War Report

On the 70th anniversary of D-Day, an unforgettable chronicle of the final year of World War II as told through the BBC War Report dispatches.

WAR REPORT, the landmark BBC radio program, first broadcast after the nine o-clock news on D-Day, 6 June 1944 and provided an almost-daily chronicle to millions of listeneres of the final year of World War II. This title collects the dispatches of War Report to provide a visceral account of Allied efforts to liberate Europe and end the war.

This is WWII history, as it happened. All the horror and excitement of eleven months that changed the world.

On D-Day (6 June 1944) a team of BBC reporters, trained and were embedded with British troops, achieved a first in war reporting: they landed side by side with soldiers, in gliders, by parachute, in assault-craft, talking into portable recording machines to ‘tell it as it was’. For eleven months reporters such as Richard Dimbleby, Chester Wilmot and Frank Gillard were in the vanguard, filing over 1,500 dispatches covering the desperate exchanges on the D-Day beaches, the battle for Caen, the advance through Normandy, the liberation of Paris and, finally, the German surrender in 1945.

75 years after the invasion of Normandy, the dispatches of War Report collected here are as visceral and urgent as ever, and provide a remarkable account of Allied efforts to liberate Europe and end the war. With a foreword by John Simpson, War Report is a vital piece of modern history, direct from the front line.