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00:30Few men in the long history of the British Empire won the deep respect and admiration
00:42of the entire nation as Winston Spencer Churchill did in the darkest days of World War II.
00:49From his appointment as prime minister in May of 1940 to his departure in 1945, Churchill
00:55inspired his allies, frustrated his enemies, and charmed Great Britain with his determination,
01:01his will, and his wit.
01:03As prime minister, Churchill moved himself into the secret war room offices, often sleeping
01:08there.
01:09From these secret headquarters in the middle of London, but underground and hidden from
01:14public view, he poured over classified documents, planned covert military operations, and launched
01:22clandestine political gambits, all to defeat his great enemy, Adolf Hitler.
01:31Before becoming prime minister, he'd been a soldier, a spy, an author, a successful
01:37politician.
01:39He was outspoken, bold, and direct.
01:44He once said, there are men of ideas and men of action, and I'm definitely a man of action.
01:50He wanted to lead Britain to victory, and he was determined to do it.
01:56To beat the Germans, Churchill turned the murky world of espionage and military deceit
02:01into an organized, fierce, and devastating weapon of war.
02:07From his secret office in the cabinet war room, he would direct some of the most fascinating,
02:12ingenious, and devastating covert missions of the war.
02:17He used secret information to challenge the enemy in battle, to attack behind the front
02:23lines, and to manipulate Britain's allies.
02:29Part of the reason, I suspect, why Churchill was so interested in intelligence, and on
02:33the whole so good at using it, was that it was such fun.
02:38From the moment that Churchill found something interesting, he was enthused by it.
02:43And one of the things that enthused him was danger.
02:47He said at one point that there are few thrills in life quite so exciting as, and I quote,
02:54being shot at without result.
02:55In other words, you know, the man misses.
02:58Well, I mean, that really is the kind of excitement that most of us can do without, but Churchill
03:02loved it.
03:05But for all his success, he'd experienced many setbacks in his long career.
03:12Churchill had suffered humiliating mistakes with military intelligence that would have
03:16brought most careers to an end.
03:21But through it all, he learned and grew.
03:24And as the threat of World War II approached, he was ready for action, ready to lead his
03:30nation to victory, and ready to wage an all-out secret war against the Germans.
03:41Early in his life, he'd had plenty to inspire him.
03:45His father, Randolph Churchill, was a descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, himself a celebrated
03:50war hero.
03:51Controversial and outspoken, Randolph Churchill's career burned bright, but fizzled as poor
03:56health and political enemies devastated his ambitions.
04:00Randolph died when Winston was just 20.
04:04His peers regarded him as a man whose great potential went unrealized.
04:11Churchill was an average student.
04:14The man who would one day receive the Nobel Prize for Literature earned only passing marks
04:18in grammar and reading.
04:21But he possessed a quick mind and a hunger for knowledge, even if his early teachers
04:27weren't impressed with his ability.
04:31He had not been to one of the big English universities.
04:36He was neither an Oxford man nor was he a Cambridge man.
04:39He'd gone to Sandhurst instead because he was too stupid to go to one of the universities.
04:43He was self-taught in many respects.
04:47Churchill's fascination with secret war was a direct result of his own experience.
04:52At 21, he joined the military.
04:56In 1899, after serving briefly in Cairo, Churchill was sent to South Africa.
05:02The Boers were fighting Britain for their independence.
05:06Churchill was a commissioned officer and also a member of the press corps.
05:09He landed in Cape Town and, wanting to be close to the action, jumped aboard a train
05:14heading north, behind enemy lines.
05:19I think there's one episode in his early life that's very relevant to his fascination with
05:23secret warfare and behind enemy lines activity.
05:27He was captured by the Boers and made a prisoner of war.
05:32He then made a dramatic escape.
05:35And for several days had to survive behind Boer lines as a fugitive.
05:43Back home, the newspapers followed his daring escape.
05:47Churchill had scaled the walls of the prison.
05:50Without maps, a compass, or any knowledge of the Boer language, Churchill travelled
05:55over 300 miles behind enemy lines from Pretoria to the Portuguese-controlled border.
