WWII The Complete History Episode 4 A Kind of Victory
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00:30Europe has been at war for more than half a year.
00:36After the tension of the 30s, a decade when Europe had lurched from crisis to crisis,
00:41the war brought the continent a strange calm.
00:46After the initial blitzkrieg when Poland had fallen to the Nazi army in weeks, after the
00:51shock of two previously bitter enemies coming together in the Nazi-Soviet pact, an earthquake
00:56that realigned the alliances defining Europe, the continent had slipped into something that
01:01seemed neither war nor peace.
01:05Titanic battles had not been fought.
01:08The recurring nightmare that the horrors of the Western Front might be reborn had not
01:13happened.
01:14Troops on both sides sat and awaited action.
01:19In France, the Maginot Line of fortifications, a line of defenses along the German border
01:24in which the French placed such faith, was strengthened yet still further.
01:29Might was piled upon might.
01:31Destruction from the air had not appeared.
01:34The air raid shelters, the evacuation of children, the hurried issuing of gas masks had all seemed
01:39for nothing.
01:41To the people of Britain, this strange calm was called the Phoney War.
01:46The war was fought, but the action was in remote places.
01:51At sea, two great battleships had been lost.
01:54A German U-boat had daringly crept into the great northern anchorage at Scapa Flow and
01:59torpedoed HMS Royal Oak with the loss of 800 lives.
02:05In the far southern Atlantic, the German battleship Graf Spee was cornered in the South American
02:09port of Montevideo.
02:12Rather than sail to face destruction by a waiting British fleet, the German captain
02:16chose to scuttle his ship.
02:20At sea, the U-boat war against the commerce of the empire had slowly begun.
02:25The great liner Queen Elizabeth had made a secret dash to New York to finish her construction.
02:31In the far north, the Soviet Union and Finland had fought a bitter war amidst winter snows.
02:37Content that the Nazi-Soviet pact gave him a free hand, Stalin felt free to intimidate
02:42and bully the smaller countries on his frontiers.
02:46Despite fierce resistance against poorly led communist armies, the Soviets eventually inflicted
02:52defeat on the Finns and added Finnish territory to that grabbed from Poland.
02:57However, as the winter turned to spring, that illusion of peace was to dissolve before the
03:04eyes of the world.
03:06German armies swept northwards into Denmark and Norway.
03:10The aim was to conquer Norway, to secure Scandinavia on Germany's northern flank.
03:17Denmark was just in the way.
03:19A British expedition to the aid of Norway was rapidly defeated, the campaign ending
03:25in fiasco as the Royal Navy had to evacuate the army, a drama which in coming months would
03:31be replayed again and again.
03:35The crisis of the Norwegian campaign brought the fall of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
03:41In the British Parliament, he was famously told, you have been too long for any good
03:46you've been doing.
03:47In the name of God, go.
03:50The British Parliament turned to Winston Churchill, the only politician not tainted by appeasement
03:56of the thirties.
03:58Churchill's leadership was to be put to the greatest trial from the very start.
04:13On the 13th of May, 1940, on taking office, Prime Minister Winston Churchill's message
04:19to his new government, to the Parliament and the people of Britain, mirrored the plight
04:23of their country.
04:25Powerless to make any move that could threaten the Nazi state, Churchill gave no quick and
04:30easy solution.
04:31He offered no hint of any possible compromise, accommodation or understanding, no promise
04:37of any appeasement.
04:39I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat, he said.
04:47Churchill had come to power as the British war effort had collapsed into chaos in Norway.
04:53If the situation had seemed grave enough, the fortunes of Britain and her continental
04:57allies immediately plunged to new depths of despair.
05:12In the very hours that Churchill was taking office, in Europe, war was about to burst
05:18on the West.
05:20A German attack began across the whole of the Western border from the sea to Switzerland.
05:26In the North, German armies swept into the Netherlands and Belgium.
05:53In the South, seventeen divisions were hurled against the fortresses and the defenders
05:58of the French Maginot Line.
06:01The territory into which the German armies marched was, for the great part, that which
06:05had been fought over a generation before.
06:09In 1940, as in 1914, a small, highly professional British army took its place alongside the
06:17French.
06:20However, the war in 1940 was to be far different to that fought in 1914.
