5-9-14
'All Honour to You' - the forgotten letters sent from occupied France
Breaking Newstags: France, letters, WW2
The letters - about 1.000 have survived - were sent to London from just after the French surrender to Germany in June 1940, through to the end of 1943.
They were addressed to the French service of the BBC, otherwise known as Radio Londres, which during the German occupation was a vital source of information and comfort for millions of French men and women.
Extracts from the letters were read out on Friday evenings on a programme called The French Speak to the French, whose aim was to build morale and stiffen civilian resistance to the Germans and Vichy.
After the war, the letters were put in storage and forgotten. That was until historian Aurelie Luneau stumbled upon them while researching her thesis on Radio Londres.
"I was in this tiny room in the BBC archives in Reading, and they brought me a box marked 'Letters from France'," she says. "One look inside and I knew it was one of those finds that historians normally only dream about."
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel