Secret D-Day rehearsal and YouTube begins

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is World War Two military historian and archivist Elisabeth Shipton.

We start by concentrating on two events from the last year of the Second World War.

Exercise Tiger took place in April 1944 in preparation for the D-Day landings of Allied forces in Normandy. But during that rehearsal a German fleet attacked and about 749 US servicemen died.

We hear remarkable archive testimony from Adolf Hitler's secretary who witnessed his last days in a bunker in Berlin before he took his own life.

Plus, 20 years since the video sharing platform, YouTube, was first launched.

We hear about the apartheid-era production of the play Othello in South Africa, which broke racial boundaries.

And finally, how in 1985, Coca-Cola messed up a reworking of the drink's classic formula.

Contributors:

Paul Gerolstein - survivor of Exercise Tiger (from archive audio gathered by Laurie Bolton, from the UK Exercise Tiger Memorial, and the journalist, David Fitzgerald).

Traudl Junge - Adolf Hitler's secretary.

Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - on the start of YouTube.

Dame Janet Suzman - on the staging of Othello in 1987.

Mark Pendergrast - author.

(Photo: US troops ahead of D-Day. Credit: Keystone/ Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	If a Banksy appeared on your house, you'd be sitting on a fortune, right?
0:06.9	But first you think you're gifted, but you're actually not.
0:10.4	This is a tale of two murals, Margate's Valentine's Day Mascara and the lowest off seagull.
0:17.3	And the true cost of free art for the people who have to live with it.
0:21.5	40,000 pounds cost per annum.
0:23.7	We didn't know what to do.
0:25.5	Nobody's turned up to say, we'll help you protect it.
0:28.9	The Banksy story.
0:30.3	When Banksy comes to town, listen on BBC Sounds.
0:39.3	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson,
0:44.8	the past brought to life by those who were there. This week, an apartheid era staging of Shakespeare's
0:51.2	Othello in South Africa that challenged racial prejudice when the black
0:55.4	protagonist kissed his white wife.
0:57.7	And that was a bit of a thunderbolt moment.
1:01.0	It was electric, and only two seats thundered up from the auditorium.
1:07.0	Also from the 1980s, the great Coca-Cola recipe blunder, and the story behind this video,
1:13.4	which has been watched by more than 300 million people.
1:17.4	All right, so here we are, one of the elephants.
1:21.3	The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long plums, and that's cool.
1:30.5	How that clip of an elephant at a California zoo launched the platform YouTube 20 years ago.
1:37.5	But before that, we're going to concentrate on events from the Second World War.
1:42.1	Having begun with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, it wasn't
	...

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