WWII.By.Drone.S01E05
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00:00Throughout the world, the intriguing remains of structures and machines lie testament to
00:07one of the most crucial aspects of the Second World War, air power.
00:15Military aviation came into its own during World War II.
00:17They are now ready to become a central strike force on the new modern battlefield.
00:26Today, aerial drone footage, along with cutting-edge LiDAR technology, allows us to reveal evidence
00:33of military aviation innovations that shaped the course of history.
00:39This was the heart of the entire gun battery.
00:41It would have been a really impressive sight when the battery was in operation.
00:47From the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz to Hitler's miracle weapons and the
00:51air war over Berlin, we gain an extraordinary new perspective on World War II's battle for the skies.
01:21By 1944, the tide of war has turned.
01:43Germany's quest to build an all-powerful Third Reich has become a fight just to survive.
01:53But on an island in the Baltic Sea, German scientists have developed a new weapon that
01:58Hitler hopes will change the Nazis' fortunes.
02:03The V1, or Doodlebug.
02:06The V1 is essentially a drone, it's a pilotless plane that you just fly across the channel
02:13and then it drops, hopefully, on the target and causes mayhem.
02:20In mid-1944, Hitler orders their deployment against Britain.
02:28The war was prematurely thought to be coming to a swift end and suddenly these weapons
02:33arrived out of a clear blue sky.
02:40They reigned terror on cities like London.
02:46They fire them at the United Kingdom and they do considerable damage.
02:52To a war-weary British public, the arrival of V1s is a new and deadly terror.
03:02Flying at an altitude of around 3,000 feet at a speed of up to 400 miles an hour, they
03:07are very difficult to shoot down.
03:10So Britain's engineers need to turn to a new technology to counter Hitler's latest gambit.
03:19Faint traces of what the British come up with survive to this day.
03:30At Flamborough Head in Yorkshire, on the coast of Northern England, archaeologist Chris Colunco
03:35is examining what little remains of Britain's cutting-edge defences used against Germany's V1s.
03:45These things were massively high-tech at the time, you know, using state-of-the-art technology
03:50which had come to a pinnacle at the end of the Second World War in 1945.
03:56Today, only a few remnants can still be seen on the ground of Britain's former defensive
04:02front line, but Chris is confident he can obtain a much better perspective from the air.
04:09Well for me, my main curiosity with this is that all other examples in this area have
04:14been lost through coastal erosion, and as a result I'm particularly interested in this
04:18one because we can learn a lot from this single site which survives, but also interpret that
04:22data and apply it elsewhere to work out how effective these batteries would have been
04:25on this stretch of coast.
04:28To tease the history out of these ruins, Chris will need the help of some cutting-edge technology
04:33of his own.
04:36And so he has enlisted the help of aerial imaging specialist Ben Bishop and his LiDAR-equipped
04:42drone.
04:43LiDAR, short for Light Detection and Ranging, utilises a series of lasers which, when processed,
04:50will reveal features that aren't visible to the naked eye.
04:55Through processing, we can start to eliminate features that we're not interested in, such
04:58as the vegetation, trees, over behind you we have some gorse, those kind of features
05:04we can start to filter out and we can classify them as non-interesting features, but with
05:09the drone, hopefully, we can start to help you to link this together and identify how
05:14this site worked.
05:19After programming the drone's flight path, Ben begins to scan the area of interest.
05:26Right now, the drone's doing a grid pattern, up and down, so on the screen here, I can
05:32see where the drone's meant to be going, and basically what it does is it does this grid
05:36pattern up and down across the entire site, once we get to the end, it's going to come
05:40back in, do a figure of eight and land, and that'll be the data collected.
05:45If the LiDAR scan is successful, it could reveal that there is more to this site than
05:50meets the eye.
05:53These crucial wartime defences in northern England highlight the fact that during World
05:58War II, London isn't Nazi Germany's only target.
06:03We'll have our first start of launching V1 flying bombs off aircraft out to sea, with
06:12the intention, especially up here, of hitting Manchester.
06:16The north of England is home to much of Britain's industrial production during World War II,
06:23and so with Germany having developed the technique of dropping V1s from planes, the north becomes
06:28a prime target.
06:32This battery was built to counter that threat from air-launched V1 rockets.
06:40With the drone having completed its LiDAR scan, Chris and Ben get their first look at
06:44the raw data.
