The people’s war

Emma — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There was a German bomber flying right towards us – a Dornier, one of their biggest. It was so low we could see the pilot flying it and the gunner in the nose of the bomber pointing his machine gun at us?

Schoolboy in Kent, during the Battle of Britain
My legs pressed harder around my father’s waist; my arms nearly choked him. The humming of Japanese aircraft was loud enough for everyone to hear now, and panic spread like ink on a blotter.
Child saying goodbye to her parents, Singapore 1942

In the early 2000s, the BBC launched its biggest oral history project, recording the lives and experiences of the ordinary people who lived through World War II. It amounted to 47,000 testimonies and over 400 diaries and letters, all of which have remained unexplored in the archives for twenty years – until now.
In The People’s War, John Willis reveals untold stories of everyday bravery, moments of terror, and tales of life-affirming community, that guide us through the years of the World War II. From soldiers in North Africa and prisoners of war in East Asia, to evacuees in the British countryside and women in the factories, The People’s War is a truly ambitious and comprehensive journey through a devastating and pivotal period of our history, as you’ve never read before.
Follow the remarkable stories of ordinary individuals who lived, fought, grieved, loved, and survived through the war.

Nagasaki

Emma — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of the most remarkable untold stories of the Second World war. At 11.02 am on an August morning in 1945 America dropped the world’s most powerful atomic bomb on the Japanese port city of Nagasaki. The most European city in Japan was flattened to the ground ‘as if it had been swept aside by a broom’. More than 70,000 Japanese were killed. At the time, hundreds of Allied prisoners of war were working close to the bomb’s detonation point, as forced labourers in the shipyards and foundries of Nagasaki.These men, from the Dales of Yorkshire and the dusty outback of Australia, from the fields of Holland and the remote towns of Texas, had already endured an extraordinary lottery of life and death that had changed their lives forever. They had lived through nearly four years of malnutrition, disease, and brutality. Now their prison home was the target of America’s second atomic bomb.In one of the greatest survival stories of the Second World War, we trace their astonishing experiences back to bloody battles in the Malayan jungle, before the dramatic fall of Fortress Singapore, the mighty symbol of the British Empire. This abject capitulation was followed by surrender in Java and elsewhere in the East, condemning the captives to years of cruel imprisonment by the Japanese. Their lives grew evermore perilous when thousands of prisoners were shipped off to build the infamous Thai-Burma Railway, including the Bridge on the River Kwai. If that was not harsh enough, POWs were then transported to Japan in the overcrowded holds of what were called hell ships. These rusty buckets were regularly sunk by Allied submarines, and thousands of prisoners lived through unimaginable horror, adrift on the ocean for days. Some still had to endure the final supreme test, the world’s second atomic bomb.The prisoners in Nagasaki were eyewitnesses to one of the most significant events in modern history but writing notes or diaries in a Japanese prison camp was dangerous. To avoid detection, one Allied prisoner buried his notes in the grave of a fellow POW to be reclaimed after the war, another wrote his diary in Irish. Now, using unpublished and rarely seen notes, interviews, and memoirs, this unique book weaves together a powerful chorus of voices to paint a vivid picture of defeat, endurance, and survival against astonishing odds.

Willis, John – The Bell Bookshop

The people’s war

Nagasaki