Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week we've got a couple of stories from the Second World War.

One recalls the horrors inflicted on the local population during the

fall of Singapore and the other introduces us to the writer Kurt Vonnegut and how

the bombing of Dresden inspired his anti-war novel Slaughterhouse 5.

There was a firestorm out there.

Dresden was one big flame.

The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn. So it goes.

Plus from the 1990s, a satirical rewriting of history in the Soviet Union.

The next day a group of old party comrades went to the head of communist ideology in

Leningrad region and asked her if it was true that Lenin was a mushroom.

Really?

We'll find out what that's all about later in the podcast. But first, a remarkable story from the centuries-old fight against one of the scourges of humanity, malaria.

For this, we're going back to a medical breakthrough which happened in China in 1972.

The drug, Artemisinin, has saved millions of lives, but it was born during a chaotic time in history, which meant it was decades before it was widely used.

Professor Lang Nien-Fu was one of the scientists in the small team that discovered the cure,

which was inspired by a herbal remedy from traditional

Chinese medicine. He's been telling Rebecca Kespi the story.

In the war-torn jungles of Vietnam during the 1960s and 70s, soldiers from both sides were fighting a common enemy as well as each other.

Mosquitoes.

Thousands of American and North Vietnamese troops fell ill with malaria.

...