06:48So if we then play the data as it's captured, we'll then see the features come in and out
06:53of the data set, and so here you can see where the drone's moving forward, you can see some
06:58gorse here coming through, the beginning of a gun emplacement.
07:02Yeah, yeah.
07:03You see that?
07:04Another one there, and a third one.
07:07Oh yes.
07:09The LiDAR has penetrated the overgrown vegetation, enabling Chris and Ben to see hidden features.
07:17So by looking at the data, we can start to see some of the features you've been talking
07:21about, and so we've got that ridge and furrow, we've got those gun emplacements starting
07:26to show themselves.
07:30The data will be processed to create a 3D model of the site, finally revealing the full
07:35picture about these crucial gun emplacements.
07:45But back in the war, while Britain's military are trying to innovate to combat the threat
07:50of the V1s, civilians remain terrified by the many flying bombs that do get through.
07:59Morale didn't break, but it was heavily strained, so you had this real issue of trying to protect
08:05your own life from the dangers above, and having that problem of not knowing if you're
08:10going to wake up the next morning.
08:15I remember my grandmother telling me that she'd been in a pub in Fleet Street called
08:20The Rainbow, when the sound of a doodlebug approaching came, and suddenly it stopped.
08:28And the hubbub in the pub immediately ended, and people waited.
08:33Was it going to fall on them?
08:35And then there was a low sound of a distant explosion.
08:39Immediately the hubbub resumed.
08:41People thought it had fallen on some other poor sod, not on them.
08:46Germany's deadly V1s are a terrifying weapon that Britain has to stop.
08:52The research team's LiDAR survey reveals that fortunately, back in World War II, Britain's
08:58coastal defense batteries have an ace up their sleeve.
09:11During World War II, Germany's deadly V1 flying bombs are raining down on Britain.
09:18Today, a new LiDAR survey of military defenses at Flamborough Head in northern England is
09:25about to reveal the cutting-edge technology that enables wartime Britain to shoot down
09:31V1s.
09:34So what we're seeing on the ground is this circular earthwork, which makes up the edge
09:38of the emplacement itself, and then we have these concrete foundations, which are the
09:43ammunition recesses where the ammunition for the gun itself would have been stored.
09:48The LiDAR scan clearly shows the outer boundaries of where one of the defense batteries' guns
09:54once stood.
09:57But the key to the battery's effectiveness isn't just its powerful guns.
10:02Crucially, it's the battery's tracking system that makes the guns so accurate.
10:08Okay, so this was essentially the heart of the entire battery.
10:12Okay.
10:13This, what we see here, is the remains of what was called a tracker tower.
10:17At the top of the tracker tower is the predictor, an early form of computer.
10:23Computers would use its scopes to track the V1s.
10:27The predictor would calculate the speed and distance of the target and send the information
10:32via cables to a dial on the gun.
10:36So the information that was gathered by this instrument would have been used to create
10:40a firing solution, which was then transferred to every single one of the gun emplacements,
10:44allowing the guns to be turned and elevated to the correct height that was required to
10:48hit any incoming targets.
10:50By using a predictor, the chances of hitting incoming V1s increases dramatically, becoming
10:5625 times more likely than without one.
11:02Controlled by the predictor, the LIDAR scan has revealed that eight guns once stood here
11:08defending northern England.
11:11This was essentially the height of anti-aircraft artillery technology at the time.
11:15This really set the ball rolling in terms of the modern technology we see in warfare
11:18today.
11:22Both Germany's V1s and the anti-aircraft batteries that defended against them were
11:27the culmination of innovations that began long before the war.
11:34In December 1903, the Wright brothers achieved the first successful heavier-than-air powered
11:40flight.
11:42Then even as humanity celebrated the dawn of the aviation age, the world's military
11:48began considering how to use this new invention.
11:53And by World War I, the first experimental steps were being taken to seriously weaponize
11:59aircraft.
12:02In World War I, air power was in its absolute infancy.
12:05You know, we're dealing with big decisions.
12:08Do we use dirigibles, you know, blimps?
12:11Or do we use fixed-wing aircraft, you know?
12:14And there's a whole lobby that says dirigibles are the way to go and that aircraft are just
12:18sort of primitive technology.
12:21Nobody knew quite what to do with it.
12:23They used aircraft as observer planes.
12:26They put cameras on the bottom of the planes.
