The Chindits and USAID

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's episodes of Witness History.

The formation of an unconventional special force during the Second World War sparks a discussion about three others around the world with military historian Lucy Betteridge-Dyson.

Plus, the founding of the United States Agency for International Development, the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic 40 years ago and the first baby born after a womb transplant.

Finally, Mexican-American boxer Oscar De La Hoya's toughest test - a clash with Ghana's Ike 'Bazooka' Quartey and how the online marketplace started at a house party in Lithuania in the noughties.

The first item contains outdated and offensive language.

Contributors: Major General Orde Wingate - leader of the Chindits. Baroness Jackson - economist who influenced the founding of USAID. Cathy Offinger and Jean Louis Michel - explorers who helped find the wreck of the Titanic. Prof Pernilla Dahm-Kähler - gynaecologist who helped deliver the first baby after a womb transplant. Oscar De La Hoya - boxer nicknamed 'the Golden Boy of Boxing'. Milda Mitkutė - co-founder of Vinted.

(Photo: Members of the Chindits in the jungle in Burma, now Myanmar. Credit: Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.
0:08.9	In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?
0:16.2	Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.
0:20.0	A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by
0:23.1	their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me,
0:28.6	Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to The History Hour from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson,
0:41.0	the past brought to life by those who are there, and have appeared this week on witness history
0:45.3	on the BBC World Service.
0:47.5	Coming up, under attack from President Trump, we look at the origins of USAID.
0:53.4	The question which began to be discussed on my visit to Washington in 1961
0:57.2	was, was it at all in the American national interest?
1:00.4	Plus, the team that eventually found the wreck of the Titanic
1:03.3	and the first woman to give birth after a womb transplant.
1:07.8	Little Windsor was out quickly, screamed, and we were very happy. And I feel
1:14.9	privileged to be part of this process. That's all coming up. But first, we're going to what is now
1:21.2	Myanmar, but which was known as Burma during the Second World War. And it was in that
1:26.6	Burmese theatre of war that an unconventional
1:29.3	special force was created to help the Allies confront the Japanese army. Jill Kursley tells
1:35.1	the story using recordings from the BBC archive, and this item contains outdated and offensive
1:40.3	language.
1:41.3	Here they are, for the first time in newsreels the Chimdits. Take a close look at them.
1:47.4	Not that it'll help you to recognize any of them their own mother couldn't.
	...

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