Flashback Television

In September 2006, Taylor Downing, Managing Director and Head of History at Flashback Television, and Richard Melman, Progamme Controller of The History Channel, formally presented to the Imperial War Museum nearly 200 video tapes. This footage will be taken in for permanent preservation in the Museum’s internationally respected film and videotape collection.

The tapes are from a series of interviews recorded by Flashback Television between 2000 and 2005 for the series BATTLE STATIONS produced for The History Channel in the US and shown in the UK on The History Channel and on Channel 4. The tapes have a value of about £400,000.

Nearly 200 tapes were deposited at the IWM and they include interviews with a wide selection of veterans, ranging from

• the 1930s test pilot of the Spitfire, to

• the Challenger tank commander who led his crew to safety after being hit by 12 RPG rounds in Basra, Iraq in 2003.

The interviews include

• veteran Lancaster bomber crew members recalling the Bomber Offensive against Germany

• members of the crew of HMS Belfast remembering life on board the heavy cruiser and the sinking of the Scharnhorst in 1943

• the designers and users of the Mulberry harbours that were constructed off the Normandy beaches after D-Day and

• Spitfire pilots recalling the Battle of Britain.

This unique collection of interviews also features an interview with one of the team who helped develop Radar with Watson Watt in the 1930s, with a man who was part of the design team of the famous Mosquito, the fastest aircraft of the pre-jet era, and with an RAF pilot who flew alongside the V-1 buzz bombs to tip them off course.

The total cost in production terms of researching and interviewing the veterans amounts to about £400,000.

Taylor Downing, producer all 40 x 1 hour episodes of the BATTLE STATIONS series for Flashback Television, said that these interviews “represent living history for the future generations who will now be able to see and study these men and their wartime experiences. In 150 years these interviews will still be available at the Imperial War Museum and it will be like today us finding filmed interviews with the soldiers who fought in Napoleon’s army.”

It is important for veterans to know that when they are interviewed by Flashback Television the historically important testimony they record with us might well be donated later to the Imperial War Museum. Here their memories will be available for generations to come to read, watch and to learn from. It is vitally important that this historical material should be properly preserved for the future and the Imperial War Museum does an excellent job of this.

The copyright in the tapes belong to The History Channel who by their generosity have made this deposit possible.