12:29And then they started, by the end of the war, using aircraft to drop small bombs and gas.
12:36You have the famous battles of Rickenbacker and the Red Baron that we all know so well.
12:42The First World War saw aircraft take their place in the war arsenals of nations around
12:48the world.
12:50But with this new technology came a new danger to civilians, too.
12:56In Britain, there was this real obsession with the threat of aerial bombardment, which
13:00actually stemmed from the Gotha raids over London in the First World War.
13:04So it wasn't a completely out-there possibility that London could come under siege once more.
13:14After World War I, the memory of the successful raids by Germany's Gotha bombers leads Britain
13:20to invent a method of detecting aircraft before they can be seen.
13:24On Britain's southern coast at Dungeness, remains of these curious devices watch out
13:34over the sea to this day.
13:37They built a number of these acoustic devices in the 1920s and early 1930s along the British
13:45coast that would give them some warning.
13:49The distinctive shape of these devices, plus strategically placed microphones, enabled
13:54them to magnify the sound of aircraft crossing the English Channel.
14:00They were like giant earphones, but built out of concrete with these baffles.
14:06They could pick up the sound of an aircraft engine 20, 30 miles out.
14:15These remarkable acoustic mirrors become obsolete almost as soon as they are built.
14:20By the late 1920s, aircraft are becoming so fast, their sound can't be detected in time
14:26to stop an attack.
14:36During peacetime in the interwar period, aircraft continued to rapidly evolve, their development
14:42driven not by war, but by competition.
14:48Events like the Schneider Trophy see planes from all around the world race against each
14:53other.
14:55Crowds of hundreds of thousands would assemble wherever it was raced, and it was extremely
14:59popular and the fliers became the stars of the time.
15:05To stay ahead of the competition, aircraft companies continued to develop ever faster
15:10planes, fueling dramatic changes in aircraft design.
15:16They were metal, they were streamlined, they were of course much, much faster, and it was
15:21a real step change in the development of aviation.
15:25The improvements that are developed through the sport of racing will soon forge a new
15:30generation of military aircraft and reshape the future of warfare.
15:37These are things that hadn't been thought about 35 years before, and suddenly, you know,
15:41they are in every air force in Europe.
15:44Within two very, very swift decades, you have got air power in all its violent modernity.
15:52These aircraft were now ready for prime time in a way that World War I aircraft had not
15:57been.
16:00One nation eager to exploit these developments is Germany.
16:05But after defeat in the First World War, the country is no longer permitted an air
16:09force, and so the Germans exploit a loophole.
16:14Germany, while banned from having an air force, was not banned from having civil aviation.
16:20So the German government poured large subsidies into building modern airfields, modern long-range
16:27navigation systems, and in a sense German aviation was much better subsidized and financed
16:35than French or British civil aviation.
16:39And so despite the restrictions, by the 1930s, Germany is building modern airfields, training
16:46pilots and designing cutting-edge aircraft.
16:51Then begins the rapid rise to power of Adolf Hitler, eager to turn peacetime aviation into
16:57a devastating weapon of war.
17:05In 1933, Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany.
17:10Eighteen months later, he becomes Führer of Nazi Germany.
17:15The country's advanced civil aviation provides the foundations of a secret air force.
17:21They pledged billions of Reichsmarks into creating this new air force.
17:26Building up the Luftwaffe was a massive priority for the Nazis.
17:30In 1935, Nazi Germany finally publicly acknowledges the formerly secret Luftwaffe.
17:38Given the speed of the 1930s aircraft, Britain knows its listening ears early warning system
17:45is now hopelessly out of date in the event of war.
17:52But at Bordsee Manor on the Suffolk coast, engineers are secretly working on a revolutionary
17:58new aircraft detection system that will change warfare forever.
18:06Within these walls, Britain's top secret new technology is being developed by Robert Watson
18:12Watt.
18:12The very first aeroplane from France landed near Dover Castle. A very great and wise journalist
18:20tore up the captions offered by his staff and wrote, Britain no longer an island.
18:30A meteorologist by trade, Watson Watt discovers that radio waves beamed at the sky are bounced
18:37back by thunderclouds.
18:40This was developed into the idea that radio waves could be bounced off approaching enemy
18:46aircraft and this was the origin of radar.
18:51Watson Watt refines the system and by the end of 1935 aircraft are being detected up
18:58to 60 miles away.
19:02But Britain's development of radar is about to become much more urgent.