06:27It was a war where movement replaced static immobility, where the front line moved tens
06:32of miles every day, a war where even the words, the front line, came to have little meaning,
06:39where the safe area in the rear could in hours become enemy territory, in seconds become
06:46a tortured hell of aerial bombardment.
06:49The word that history uses for this type of war is blitzkrieg.
06:55Blitzkrieg was a word new to the world.
06:58It's a word born of the 20th century.
07:00Its first reported use was 1939, and since then has passed into nearly every language
07:06of the world.
07:08Blitz, lightning, Krieg, war.
07:13Blitzkrieg was known as the lightning war.
07:16To understand how blitzkrieg came about, as with so many of the events of World War II,
07:21is to understand the impact of World War I.
07:26In 1940, the this war of incredible mobility was played out upon the same stage as were
07:31only 30 years previously.
07:33An entire generation died moving backwards and forwards over the same shattered few miles
07:39of earth only emphasized the shock of the new.
07:44Throughout the history of human conflict from the first time a club was swung in anger,
07:49the advantage in war has swung between the extremes of offense and defense.
07:57Those primitive peoples who first used clubs had the advantage, but were bettered when
08:02met by those who had also invented the shield.
08:07The cycles of offense versus defense have continued throughout the history of warfare
08:13to this present day.
08:15In World War I, the perfection of just one weapon, the machine gun, had given the defense
08:21a crushing advantage.
08:23Two men in protected positions could resist a thousand.
08:28The result was stalemate, as neither side could mount a decisive attack.
08:36The first tanks had appeared in the later stages of the Great War.
08:39Lumbering and clumsy, they had crawled their way across the mud, the trenches and the barbed
08:44wire of no man's land.
08:47Their contribution to allied victory was not clear.
08:52Over so many of the leaders of the Second World War hung the shadows and ghosts of 1914.
08:59In the Great War, generals on both sides, bereft of ideas, had, in despair, resorted
09:06to the logic of attrition.
09:08The aim was not to defeat the enemy, simply to destroy, to kill soldiers.
09:14It was a strategy expressed as bleeding the enemy white.
09:26When the First World War was over, historians and military theorists all over the world
09:31sought to draw lessons.
09:34Winners always tend to think that the same tactics and weapons that won the last war
09:39will win the next.
09:41France thought the lessons of the war were that the defense had the upper hand, that
09:45the machine gun, the entrenched soldier, had the advantage.
09:49They sought to defend France by building a line of defenses all along the border with
09:54Germany.
09:55This was the Maginot Line, most accurately described as the Western Front, cast and set
10:01into concrete and steel, a complex of forts with protected underground roads, miniature
10:08railway systems, and deep bunkers as barracks.
10:20The victorious armies of Britain and France saw the tank and the aircraft as just another
10:26weapon to be fitted into existing ways of fighting war.
10:30Tanks were attached to cavalry units.
10:32Tanks were ordered to support the infantry.
10:35The result was that tanks moved at the pace of men marching on foot, at the same speed
10:41as horse-drawn transport and artillery.
10:44Their job to knock out machine guns so infantry could make a bayonet charge on foot and cavalry
10:51could gallop to attack with sabers drawn.
10:56It would be completely wrong to suppose that the British and the French ignored the tank.
11:01Tanks in fact made up large numbers of both countries' armies.
11:04The weakness lay in the minds of the commanders, in the theories and ideas of war.
11:16Air forces in Britain and France were seen in the light of futuristic theories, of imagined
11:21wars that could be won by air power alone, where unstoppable bomber forces would bring
11:27devastation to the centers of population and industry.
11:31The air force officers of Britain and France encouraged these ideas.
11:35They meant air forces were independent, free from interference by generals or admirals.
11:44Britain and France were the winners of World War I.
11:47Germany had suffered national disaster.
11:50The terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty had destroyed the once proud German military.
11:55The German military mind was open to new ideas, rejecting the old ways of thinking that had
12:00failed to bring victory.
12:02Nazism, National Socialism, believed itself the politics of the future, with an ideology
12:09of newness which readily embraced modern theories and ideas.
12:14It was in this fertile and receptive environment that the new technologies were realized to
12:19create the Blitzkrieg.
12:22The idea was to create an armored and mechanized army in which all elements moved at the speed
12:28of the fastest, not the slowest, where infantry and artillery were mechanized and could keep
12:34up with the tanks, where airborne soldiers and paratroopers could be landed behind enemy
12:40lines, where the air force was not independent, fighting its own private war, but was instead
12:46dedicated to the support of the army, with aircraft designed to attack tactical targets,
12:52troop formations and supply lines, in support of ground attack.
12:57The German Luftwaffe was by no means the ultimate fighting organization that its propagandists
13:02claimed.
13:03By the end of 1940, its weakness would have been laid bare to the world.
13:08But in the early summer, the Luftwaffe stood at the peak of its strength and effectiveness.
13:17Under the determined will of the Nazi administration, with active preparation for war in mind, Germany
13:23had focused on producing just a few highly effective and advanced aircraft.
13:28In Britain and France, the air forces were equipped with an assortment of types, some
13:32obsolete, some useless.
13:36The Luftwaffe's leadership, its officers, were of a high standard.
13:40In Germany, it was an honor and a mark of competence to transfer from army to air force.
13:46In Britain and France, such a move was a way for the incompetent to restart a career.
13:55Despite the modernity of the means of war, Blitzkrieg had, at its heart, classic military
14:01theory, ideas which would have been understood by the greatest commanders of the past, Alexander
14:07the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon.
14:11Blitzkrieg was not a strategy of wounding the enemy, of destroying him, but of techniques
14:16of hitting at the decisive point of rapid, fluid maneuver that could respond to the will
14:22of quick-thinking generals.
14:25Blitzkrieg was a strategy of encirclement and of surprise, in which victory would go
14:30to the quick and the skilled.
14:35The German word for armor is panzer.
14:39Germany created specialist panzer divisions, which, with close air support and airborne
14:44soldiers, were to act as the spearheads for German attacks, penetrating deeply behind
14:49enemy lines, outflanking and surrounding the enemy.
14:53The German army still had traditional elements, slower divisions of foot and horse that reduced
14:58and destroyed the pockets surrounded and cut off by the panzers.
15:03Panzer warfare, Blitzkrieg, made real the soldiers' nightmare, to be surrounded, to
15:09be cut off from home and safety, to have no way out.
15:15On May 10th, the forces of Britain and France outnumbered those of Germany.
15:20Germany had a total of 2,400 tanks, the French 3,000 and the British 1,000.
15:27And on that day, Hitler told his generals, gentlemen, you are about to witness the most
15:33famous victory in history.
15:39In the south lay the Maginot Line, fortifications against which the strongest of forces would
15:44find it difficult to prevail.
15:47This was where the French expected an attack.
16:16As a diversion, the Germans threw masses of ordinary non-mechanized and non-armored troops
16:22against the line.
16:23The Maginot fortifications did not extend across the Belgian frontier.
16:29Opposite these areas in northern France stood the best of the French army and the entire
16:34British army, guarding against a strike that would seek to bypass and outflank the Maginot
16:41Line and thrust to the rear towards Paris.
16:45This was what Germany had done in 1914, invading neutral Belgium to outflank the French.
16:52However, in 1940, the thrust came farther to the north, into Holland and northern Belgium.
16:59The French and British moved to meet the invasion.
17:03The northern attack was bait, an enticement, and a provocation.
17:08It was designed to draw the British and French to the north, into a trap, into destruction.
17:17As the western allies moved north, silently, quietly, through the dense forest of the Ardennes,
17:23came a third German attack.
17:26This concentrated the German panzer armies in one massive tank-based formation.
17:31The British and the French thought tanks could not work in the wooded country of the Ardennes.
17:37They could, and did, creeping slowly through narrow forest lanes, eventually to burst out
17:44into open countryside.
17:47As this silent menace grew, the first weight of the attack fell upon the Dutch in the north.
17:55The Dutch were genuine neutrals, and surprise was complete.
17:59A tiny army protected the Netherlands, just ten divisions strong.
18:04It was an army that had not been in the field since 1830.
18:09The Dutch Air Force was a mere 125 planes strong, and was half destroyed on the ground
18:15in the first hours of the assault.
18:18The Dutch, historically, had retreated behind barriers of water.
18:23German airborne troops simply bypassed these defenses.
18:27On May 13th, the Luftwaffe, against no resistance, destroyed the historic center of the city
18:34of Rotterdam, and the Dutch surrendered.
18:50Still the British and French advanced toward the north, to a decisive battle.
