VE Day: a people's history
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Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Nazi Germany had finally been defeated, and for 24 hours Britons could let their hair down and celebrate. But not everyone was in the mood to party. 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day, and John Willis has told the story of the day via the voices of Britons who lived through it in a feature for the May issue of BBC History magazine. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizon, he discusses what these testimonies can reveal about the state of mind of a nation after six long years of war.
You've written a book, The People's War Unheard Stories, which draws on a vast oral history project of wartime testimonies that was carried out by the BBC 20 years ago in 2005. How did you go about condensing a database of I think I've read it was like 47,000 testimonies? into a single book. How do you choose which testimonies to choose and which to discard? Well, it is an astonishing archive, the People's War, as you say, 47,000 testimonies and memories covering the whole range of the war, both at home and overseas.
And the biggest challenge of all was try to curate those voices into a coherent book that told the story of the war, but also gave some characters who kept popping up, whose stories carried the narrative through the six years of the war. And to try to condense them, I just had to use my journalistic experience really to choose what really stood out. I've written, you know, four other books about the Second World War, so I I've got some understanding of that particular moment in our history. This is a grand floor history, as it were, isn't it?
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