19:10When we think about preparedness, you've got to think about experience.
19:13The German pilots had been practicing for war.
19:19In particular, the Luftwaffe perfect their deadly skills in Spain.
19:26In February 1936, the people of Spain elect a left-wing government.
19:33The right-wing officer class lead a military coup and the divided country erupts in civil
19:39war.
19:41Germany provides air cover when the rebels, led by General Franco, besiege Madrid.
19:47A year later, Franco gives the Nazis free reign to test out their new bombers on the
19:54Spanish town of Guernica.
19:56It was a market day in Guernica and they suddenly swept in out of a clear blue sky, bombed the
20:04place.
20:05Ordinary people were killed outright, were trapped under the rubble.
20:11Bombing destroys most of Guernica.
20:13But for Hitler, the attack is merely useful practice for the Luftwaffe.
20:19They tried different things.
20:21What is it like if we bomb a city?
20:23What is it like if we fight this way?
20:29When the news of Guernica's fate reaches Britain, there is utter shock.
20:34So this led to absolute panic, you could say, that in the event of another war, whole cities
20:42would be laid waste, thousands and thousands of people would die.
20:46And I think this was the time when the world woke up to the potential for aerial bombing.
20:53For the British, the idea that what happened to Guernica could one day happen to London
20:59is horrifying.
21:00The English Channel now seemed a tiny barrier against an enemy.
21:08But there is one new technology in which Britain is ahead in the 1930s, radar.
21:14Radar gave Britain a complete technological leg up.
21:19If we hadn't have had it, we would have had to rely on civilians scanning the skies with
21:24binoculars and listening out for the drone of the approaching planes.
21:32At Bordesey Manor, the race begins to develop the burgeoning radar technology into a comprehensive
21:38aircraft detection system, under the codename Chain Home.
21:45The first radar station at Bordesey is soon followed by others erected elsewhere.
21:52The advantage of the early warning system is that you can pinpoint exactly where the
21:58enemy is coming from and you can marshal all your planes to that spot. You don't just have
22:03to keep patrolling up and down hoping you're going to find them at some point.
22:08But it would take more than a few radar stations to cover the main approaches to the country.
22:14In fact, Britain plans to construct 21.
22:19But building this new technology to prepare for war is going to take time.
22:24And time is about to run out.
22:32In September 1939, Hitler orders the invasion of Poland, sparking the Second World War.
22:40The Luftwaffe's dive-bombing techniques, perfected in Spain, are combined with very
22:45rapid attacks by tanks and ground troops in a tactic known as Blitzkrieg.
22:53The word Blitzkrieg in German literally means lightning war. And this was a tactic to coordinate
23:01an air offensive, to bomb them from the air at the same time as armoured columns were
23:06breaking through on the ground.
23:10Squadrons of Stuka dive-bombers descend on Poland.
23:15These planes would come screaming out of the sky with their sirens, drop their bomb
23:25and streak away again.
23:27And so this was very much a psychological weapon of war as well as a technological weapon
23:33of war.
23:37Germany's combination of air power and ground forces sees Poland surrender in less than
23:43four weeks.
23:45And over the next nine months, many other countries across Europe fall to the seemingly
23:50unstoppable Third Reich.
23:54Britain knows that its time will come soon.
24:00Fighter aircraft production was stepped up, anti-aircraft defences were stepped up, things
24:06like barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns.
24:11By mid-1940, German forces are occupying France, having won victory in just 46 days.
24:21And as a triumphant Adolf Hitler tours Paris as a conqueror, Britain knows that it's next
24:27on Hitler's list.
24:31But as an island nation with a very strong navy, Britain will be a hard nut to crack.
24:38Germany will have to rely on air power alone.
24:43This was purely an air battle. The victories that the Germans had achieved with their blitzkrieg
24:48tactics in Poland and in France were achieved in coordination with offensives on the ground.
24:55And there wasn't that. This was the Luftwaffe versus the RAF.
25:02Fortunately for Britain, it has the chain home radar network to counter the onslaught
25:07of the Luftwaffe.
25:09The chain home system only is completed just before the war breaks out. But you have the
25:14entire coast covered.
25:16When the German air offensive begins in July 1940, Britain can see it coming.
25:22Radar's absolutely crucial because it allows the British to see what's coming towards them
25:27and what to scramble in response.