06:02While the Boers launched a nationwide manhunt, Churchill secretly made his way by train at
06:07night.
06:10Once home, he became a genuine war hero.
06:14From that experience, he could always say in the future, when it came to discussing
06:21secret agents behind enemy lines, I have been there too.
06:25I was once behind enemy lines.
06:26I know what it's like.
06:28And I think he relished this.
06:30And he took those memories of his sort of glorious youth, youthful escapade and adventure,
06:36into his later experience as war leader.
06:41Churchill's wartime exploits made him a popular speaker back home and gave him a political
06:45platform on which he could run for parliament.
06:51Elected to his first public office in 1900, Churchill quickly gained a reputation as an
06:57up-and-coming talent whose ability to stir controversy with sarcasm and invective was
07:02matched only by his charm.
07:06His wit soon became legendary.
07:09Once Lady Astor had criticized him for the amount of alcohol he drank.
07:13She told him that if she were his wife, she'd poison his drink, to which he replied, Madam,
07:18if I were your husband, I'd drink it.
07:23On another occasion, Churchill was heard to comment of a colleague he thought particularly
07:28arrogant.
07:29There, but for the grace of God, goes God.
07:33But there was one subject he was deadly serious about, Britain's need for adequate security.
07:39To Churchill, secret information gathering was the key to military success.
07:45In 1909, when he was 35, Britain's secret service was formally organized and made operational.
07:52No one in Whitehall was as interested in or as involved with the new military intelligence
07:57unit as was Winston Churchill.
08:02He knew about the creation of what was then called the Secret Service Bureau.
08:07And in fact, we now have documents that reveal that within a matter of weeks, Churchill is
08:15talking directly to those running the Secret Service Bureau about espionage matters.
08:24By 1911, Churchill's political talent earned him a cabinet post.
08:33But it was during the First World War that Churchill learned about the possibilities
08:37and limitations of secret information.
08:42When war broke out, Britain was decoding German messengers, naval messengers, but they really
08:51needed to centralize the effort and to bring experts together to work on it full-time in
08:57a concentrated way.
09:00Churchill created Room 40, a special place to decode, organize, and disseminate naval
09:06intelligence.
09:09Churchill's effort improved the use of this information, but secret intelligence was rarely
09:14shared between the Army and the Navy, creating the potential for mistakes and misuse.
09:20In fact, the misuse of intelligence led to one of the greatest disappointments of Churchill's
09:25career.
09:26In 1914, in the midst of the bloodiest fighting of World War I, a plan was launched to bring
09:35the war to a swift end.
09:38The Balkans were considered by military planners to be the backdoor to Europe.
09:44Churchill and others thought that it was an area of weakness and vulnerability for the
09:48Germans.
09:49In fact, he would one day refer to it as the soft underbelly of Europe.
09:55It was a bold and daring secret plan.
09:59British ships would sneak into the Dardanelles Strait, separating Asia Minor and Turkey,
10:05hammer the coast at Cape Helles, and take Constantinople, the capital of Turkey.
10:13But the British underestimated the coastal defenses, and when the battleships failed
10:18to succeed, troops were sent in to finish the job.
10:23Over the course of a year, the operation turned into a quagmire.
10:30Five of the nine battleships were destroyed, and thousands of British soldiers lost their
10:36lives.
10:37It turned out to be bloodbath.
10:39The intelligence about Turkish armaments or Turkish fortifications in the Dardanelles
10:44was very badly wrong and terribly outdated.
10:47And this was, in fact, amongst other things, a very bad failure of intelligence.
10:54Considered one of the chief organizers of the plan, Churchill was viciously attacked
10:58by his adversaries and abandoned by many of his supporters.
11:05His political career appeared to be all but over.
11:10A darkness descended upon Churchill that would haunt him for years.
11:16Churchill often suffered, I think, from what he called his black dog, which I think we
11:21would now describe as a kind of manic depressive state.
11:25One reason he didn't like introspection and introspective novels was that he was essentially
11:30a man of action.
11:31And if he stopped for too long, I think, you know, what he called his black dog could overwhelm
11:36him.
11:37So he liked to keep busy.
