Â鶹Éç

Follow the troops’ last-minute preparations for the landings, through the vivid despatches of Frank Gillard, Guy Byam and others for the newly created Â鶹Éç programme designed specifically to cover the enormous number of breaking stories that D-Day would unleash. It was called War Report and it was the acme of the Â鶹Éç’s wartime reporting - Frank Gillard under intense artillery fire in the battle of Tilly-sur-Seulles – and then eventually gaining access to the devastated village once the battle has subsided.

Here we join Richard Dimbleby with the newly liberated inhabitants of Caen, thanking the Allies for their deliverance, and – just a few miles away – hear the bells of the local church, rung in wild joy to commemorate the village’s new-found freedom. Just outside Florence, as the Allied advance slowly liberates Italy, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas finds, in the dark recesses of a Tuscan farmhouse, a treasure trove of masterpiece paintings, including Botticelli’s legendary Primavera.

But it’s not all joy and deliverance. The Far Eastern war is still intense and tightly fought, and despite the rejoicing in Europe as VE (Victory in Europe) Day dawns, there are still months of fighting before Japan is defeated in August 1945.

And the seeds sown by the final declaration of peace bear bitter fruit as the postwar world is newly divided by ideology and former Allies turn to enemies in the Cold War.