25:30You can get your squadrons up in the air and go and fight them.
25:35During late summer 1940, the fate of the United Kingdom hinges on the crucial battle
25:40of Britain between the Luftwaffe and the RAF.
25:46More than any other single factor, the chain home system saves Britain from defeat.
25:52By using radar, British aircraft can be immediately deployed to specific locations to counter
25:58German attacks.
26:01So Hitler changes tactics. Instead of trying to destroy the RAF, the Nazis will bomb British
26:08cities and try to force the British people into submission.
26:14The blitz has begun.
26:22With Britain's radar systems stopping the Luftwaffe from gaining air supremacy over
26:27the RAF, Germany adopts a new approach in September 1940.
26:35Now the main target won't be the RAF, but British cities.
26:41The natural target for the Luftwaffe to go for was London, and Goering had this obsession
26:46with London. He wanted to see it go up in flames and to make the British super peace
26:51as quickly as possible.
26:54Over the next eight months, London and other strategic English cities are subjected to
26:59an intense bombing campaign known as the Blitz.
27:07But the morale of the British people does not break.
27:10Blimey, I thought they'd got you.
27:13Who, me? Nah, I had me fingers crossed.
27:17In fact, the Blitz will prove a costly error for Germany.
27:23Switching from targeting the RAF in the Battle of Britain to attacking British cities in
27:28the Blitz gives the RAF time to rebuild its strength and take the fight to the Luftwaffe.
27:39But although Britain successfully avoids total defeat in 1940 and 1941, the Luftwaffe remains
27:46a threat to London throughout the war.
27:52The capital is always vulnerable for one simple reason. It's very easy for German planes
27:57to locate.
27:59The Luftwaffe were following the course of the Thames from the Thames estuary into the
28:03heart of London.
28:07To try to stop the German bombers using the Thames to guide them straight to London, Britain
28:12builds a new type of anti-aircraft defence just offshore from the mouth of the river.
28:20Guy Mounsell was a civil engineer. He formed what became known as a chain of Mounsell Towers
28:27or Mounsell Forts in and around the Thames estuary, off the Essex coast.
28:34To this day, their remains stand just offshore from the mouth of the river. The best way
28:39to see the engineering that went into their construction is from the air, by drone.
28:45The idea Guy Mounsell came up with was a structure which in many ways was the forerunner of today's
28:50oil platforms in the sea, which was a concrete and steel platform with stilts going down
28:57into the sea bed.
29:02Today it's the crew accommodation that remains. But back in the Second World War, the towers
29:07were crowned with deadly anti-aircraft guns, ready to shoot down any German plane that
29:13dares use the river to its advantage.
29:17Together with other increasingly effective means of air defence, radar being the prime
29:23example, the Mounsell Towers off the Thames estuary definitely discouraged the Luftwaffe
29:29from intensifying the Blitz.
29:35In June 1941, Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union also helps take a lot of
29:41pressure off Britain. With the Luftwaffe forced to fight on two fronts, Britain can now more
29:47easily go on the attack.
29:54Bomber squadrons are repeatedly sent over to Germany to pummel military targets. But
30:00Britain's bombers don't have accurate target aiming devices, so lots of practice is needed
30:05to try to achieve precision bombing.
30:14Ashley Walk in southern England is one of the places where the bombers practice.
30:20Every type of aerial dropped explosive that was used by the Royal Air Force during the
30:24Second World War was tested here at Ashley Walk.
30:28From the ground, the evidence of the crucial role this area plays in the Allied war effort
30:33is easy to miss. But this testing ground was always intended to be viewed from the air.
30:42There's all sorts of markers that were put in place so that airmen could see targets
30:46and visual indicators as they approached the bombing range.
30:51The arrows that once pointed to illuminated targets remain to this day, and what looks
30:56like paths were actually created for bombers to practice targeting railway lines.
31:04Yet despite all the wartime practice here, bombing runs over Germany remain very inaccurate,
31:11as highlighted by an official British government report in August 1941.
31:16There'd been this real embarrassment in 1941 when the book report came out, and there was
31:23this issue of the fact that only one in ten bombs were hitting their place over the Ruhr.
31:28The British had been launching these wildly inaccurate nighttime raids on German industry.
31:33They were lucky to hit the city they were aiming for, let alone hit the factory within
31:37the city.
31:40In February 1942, in an attempt to shake things up, Arthur Bomber Harris is appointed Commander
31:47in Chief of Bomber Command.