18:55Hitler was to save the campaign, as he received reports of the British and French advancing.
19:01It was wonderful the way everything turned out according to plan.
19:04When the news came through that the enemy were moving forward along the Hull Front,
19:08I could have wept for joy.
19:10They had fallen into the trap they had believed.
19:16On May 13th, the British and French armies were deep into Belgium and Holland, and the
19:20third German attack burst in their rear, accelerating to open country.
19:25Moving at tremendous speed, the panzer armies swung around to the west, attacking the channel
19:31ports, giving the British, and the very best of the French, no way out.
19:44By May 25th, catastrophe faced the entire British army.
19:50The entire British war effort was placed in the gravest peril, as the British expeditionary
19:55force was nearly surrounded.
19:58In the Great War, another British expeditionary force had doggedly defended this small patch
20:03of Europe for four years.
20:06In 1940, in just weeks, fast-moving panzer armies broke the British line, circled around
20:12to their rear, and threatened to surround the British, denying them a way out by holding
20:17the channel ports.
20:20The result would be that the entire army Britain had raised would be lost in mass surrender.
20:59Only one door, one way home across the sea, lay slightly open.
21:11This was the French port of Dunkirk.
21:15The Royal Navy began to organize the army's escape.
21:19To close the trap, all the Germans had to do was take Dunkirk.
21:23The days between May 26th and June 3rd number among the most important in the history of
21:29the world, a point in the timeline of humanity where the actions of a single man, a single
21:35mind, a single will, has a decisive influence on all that happens ever after.
21:43Within the encircled port were both British and French troops.
21:47That the British were planning escape was a fact at first hidden from the French.
21:52French troops were refused evacuation, and in ugly confrontations British soldiers opened
21:57fire on their allies.
22:03The panzer armies stood outside Dunkirk.
22:06They had paused to reorganize, regain their formations and shape, and were ready to make
22:12the final assault on the port, their generals ready, eagerly awaiting the order to attack.
22:19The order was to come from Adolf Hitler, and that command was crucially delayed for 48
22:25hours.
22:26Was it a mistake, or did Hitler fear he risked his forces?
22:31Did he not understand how close his dark ambition lay to fulfillment, or was it simply loss
22:37of nerve?
22:39Hitler wanted to completely destroy and humiliate the French, but saw in Britain a potential
22:45friend, and dreamed of his European empire allied with the British overseas empire, confronting
22:51and destroying the forces of Stalin's communism in the east.
22:56Of course, there were other factors that stayed the German armies.
22:59French armies fought fierce, covering attacks to win time.
23:03The Luftwaffe wanted to prove that it could defeat the British without ground forces.
23:11The result of Hitler's hesitation was what history has come to know as the miracle of
23:16Dunkirk.
23:17Dunkirk mobilized the British talent for improvisation, for pulling in unity during crises, that side
23:24of the British personality that is dogged, that refuses to give in, which adversity only
23:29inspires to ever stronger resistance.
23:32A hastily gathered fleet of small vessels, pleasure ships, small boats used by ordinary
23:38people for weekend holidays, crossed the channel and helped rescue the army from the
23:43beaches under the guns and bombs of the Third Reich.
23:47Abject defeat was turned into a kind of triumph, a kind of victory.
23:53Of course, the ships of the Royal Navy were the central element of the effort in the saving
23:58of the army, but the lasting image is of civilians, ordinary people, of the man next door, volunteering
24:05to climb into tiny craft designed for pleasure on sunny days, crossing a hostile sea to save
24:12soldiers from exposed and open beaches under remorseless air attack.
24:18A total of 338,000 soldiers escaped over the sea.
24:23After the British, 100,000 French were taken.
24:27All heavy equipment was lost.
24:29Vast stores of artillery, transport and tanks fell into German hands.
24:34German even threw away helmets and rifles in escape, but helmets, rifles and tanks can
24:40be replaced.
24:42Dunkirk turned crushing and humiliating defeat into a version of victory.
24:47Dunkirk was demonstration of the British will to endure and in the end prevail.
24:53Dunkirk was one of the events of the dark days of the war that gave the British people
24:58belief in their future.
25:01The possible course of history, had Hitler closed the trap, is stunning to contemplate.
25:07Britain would have had to surrender, the war might have ended, and the British Empire become
25:12ally to Hitler's tyranny and evil.
25:17With the escape of the British, in June, Belgium too capitulated and surrendered to the German
25:22occupation.
25:25With Nazi armies just 20 miles off sea from British territory, Churchill again repeated
25:31a message of defiance.
25:33In one of his most famous speeches, he once again took words and forged them into weapons.
25:41We shall go on to the end.
25:43We shall fight in France.
25:45We shall fight on the sea and oceans.
25:48We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
25:52We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
25:56We shall fight on the beaches.
25:58We shall fight on the landing grounds.
26:00We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
26:03We shall fight in the hills.
26:05We shall never surrender.
26:09While Churchill issued forth with belligerent defiance, the role of Nazi victory continued.
26:15The campaign in Norway came to a close as that country surrendered on June 4th.
26:21Hitler's northern flank was secure and Sweden, although neutral, was insulated from the war,
26:27from British interference and falling firmly into the Axis sphere of influence.
26:33In France, the forces of Germany had turned south to deal with the French.
26:38The remaining soldiers were from the reserve divisions of the French army, poorly equipped,
26:43badly trained, and of low morale.
26:46It was an army that marched on foot that Napoleon Bonaparte would have recognized.
26:55On June 9th, the French government appealed to American President Roosevelt to act as
27:00mediator.
27:01He refused, saying he could have no influence on European events.
27:06The next day, Italy entered the war, Mussolini's armies invading southern France.
27:20Mussolini was simply eager to make sure of a share of the spoils, not to be left out
27:25in the victory.
27:27In the United States, Mussolini's opportunism caused revulsion, the cynical nature of the
27:33attack added to the slowly growing swell of American opposition to the Axis.
27:39Italy's first involvement in the fighting could have been taken as a warning that Italy
27:43would prove an eventual liability to the Nazi fascist alliance.
27:48The French troops opposing the Italians in the south beat off the invasion, and only
27:53the later collapse against German forces attacking from the north prevented an embarrassing repulse
27:58for the Italians.
28:01In France, an impending sense of crisis caused the government to recall to office a hero
28:07of the Great War.
28:10Marshal Philippe Pétain had been the hero of 1915 and 1916.
28:15At the height of the Battle of Verdun, an earlier dark hour of crisis, his simple message
28:20of defiance, the famous words,
28:23Il ne passeront pas, they shall not pass, had become a battle cry.
28:29This spirit of defiance reflected that offered by Churchill.
28:33Tragically, the Pétain of 1940 was not the same man as the hero of 1915.
28:40The guilt of many thousands of lives lost, their last dying words, that battle cry, weighed
28:46heavy on the old man's shoulders.
28:49Pétain immediately suggested a peace with Hitler.
28:55On June 10th, the French government fled Paris and declared the city open, hoping by doing
29:01so to prevent the capital being fought over and destroyed.
29:05Churchill urged them to fight in the streets of Paris, to never surrender, but he was ignored.
29:13A week later, on June 17th, Paris was open for business as usual, only the tourists enjoying
29:20the summer were Germans.
29:23At the same time as some Frenchmen served their conquerors drinks, others were still
29:27fighting.
29:29Ironically, the Maginot Line had proved impregnable, secure until the very last.
29:38The Germans forced the French to sign the surrender in the preserved railway car that
29:43had seen the German capitulation in 1918.
29:47This was just one of a series of vengeful humiliations which Hitler was to inflict upon
29:52his enemy.
30:00On June 14th, the population of Paris endured the sight of the Wehrmacht marching in triumph
30:06down the Champs-Élysées.
30:09The surrender terms that Hitler imposed on the French were revenge and retribution for
30:14the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, a humiliation that the corporal decorated
30:19for bravery on the Western Front had felt so keenly.
30:23The French army was reduced to 100,000.
30:26The cost of the German occupation was to be borne by the French.
30:47Hitler famously went sightseeing in the French capital.
30:53On the other side of the continent of Europe, yet another opportunist state took its chance.
30:59The Soviet Union invaded and extinguished the independence of the tiny Baltic states
31:03of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, annexing them into the USSR.
31:11On June 17th, Pétain was made premier of a new French government which had made peace
31:16with Hitler, with a base in the southern French town of Vichy.
31:21The Vichy regime was to become a byword for collaboration and betrayal.
