CD.
In 1960, the Imperial War Museum began a momentous and important task. A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing WWI veterans and interviewing them at length in order to record the experiences of ordinary individuals in war.
The IWM aural archive has become the most important archive of its kind in the world. Authors have occasionally been granted access to the vaults, but digesting the thousands of hours of footage is a monumental task. (There are over 2,500 interviews, some as long as 20 hours long). As a result, those seeking first person quotations for their works have only used a tiny fraction of the available pre-transcribed material.
Now, forty years on, the Imperial War Museum has at last given author Max Arthur and his team of researchers unlimited access to the complete WWI tapes. These are the forgotten voices of an entire generation of survivors of the Great War. Their stories have rested unheard for almost half a century, and nearly all of those interviewed have since passed away.
The resulting audiobook covers the loss of Vimy Ridge by the British, Battle of the Somme with losses of 20,000 Allied soldiers in one day and the battle of the River Ancre which concluded the battle of the Somme.
