This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of flame came up and almost blinded us from our guns.

Hello and welcome to the World War II podcast I'm Angus Wallace. While at we have Waresfest last year I caught Paul Woodage the host of World War II TV

on YouTube giving an excellent talk on D-Day tourism.

So I thought I would ask him on to the show to discuss tourism and how that has changed and

what to see.

Paul is based in France and for the last 20 years has been a battlefield

tour guide. More recently he launched World War II TV and became a second World War YouTube sensation.

Thanks for joining me.

Pot, I'm sure the question that everyone wonders is,

you know, how on earth you become a battlefield, uh, Togad?

Well, it's different to when I started than how it works now.

I moved to Normandy 23 years ago this September and at that time

there weren't really any dedicated World War II tour guides in Normandy. There were generalists. Mostly French,

one Brit, who did D-Day, cathedrals, trips to Paris, Versailles, you know, Mona's Garden, all that kind of stuff. And I had thought when I moved here that I might get a job in a museum and my

French wasn't good enough then to do that.

And I was a bit floundering because I've kind of made this big decision to just move

and didn't really know what I was going to do.

Which from the 54-year-old me looks at 32-year-old me and thinks, what the hell were you doing? But 32-year-old me looks at 32-year-old me and thinks what the hell were you doing but

32-year-old me with a different me and long story short I got to I made connection

with a guy who was just starting a touring company where he was going to do a bit of everything,

...