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The History Hour
Secret D-Day rehearsal and YouTube begins
The History Hour
Apr 26, 2025

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is World War Two military historian and archivist Elisabeth Shipton.

We start by concentrating on two events from the last year of the Second World War.

Exercise Tiger took place in April 1944 in preparation for the D-Day landings of Allied forces in Normandy. But during that rehearsal a German fleet attacked and about 749 US servicemen died.

We hear remarkable archive testimony from Adolf Hitler's secretary who witnessed his last days in a bunker in Berlin before he took his own life.

Plus, 20 years since the video sharing platform, YouTube, was first launched.

We hear about the apartheid-era production of the play Othello in South Africa, which broke racial boundaries.

And finally, how in 1985, Coca-Cola messed up a reworking of the drink's classic formula.

Contributors:

Paul Gerolstein - survivor of Exercise Tiger (from archive audio gathered by Laurie Bolton, from the UK Exercise Tiger Memorial, and the journalist, David Fitzgerald).

Traudl Junge - Adolf Hitler's secretary.

Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - on the start of YouTube.

Dame Janet Suzman - on the staging of Othello in 1987.

Mark Pendergrast - author.

(Photo: US troops ahead of D-Day. Credit: Keystone/ Getty Images)

More Episodes

Aug 15, 2026
The Mau Mau uprising and man-eating lions

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes focussing on Kenya.

We hear about Muthoni Kirima, one of the last Mau Mau fighters to come out of hiding and lay down her arms.

Caroline Elkins, Professor of History at Harvard University, discusses the brutality of the conflict between Kenya’s Land and Freedom Army, the British and Kenyan loyalists.

Next, when Princess Elizabeth became queen while staying at the Treetops Hotel, a lodge in the Aberdare National Park.

In 1997, scientists travelled to Kenya, in search of a cave believed to have been the den of the man-eating lions that terrorised railway workers in 1898.

Plus, we hear how Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and his rival Raila Odinga signed an unprecedented power-sharing deal to end a wave of violence that left more than 1,200 people dead.

And the heartwarming story of the friendship between a baby hippo and a 130-year-old giant tortoise.

Finally for our Sporting Witness story, we head to the first Ultimate Frisbee World Championship in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1983.

Contributors: Caroline Elkins - Professor of History at Harvard University, and author of Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Muthoni Kirima - Field Marshall in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Frank Gillard - BBC correspondent. Thomas Gnoske - Scientist. Alan Patterson - British Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson's grandson. Maina Kiai - Chair of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights in 2008. Maini Schildt - Swedish Ultimate Frisbee player.

(Photo: Mau Mau suspects are rounded up by police outside the camp in Manyani, Kenya, 1955. Credit: Getty Images/Authenticated News)


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Secret D-Day rehearsal and YouTube begins

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