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With the intervention of Japan and the US into the war, the conflict spreads worldwide. The Axis' advance through Russia is unrelenting, until they are checked by the heroism of the Russian forces at the city of Stalingrad (today, Volgograd). Hitler is forced to retreat, and soon, too, the long siege of Leningrad is lifted. In North Africa, the grinding struggle of the Desert War eventually also brings victory for the Allies, and forms a base from which, slowly and inexorably, they win back occupied Italy. The tide is turning. Meanwhile in Tehran, the Allies meet to plan Operation Overlord, the top-secret assault on occupied Normandy.

Richard Dimbleby and Godfrey Talbot tracked the Desert War with sound pictures and vivid recordings of the battles, the like of which the Corporation had never before broadcast. Likewise from Italy, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas’s very Welsh literary flourishes imparted a painterly descriptive flare to his accounts of bombing raids in Italy. In this episode too are rarities, such as the UK premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony, performed in solidarity with Russia, and the same composer’s arrangement – in Russian – of the British folksong, Blow the Wind Southerly, performed in Moscow and relayed to listeners in the UK.

(Photo: Anzio beach landing, Italy. Credit: Getty)