Benedict Cumberbatch may teach his young fans a thing or two about history today.

Cumberbatch joined Patrick Stewart and Toby Jones in a tribute to today’s 70th anniversary of D-Day by re-recording BBC news bulletins from that fateful day during WWII. The reports will be mixed in to BBC Radio 4’s regular news coverage, airing at the same time the dispatches were broadcast to a beleaguered Britain in 1944.

The recordings of the news bulletins will run through Sunday, to give listeners a sense of a magnitude of the campaign that was the turning point for the Allies’ campaign in Europe.

The storming of a 50-mile stretch of French coastline at Normandy remains one of the most awe-inspiring battles in military history for its scope and the skillful planning that it required. More than 160,000 Allied soldiers invaded Nazi-held France on D-Day, an extraordinary mobilization that cost the lives of more than 4,000 soldiers and wounded thousands more.

Here is a link to BBC Radio 4’s re-recorded dispatches.