it like saying goodbye to your parents to go

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  • Artillery Wood Two military graves lying only feet apart in a Belgian cemetery commemorate the lives of two iconic literary figures: the greatest Welsh and the greatest Irish poets of the Great War. They died on the same day (102 years ago today) in the same battle, but the paths that led them into British

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  • If you have a tough question, ask a commando:

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  • Finally getting a chance to round up some of the reviews and responses to Defying Hitler. USA Today made it one of their Five Books Not To Miss, noting that Publishers Weekly says the book is “an informative counterpoint to accounts of widespread German complicity with the Holocaust.” And the New York Post marked it as one

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