The end of hostilities in Europe in May 1945, followed by Japanese surrender four months later, signalled the end of the Second World War. Yet, the political, technological, and cultural revolutions that war had released would continue well beyond 1945. These, in turn, set the conditions for a continuing conflict as the hot war metamorphosed into a cold war that dominated international relations, military planning, and the allocation of national resources for much of the rest of the Twentieth Century.
In this sense, the five decades between the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 are part of a continuum, in which the ±«Óãtv played an important role as observer, reporter, and participant.
The Cold War, between competing power blocs of the global East (Soviet Union, China and their spheres of influence) and West (America, Britain, Western Europe and their allies), soon became a prominent editorial focus for the ±«Óãtv in its broadcasts at home and around the world.
Oliver Whitely, who had worked during the first years of the war in the ±«Óãtv Monitoring Service, the UK’s open source communications intelligence agency, became acutely aware of this on his return to the ±«Óãtv after military service in 1946 as he listened to the combative rhetoric of the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov.
Whitely would go on to become Managing Editor of the ±«Óãtv External Services, what we know today as the ±«Óãtv World Service.
Broadcasting in over forty languages around the globe, they were to play a front line role in the battle of ideas between East and West during the Cold War. Editorially independent, but funded by British government Grant-in-Aid, ±«Óãtv overseas broadcasting penetrated the Iron Curtain on a daily basis and quickly became an integral part of Britain’s Cold War arsenal.
For the ±«Óãtv, as with other institutions concerned with international affairs, the end of the Second World War was an all too brief interlude in the continuing global conflicts that scarred the Twentieth Century.
A resurgent Soviet Union and an expansionist United States, the dawning of a nuclear age, post-war reconstruction and the multiple struggles of independence movements were all constrained and consumed by the geopolitics of the Cold War.
The Berlin blockade of 1948/9, the 1956 Hungarian uprising and Suez crisis, the Prague Spring of 1968, and Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980s all stemmed from the unresolved tensions that flowed from the Second World War and before.
And throughout this extended period of war, the ±«Óãtv offered a daily commentary on its unfolding course, while maintaining a direct line of communication between the people of Britain and those on the opposite side of the hot and cold war divide.
In November 2019, more material from the ±«Óãtv Oral History Collection was released providing fresh light on the Corporation’s role behind-the-scenes of this longer war.
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The ±«Óãtv and the Cold War
To commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we explore the role the ±«Óãtv played in communicating our understanding and experience of the Cold War, with the help of newly-released interviews with those involved from the ±«Óãtv Oral History Collection.