The BBC and World War Two.

History The History of the BBC pages have been updated with a huge archive of material from World War II in which corporation staff and others describe their experiences of the war and what it was like to work under those conditions, attempting to inform the public despite the pressures from government and the resources available.

Here's a page about celebrity during the period, with audio of General Charles De Gaulle broadcasting in French to his people from BBC Forces Radio:

"France had fallen, and the military commander had just arrived in London post-haste from Bordeaux. Now, in exile, he entered the BBC’s studios and sat before the microphone to broadcast to his fellow countrymen and women a fierce repudiation of Pétain’s armistice agreement with Nazi Germany.‘As the irrevocable words flew out upon their way’, he recalled, I felt within myself a life coming to an end’. Broadcasting, he said, had provided him with ‘a powerful means of war’.De Gaulle would broadcast from the BBC studios on several more occasions. But for him, the people of France, and for the BBC, this first broadcast represented a dramatic and vivid moment in the war."

There's a mountain of material here and I can't wait to set aside a day to work my way through it all.