31:51Since the RAF were unable to hit their targets with any accuracy, Harris' new approach is
31:56as simple as it is deadly. Bombers should not attempt to hit specific targets.
32:03Harris says, look, let's just fly at night, and let's not aim precisely at targets. Let's
32:09area bomb. We'll just choose an area of a city like Hamburg or Cologne, and we'll just
32:14drop all our bomb loads on it. And if we get the target, fine. And if we don't, that's
32:18fine too, because if we take out a lot of German housing, we're going to lower morale
32:22inside Germany.
32:23There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well, my answer to that
32:32is that it has never been tried yet.
32:35Harris' proposed strategy sees debate rage in the corridors of power. Should bomber production
32:42be ramped up to destroy Germany's cities, even though tens or even hundreds of thousands
32:48of German civilians would be killed?
32:52There was a debate about Bomber Harris from the very, very first moment about whether,
32:57first of all, these raids were efficient, whether they were having any impact on German
33:01war-making capability at all, and secondly, whether they were morally right.
33:08Germany, of course, has already targeted British civilians in the Blitz. And so, after months
33:14of discussions, the British reach a decision. They will go ahead.
33:23Much of the industrial production of Britain is harnessed to build a vast fleet of heavy
33:28bombers. And with the United States also joining the war, Allied air superiority will now become
33:35the most crucial single factor in the struggle to defeat Nazi Germany.
33:43From early 1942, the U.S. Army Air Forces began arriving in Britain. Seventy airfields
33:48largely in the southern portions of the country, probably 250,000 Americans.
33:56And with the pilots come the planes, including B-17 Flying Fortress bombers.
34:03The B-17s of the 8th Air Force were real workhorses. They had good guns, they had good armor, and
34:10they worked hard.
34:12The B-17s are equipped with an advanced, new type of bombsight that allows for more precise
34:18targeting. And so, while Britain bombs indiscriminately by night, America concentrates on specific
34:27high-value targets during the day.
34:30Germany will be subjected to 24-7, 365 bombing, quite literally, until its entire infrastructure
34:38has been destroyed.
34:40Germany is getting overwhelmed by wave after wave of Allied bombing attacks. But the Nazis'
34:47anti-aircraft defenses ensure that Allied bomber crews pay a heavy price.
35:01On a beach in Kent lies the wreck of an American B-17 bomber.
35:11Having sustained heavy fire over Germany, it nearly makes it back to England, but has
35:16to ditch in the sea just offshore.
35:20Remarkably, all the crew survived the crash.
35:27But many other shot-up aircraft aren't so lucky. Tens of thousands of Allied crewmen
35:32are killed during the war.
35:35They'd be buffeted by gales of flak, and then they'd be hit with German fighters, and they
35:42could not swerve or try to avoid. They had to remain in formation and take whatever punishment
35:46they got.
35:48So an individual bombing run wasn't so much a mission as it was a kind of trauma for the
35:54crew. It's no wonder that some of these young men cracked under the strain.
36:02The ordeal of these bomber crews, of course, must be set against the suffering of the hundreds
36:07of thousands of German civilians killed by their bombs.
36:13Whether the Allied bombing campaign could be morally justified remains debated to this
36:18day.
36:21But by virtually wiping out many industrial cities, area bombing is undoubtedly effective
36:27at crippling the German war machine.
36:32The brutal air war looks sure to defeat the Nazis. But Hitler has a terrifying trick up
36:38his sleeve. Military rockets.
36:45By late 1943, Germany is on the retreat on the Eastern Front in Russia. And when the
36:53Western Allies invade Nazi-occupied France on D-Day in June 1944, the situation for Hitler's
37:00Nazi regime becomes desperate.
37:07But at the same top-secret weapons testing facility that made the V-1, German scientists
37:15are working flat out on a new miracle weapon that Hitler hopes will turn the tide of the
37:21war.
37:25Hitler begins relying more and more on these so-called Wunderwaffen, these miracle weapons,
37:30which he thinks will be a stand-in for conventional air power. That if you can't field the big
37:35fleets of aircraft needed to take on the Allies, you can terrorize them into submission.
37:42Peenemunde was a very large site on this distant island which protected it from prying eyes.
37:49If you like, the Germans were putting all their eggs into this basket.
