The Yangtze Incident
In 1949 a British warship, HMS Amethyst, launched a daring escape after it was held captive for months by Chinese Communists on the Yangtze river. The ship had been badly damaged when it was fired on ...
9 Aug 201911min
British troops take to the streets of Northern Ireland
In August 1969 the British Army was first deployed in Northern Ireland. Their job was to keep the peace on the streets of Londonderry where sectarian violence had broken out. To begin with the soldie...
8 Aug 20199min
Criminals in the community
In the 1970s the UK tried to reduce its growing prison population. An experimental new punishment was introduced for convicted criminals. It was called Community Service. The scheme was soon copied a...
7 Aug 20199min
Under the North Pole
In 1958 the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus travelled under the North Pole. Julian Bedford spoke to retired vice Admiral Kenneth Carr in 2012 about the mission spurred by the Cold War battle for techno...
6 Aug 20199min
The mass exodus of Algeria's 'Pieds Noirs'
Hundreds of thousands of French people who'd been living in Algeria for generations fled for safety to France in the summer of 1962. It was in the last days of the war of independence in the North Afr...
5 Aug 20199min
The invasion of Kuwait
Thousands of Iraqi troops and tanks began pouring into Kuwait on 2 August 1990. The tiny, oil-rich Gulf state was immediately taken over by Saddam Hussein's military. Sumaya Bakhsh has spoken to Sami...
2 Aug 201910min
The Warsaw uprising
On 1 August 1944, resistance fighters in the Polish capital rose up against German occupying forces. The uprising lasted for 63 days and some 200,000 people were killed, Warsaw itself was largely dest...
1 Aug 20199min
The anti-nuclear protesters who won
In 1980 the Bavarian government announced plans to build a nuclear reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf in southern Germany. Eight years later construction on the plant was halted after a sustained prote...
31 Jul 201910min