31:27On June 18th, another Frenchman, Charles de Gaulle, made a broadcast from London to the
31:33French people.
31:34He boldly declared that the war was not over and the French must resist.
31:39He denied that the Vichy regime had any legitimacy.
31:44De Gaulle's story truly proves that there is such a thing as destiny.
31:49De Gaulle was a devout Catholic and fierce patriot.
31:53Three times wounded in the First World War, he spent much of that conflict as a prisoner
31:57of the Germans.
31:59His life, until World War II, was spent as an unspectacular career soldier.
32:05He wrote books about armored, mechanized war, but his ideas found no acceptance in the French
32:11military.
32:13In 1940, he was made the commander of a division that was forming, which had some minor successes
32:18as the French army crumbled.
32:21On June 6th, he was appointed a junior defense minister in the hastily reorganized government.
32:27He was a minister for just 10 days, but during that short period, he met and impressed Winston
32:34Churchill.
32:36When the French government resigned on June 16th, De Gaulle was smuggled into the UK.
32:42At Churchill's personal insistence, his famous broadcast was made.
32:48De Gaulle became recognized as the head of the Free French and began to mastermind a
32:53strategy of striking back at the Axis from wherever possible, most notably the far-flung
32:59corners of the French colonial empire.
33:02Out corners of the world declared war against Vichy and the Axis.
33:17De Gaulle saw his duty as a religious calling.
33:20Events impose this sacred duty on me, I shall not fail to carry it out, he said.
33:29De Gaulle would, in the coming years, boldly fight as the leader of a free people, mounting
33:35actions independent of his allies.
33:39Through strong self-belief, he refused to become subject to Britain and acted as an
33:45independent leader.
33:46Pétain's government tried De Gaulle for desertion and in his absence condemned him
33:51to death.
33:55The 100,000 Free French were just the largest group of defiant exiles that had refused to
34:01surrender to the Germans and by roundabout routes had escaped from occupied Europe and
34:06found their way to Britain to carry on the war.
34:10A Czechoslovak brigade, 5,000 strong, existed as part of the British army.
34:17Four squadrons of the RAF flew with Czech markings.
34:24Polish armed forces made up an even more sizable number of anti-Nazi forces.
34:29In 1940, there were 14,000 soldiers, numerous naval and merchant ships and five squadrons
34:36in the Polish Air Force.
34:39In the coming Battle of Britain, Polish pilots were to be among the most resolute, courageous
34:44and successful destroyers of German attackers.
34:55In early July, an engagement was fought which demonstrated to the world that Churchill's
34:59defiance was not just words.
35:03The French fleet, the fourth largest in the world, lay at anchor, having hardly seen action.
35:10The British feared the Vichy government would surrender these ships and place them at the
35:14disposal of the Germans.
35:17The Royal Navy sent a powerful fleet to lie off the ports in which the French fleet lay
35:23and the French admirals were given hard choices, put to sea and join the British in a combined
35:29fleet, scuttle their ships or be destroyed.
35:35The French admiralty refused to comply and ordered all ships at sea to move to the ports
35:41where the main fleet lay to confront with the British.
35:45The Royal Navy intercepted the message and the British ships opened fire.
35:51The French ships at anchor were easy targets and the bulk of the Vichy Navy was destroyed.
35:57Nearly 1,300 French sailors died, creating a legacy of bitterness.
36:27Churchill's words were turned into action.
36:53Action really would pay any price to survive.
37:06On August 5th, Italian troops invaded British Somalia from their neighboring East African
37:12colony.
37:13The motivation for war was once more Mussolini's ego and passionate, ravenous hunger for conquest
37:20to add to his new Roman Empire.
37:23The fighting between European powers and European ideologies was spreading over the surface
37:29of the planet to embroil all peoples.
37:33Men were to fight and die in all corners of the earth.
37:39The fall of France had a wide effect on the conduct of the war, affecting the war of resources,
37:45the war of economic and industrial strength.
37:49It has been said that all wars have at their root the control of resources, of food, of
37:54raw materials, of manufactured products, including weapons themselves.
38:01The possession of these resources is as important in bringing victory as much as number and
38:07quality of armies, navies and air forces.
38:11The preconditions of the war of resources was not in Britain's favor.
38:16In 1939, Germany was self-sufficient in food and most raw materials.
