Hello and welcome to a new series of Battleground with me, Patrick Bishop and Saul David.

Well, this year marks the 80th anniversary of the most decisive, dramatic and

significant year of the Second World War. 1944 was when the Allies made their long-awaited

launch into Northern Europe, when the Red Army began to push the Vermacht back to the borders

of Germany, and when the war in the Pacific reached new levels of intensity. Between this, Saul and I

know quite a lot about what was going on in this most crucial of years, having spent many years

researching, thinking about it, and of course, the result of us several books on this period.

So our aim is, week by week, to examine the key events as their anniversaries fall due. We'll be

diving into them in granular detail, updating you with the latest research and thinking on the event

and supplementing that with interviews with historians and experts. But we'll also be looking at

the great themes that develop as the war progresses, how the allies and their enemies adapt or

fail to to changing circumstances. We'll be doing a bit of counterfactual speculation,

what might have happened if things had gone differently, we'll also be looking under the surface

of events to reveal the forces at work underneath the daily to and fro of battle,

silently shaping the geopolitical landscape that would emerge

when the fighting finally stopped. And we'll also be looking at the big personalities,

whose characters and temperaments, even in this most modern of conflicts, still affect the outcome.

It's going to be huge fun for us, a chance to share with you the listeners, some of the

knowledge we've accumulated over the years, but also to re-evaluate events and get the debate

going, which in the tradition of Battleground, we'd love you, the listeners, to get involved

in sending in your thoughts and questions.

But to start off with, let's conduct a bit of a tour d'orris on of just what was at stake in

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