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, how British Army Gurkhas fought for justice in the London courts.

At the last justice had been metered out.

It's not the money factor on its own.

It's the fact that we get treated equal.

Also a late discovery about the lives of the Vikings.

It totally transformed a picture of the Vikings from these nasty and brutal heathen.

And a Second World War mystery mystery what happened to the author of the world famous children's book the little prince.

I was very surprised that he could be in the Marseille area since every historian had said he got lost some 200 kilometers away.

What I found strange was that I knew the wreckage of that mystery

mystery unraveled later in the podcast but in this week of all weeks we have to

begin as world leaders have been doing by marking 75 years since D-Day. There's been much coverage of the

ceremonies, the speeches, the fly-pasts, and the veterans who survive to this day. That

number dwindles with each passing June, but the voices of those no longer

with us who took part in D-Day live on in the BBC Archives. Alex Last has been listening to the

recorded words of some of the troops who took part in

that massive Allied landing in Normandy to liberate Western Europe from Nazi occupation during the

Second World War.

The whole scale of the operations was so vast that one can't begin to describe what was happening on any sort what was going on right beside one. Just after midnight on the 6th of June

1944 amid great secrecy a vast Allied invasion began.

The task on D-Day was to land a huge army and establish a foothold on the coast of German-occupied

...