38:22Her supplies of energy were based on coal, oils she had to import, but advanced science
38:28and technology meant that coal-based substitutes for oil could be found.
38:34In Britain, the position was far different.
38:37Britain was a trading nation which looked out to the rest of the world, its merchant
38:42fleet the largest.
38:44Britain needed to import no less than 55 million tons of goods of all kinds each year to survive.
38:53Compared to Germany's self-sufficiency, that merchant fleet had to bring wheat from
38:57North America, meat from South America and Australia.
39:02If all shipping imports to England were halted, it would take a mere few months to completely
39:07starve Britain to death.
39:11At the outbreak of war, the huge British Royal Navy had thrown a tight blockade around Germany,
39:17closing the narrow gaps of the Channel and the North Sea.
39:21German naval strength was trapped, their warships facing a long, tortuous journey before being
39:26able to attack British trade.
39:30As France fell, this ground which determined naval strategy shifted.
39:46With the occupation of France, the Germans could use the French Atlantic ports from where
39:51100 years before, Napoleon's navy threw down its challenge to the British, another struggle
39:57in which Britain struggled for life or death against a continental dictator.
40:03German U-boats could now have easy access to the clear, deep blue water of the ocean.
40:09As soon as a U-boat left French coastal waters, it entered the shipping lanes that brought
40:15oil from Africa and the Middle East, that carried armies to Britain's overseas empire,
40:22over which flowed strategic materials, without which the RAF could not fly.
40:30Sail a short distance further, and were found the ships bearing food from the Americas.
40:38Germany was poorly prepared to take advantage of this. The U-boat numbers initially only
40:43slowly grew.
40:48Churchill was to say, after the war, that the U-boat war was the war that truly terrified
40:54him. Not a war of flaring battles and glittering achievements, but a fight of statistics, diagrams
41:01and curves that the public did not understand. A war where inspiring words and spirit could
41:07have no effect.
41:11With the fall of France, Britain and her empire stood completely alone against Hitler. The
41:17only weapon was belligerent defiance. Time and time again, Churchill made words into
41:25sharp weapons.
41:27Let us brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British empire
41:33and its commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say this was their finest hour.
41:41If we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, will sink into the abyss
41:47of a new dark age, made more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted
41:53science.
41:57Britain could have no strategy other than survival. Churchill's hopes lay in involving
42:02America in the conflict. All over the south of England, invasion was awaited, preparations
42:09were made.
42:29The famous Home Guard, of those too old and too young for military service, was recruited.
42:35It gave all a sense of involvement. With the passing of time, the measures of improvised
42:41weapons now seems comedic, the stuff of farce.
42:48From within the Home Guard, a highly secret elite of stay-behind saboteurs was given special
42:53training to work from secret hideouts.
43:01That an army of old men and boys were preparing to defend their homes against the might of
43:08the German army, the most modern in the world, using spears and antiques, is a measure of
43:15the desperate plight which faced the British people.
43:20In the course of your duty, you may have the luck to come in contact with the enemy.
43:27If you do, one of your duties is to shoot when you see a sitter, and shoot to kill.
43:36When in later years the Home Guard's German equivalent was called into real action with
43:41the aged and children fighting experienced battle-hardened soldiers, there were to be
43:46no jokes, no comedy, simply a desperate tragedy.
43:53The general atmosphere of fear and tension pervaded the whole of Britain with a feverish
43:58climate of paranoia.
44:01Both the physical and social structures of Britain were torn apart. Road signs were removed
44:07to confuse an invading enemy. Fields were filled with obstacles to hamper glider and
44:13airborne forces. Wild experiments were made to set the sea on fire.
44:19What became known as parachute fever everywhere created rumors of saboteurs and infiltrators.
44:27Wild stories of Germans in British uniforms circulated, often caused by misunderstood
44:32Polish and Czech soldiers. The classic myth was that of German paratroopers walking the
44:38British countryside disguised as nuns.
44:43The structure of the country was dismantled in an urgent need for scrap metal. Aluminum
44:49pots and pans were collected to make warplanes. Iron railings and fences were gathered to
44:55build battleships. These actions were as much a media move as a real search for the materials
45:01of war. There was a need to make the whole country feel that something was happening
45:07and that each and everyone could be involved.
