Hello and welcome this is 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 bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland

This body I saw was that of a youth being carried out by other civilians with a priest in the lead, waving a bloodied handkerchief as a white flag.

Also the abolition of corporal punishment in British schools.

The Taws has left its mark on generations of Scottish children.

It's made of shoe leather to a traditional design. Two or more thongs, the edges smoothed

off to bruise rather than cut. Plus we'll look at the historical roots of the current

Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh and Myanmar, and we remember the Godfather of Gospel music in America.

I was standing by the bedside of a neighbor who was just about the cross the swelling tide.

More from Thomas A Dorsey later in the podcast. But we begin with a key moment in the Vietnam War, a moment which

helped to turn the tide of public opinion in the US. American involvement in the conflict, supporting

the government of the South against the Viet Cong

rebels and the Communist forces of North Vietnam, had begun as early as the 1950s, and by

the beginning of 1968, the US had more than half a million troops in the field.

In those days, what we now know as the Daily News cycle was very different.

The Prime Time Network Nightly News set the agenda.

And at the end of January 1968, millions of Americans sat in their living rooms agast as they watched

Vietnamese Communist Forces launch a massive coordinated attack on towns and cities across

southern Vietnam. It became known as the Tet Offensive after Vietnam's New Year

celebrations. Alex Last has been speaking to Julian Petifah, a former BBC

journalist who witnessed the attack on Saigon. And the telephone rings and

it's my cameraman who is in another hotel, which was close to the presidential palace in Saigon saying there's a big firefight going on just outside.

...