THE PEOPLE’S WAR: UNHEARD STORIES. LIFE ON THE BATTLEFIELD AND HOMEFRONT IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR. JOHN WILLIS IN CONVERSATION WITH SAVILIAN PATRICK KIDD.

        

To mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, John Willis’s new book fully explores for the first time the BBC’s biggest ever oral history project: 47,000 testimonies and memories from the Second World War, including hundreds of diaries and letters, that have remained buried in the archive – until now. The People’s War sweeps from the battlefronts of North Africa and Italy to land girls in the British countryside, from female internees in the Far East to children in the Blitz. This is not war seen through the eyes of politicians or generals, but a conflict told with extraordinary candour and humour by ordinary men and women who lived, fought, grieved, loved and survived through the war.

John Willis is the author of five history books including Nagasaki: The Forgotten Prisoners (2022), the subject of a previous Savile talk,and Fighter Boy(2024). He is one of Britain’s best-known television executives and a former director of programmes at Channel 4 and director of factual and learning at the BBC. In 2012 he was elected chair of the British Academy of Televison Arts. He started his career as an award-winning documentary-maker. John is currently chair of governors at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. The People’s War is published by BBC Books, part of Penguin Random House.