45:12The physical signs of desperate paranoia were mirrored by changes to the political and social
45:18landscape of Britain. One of the first acts of Churchill's government was to make new
45:23laws that effectively abolished traditional British personal freedoms and the right to
45:29private property. Now anyone could be told to do any job and property could be seized
45:36by the government and used for the war. The right to strike was abolished. New taxes at
45:44100 percent were introduced to prevent war profiteers. The democracy had paradoxically
45:50assumed the garb of the totalitarian dictatorship that it sought to destroy. The fear of subversion
45:58meant those thought politically suspect were arrested and detained. Pre-war British fascist
46:05leader Oswald Mosley was imprisoned. His followers in the British Union of Fascists interned.
46:11As the British people lived lives of febrile panic and paranoia, the fact remained that
46:17a few miles away the German armed forces were preparing to complete the war with the invasion
46:24of Britain. It is a fact of history that wars very rarely turn out as political leaders
46:31or generals ever imagined. The blitzkrieg had brought the Nazis stunning success at
46:38a speed they had never thought possible. Hitler's view of the world had never encompassed
46:44taking on the might of the British Empire. From the earliest days of Hitler's political
46:50thought he had seen his destiny, that of the Nazi movement and that of the German people,
46:56as lying in a titanic war in the east against Soviet communism. While Hitler may have sought
47:03humiliating revenge on the French, whom he viewed as the prime architects of Germany's
47:09interwar humiliation, against Britain and her empire he had not planned a war. Now the
47:17German command was confronted with the need to plan an invasion of the British Isles.
47:23Looked at from the perspective of the longer history of Europe, Germany was now placed
47:28in a classic dilemma. A strong continental power, used to looking strategically inwards
47:34to the east, fighting its wars across land frontiers, was faced with the challenge of
47:40defeating the preeminent naval power. The invasion of Britain was codenamed Operation
47:47Zaloba, Operation Sea Lion. Germany was not an historically great naval power and its
47:55attack on Britain was planned more as a river crossing. Landings would be made on the beaches
48:01of southern England and the panzers would thrust northward. Today we think of amphibious
48:09warfare as using special landing craft and vessels. This was far from the case in 1940.
48:17The fleet to carry the German army across the sea was an improvised armada of river
48:21barges and merchant ships. The German navy was not large enough to engage the British
48:28in a powerful fleet to fleet battle. Britain was historically the dominating sea power
48:33of the world and its powerful navy would easily subdue and destroy any fleet of clumsy inland
48:39craft moving across the channel. For the first time there was a way to solve the problem
48:47of British naval power. All navies in 1940 were vulnerable to air attack. It was aircraft
48:54rather than the great guns of other battleships that were to cause the losses of capital ships.
49:01The British command of the sea could be countered by the Germans having command of the air.
49:07However, to gain command of the air, the Germans had to destroy the RAF. In Churchill's words,
49:15the battle of France is over. The battle of Britain has begun.
49:23Next time on World War II, The Complete History, the battle of Britain rages in the skies over
49:28southern England as Hitler's Luftwaffe throws its strength of more than 1,000 bombers against
49:34the fighters of the Royal Air Force. Its aim is total air supremacy over the British Isles
49:41to negate British naval power and enable the German army to cross the river and mount the
49:47first foreign invasion of the British in nearly 1,000 years. With the army shattered following
49:54Dunkirk and the Home Guard preparing to fight with spears, the defense of Britain, the future
50:00of civilization lies in the hands of less than 3,000 young men, the pilots of the RAF,
50:08what Churchill called the few. The battle is a war of courage and of technology.
50:16As state-of-the-art fighters meet in air-to-air combat, the twin legends of the Spitfire and
50:23the Hurricane are born. The new science of radar, born from the science fiction idea
50:30of a death ray, plays a crucial role in the defeat of the Nazi air force. As Hitler and
50:37Luftwaffe Commander Goering play for higher and higher stakes, throwing more and more
50:43of Germany's strength against Britain, the tide of battle begins to turn against Britain.
50:49In a dramatic switch of policy once more, Hitler makes the wrong choice, and mounting
50:55losses force the Luftwaffe to abandon attacks. The Battle of Britain ends, and the Blitz
51:02begins. A ruthless assault by night brings death and destruction to the cities as Hitler
51:09tries to break the will of the British people. Hitler fails. His efforts only increase the
51:16will of the British people to never surrender.