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, from 1960 a turning point for apartheid in South Africa, the Sharpeville Massacre.

I knew some of these people. Here are my friends. Here are girls who some of them were even

girlfriends. Killed by the police in front of my eyes.

Plus from the 1980s in Philadelphia the police bombing of a suspect's house.

I'm six years old and I found my aunt and a couple other family members and they were all

huddled around the television with tears pouring down their faces. And we meet one of the

two men who became the first to descend to the deepest point on the planet.

There's no room for fear because fear takes over.

People paralyzed.

That's all coming up later in the podcast and those are all gripping stories in their own

right, but our starting point this week takes us to a defining moment in 20th century history.

It's the moment when the world pivoted from the World Wars fought with bullets and bombs to the Cold War, a conflict of ideologies.

In a dramatic speech on 5 March 1946, just months out of office Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill condemned Soviet control

of eastern and central Europe and said an iron curtain had descended across the continent.

It made headlines around the world and provoked a furious reaction

from Stalin. This report is from Alex Last.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

On the 5th of March, 1946, soon after the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill,

Britain's former Prime Minister just recently out of office, gave what would be

a historic speech in a packed gymnasium at an obscure college in Fulton, Missouri.

The gymnasium has been beautified for the occasion.

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