37:55While the secret research facility's first effort, the V-1, was successfully resisted
38:00by the Allies earlier in the war, the Germans have a second, much more ambitious weapon
38:06waiting in the wings.
38:10It is the brainchild of Werner von Braun.
38:15Werner von Braun, he was only 31 or 32 when the war ended, a young German rocket scientist.
38:22Von Braun spent his childhood devouring science fiction comics and dreaming of a future of
38:27interplanetary travel. He therefore began working in the burgeoning field of rocketry.
38:35German interest in rocketry began before Hitler came to power because under the Versailles
38:41Treaty, Germany is forbidden an air force. They're not forbidden rockets. Nobody thought
38:48of rockets. Well, the German artillery branch started research into rockets.
38:55By 1944, with Nazi Germany's armies forced on to the retreat on every front, rockets
39:02became Hitler's last, best hope to avoid total defeat.
39:09Werner von Braun turns his dreams of space flight into a weapon of war, the V-2 rocket.
39:17His motto was, I aim for the stars, and as the American humorist Mort Sahl says, Werner
39:22von Braun aimed for the stars, but sometimes he missed and hit London.
39:29In September 1944, the first wave of V-2s are fired at the British capital. The world's
39:36first long-range supersonic ballistic missiles are a huge leap in weapon technology. Rocketing
39:44towards London at over 3,000 miles an hour, there is no defense against them.
39:51You can't shoot it down. It's just so quick. I mean, blink and you miss it. It's not just
39:55that. It's blink and you're dead. And that will land and explode before you hear it coming
40:00because it's going obviously so much faster than the speed of sound.
40:05It's just a huge explosion. And these were one-ton warheads. I mean, they devastated
40:09city blocks.
40:11But V-2s have come too late in the war to make a difference to its outcome, and too
40:18early in their development.
40:22The problem, of course, is that the payloads weren't big enough, the guidance system wasn't
40:26good enough, and they couldn't make them in anything like the kind of numbers needed to
40:30subvert the Allied advantage in air power.
40:35And so, while a technical tour de force, V-2s aren't going to save the Nazis.
40:42And as the war draws to a close, the British are also developing advanced weapons of their
40:49own.
40:51At Ashley Walk Bombing Range in England, there's more to these pools of water than meets the
40:58eye.
41:00The entire area is pockmarked by craters, but some of them have flooded and become natural
41:05ponds.
41:10It's here that British engineers test variants of the legendary bouncing bomb that is used
41:16during the famous Dambusters raid.
41:21And in the final months of the war, the biggest and most destructive weapon ever exploded
41:26in Britain is also tested here.
41:30In March 1945, the largest munition ever exploded on British soil was tested out at Ashley Walk.
41:36It's the famous 10-ton Grand Slam bomb, and frankly, I wish I'd been there to witness
41:43it.
41:44The Grand Slam bomb works on a radically different principle to conventional bombs.
41:50The idea behind this Grand Slam bomb was that it would penetrate into the ground and create
41:54a small earthquake, which would be powerful enough to destroy targets, particularly bridges.
42:01Bridges being very narrow are very difficult to hit with regular bombs, and you would need
42:05a direct hit on a column to destroy it, which is almost impossible to achieve.
42:09But if you could generate a small underground earthquake close to the columns of a bridge,
42:15you could actually shake it to the extent that it would collapse and bring the bridge
42:19down.
42:21The largest non-nuclear bomb of the war is deployed against the Third Reich after just
42:26one day of testing.
42:30The Bielefeld Railway Viaduct is a crucial transport link for Germany's industrial Rohr
42:35heartland.
42:38Despite over 50 Allied attacks on the viaduct with conventional bombs, it remains intact.
42:47The Grand Slam bomb puts it out of action for the rest of the war.
42:59The war is, in any case, very nearly over.
43:03Less than two months later, on May the 8th, 1945, the Allies accept Germany's surrender.
43:11But even as the public celebrate VE Day, there are some concerns about the price of victory.
43:19And the Allied attacks on Germany were ten, perhaps twenty times more destructive and
43:25effective than the German bombing campaign, the Blitz, against Britain had been.
43:31And after the war, even Churchill seemed to have had a sense of shame.
43:39Yet despite the regrettable civilian casualties, it had now become clear to everyone that air
43:45power would be the future of warfare.
43:49World War II was the first war in history in which the battle for the skies was critical.
43:55But it certainly wouldn't be the last.