11:40Churchill traded his place in the political line of fire for a place in the front line
11:44of the war.
11:45At the age of 40, he asked for and received a commission to lead troops.
11:51After witnessing fierce action at the front, he returned home, newly invigorated.
11:57By the early 1930s, Churchill began warning the nation about the growing threat of fascism.
12:04But the question remained, would anyone ever again listen to Winston Churchill?
12:16In the 1930s, as Adolf Hitler was beginning his rise to power, Winston Churchill was a
12:22political outsider.
12:24He made his living writing, but he longed to be at the center of political events, at
12:28the center of the action.
12:32Churchill referred to the 1930s as his wilderness years.
12:36It was the only decade of the 20th century in which Winston Churchill was not in office.
12:43Churchill appeared to be rather out of date and rather right-wing by the 30s.
12:49It was during this period that Churchill made what he would later view as a great blunder
12:54with secret information.
12:56He precisely revealed in his World War I memoirs how the British had broken the German codes
13:01and used the information to win the war.
13:05It would prove to be a grave mistake that alerted the Nazis to the need for tougher
13:09encryption.
13:12By 1935, despite the fact that he held no office, Churchill spoke in public, warning
13:18of the growing strength of the German military, declaiming the weaknesses of the British forces
13:23and criticizing Prime Minister Chamberlain's policy of appeasement.
13:30Many people believed his future was behind him, that he was burned out, he was finished.
13:37He ran his campaign, increasingly vociferous campaign, against appeasement and for the
13:45rearmament of Britain against Hitler.
13:49By the mid-1930s, Churchill had already begun his secret war against Hitler.
13:54He surprised those in the know with his accurate assessment of Germany's accelerating rearmament.
14:00Few in high places knew where Churchill got such precise information about the German
14:05military buildup.
14:07In fact, he had a secret source high up in the British intelligence, his close friend
14:14and confidant, Desmond Morton.
14:17I think that you would characterize it as a straightforward and quite disgraceful patriotic
14:23leak.
14:24Desmond Morton had access to all the current appreciations of German strengths.
14:32He had access to all this information and he was passing it straight to Churchill.
14:40Churchill's insistent cries were ignored at first.
14:43In the 1930s, a nation determined to avoid repeating the horrors of World War I viewed
14:49Churchill as an alarmist.
14:52But as Hitler built his military into a juggernaut and as the German nation began to grind inexorably
14:58towards European conquest, it was Britain's tomb that quickly changed.
15:03Suddenly, Churchill was no longer a doomsayer.
15:07Winston Churchill was a prophet, perhaps even a savior.
15:13When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Churchill was transformed from presumed warmonger
15:20to war leader.
15:22He returned as First Lord of the Admiralty, the office he had left in disgrace over a
15:26decade earlier.
15:28The higher office awaited the man who had been among the first to warn the nation of
15:33the German threat.
15:36I think it helps to think of Winston Churchill as a sort of stopped clock, a pocket watch
15:42that had ground to a halt somewhere in the early years of the 20th century.
15:47For most of the 20s and 30s, he is out of place.
15:51But suddenly in 1940, he's telling the right time again.
15:57In May of 1940, the nation learned that Chamberlain the Dove was out and Churchill the Lion would
16:04lead them.
16:06The king invited Churchill to Buckingham Palace and conveyed by tradition what Churchill's
16:11party had already decided by ballot.
16:14Churchill would become the next prime minister.
16:17As he would later say, I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past
16:22life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.
16:29As Churchill moved into the official residence of the prime minister at 10 Downing Street,
16:34he faced a crisis of epic proportions.
16:37Well, what faces Churchill the day he becomes prime minister is impending disaster.
16:49As the day he becomes prime minister, the Germans attack with the massed forces of Wehrmacht
16:54in Western Europe.
16:57Great Britain faced the Nazi war machine alone.
17:02Within a matter of weeks, France is defeated.
17:05France is out of the war.
17:07France is Britain's greatest ally, indeed only ally.
17:18As the bombs dropped in the summer of 1940, Churchill faced the challenge by inspiring
17:23the British people to stand firm.
17:29We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
17:35We shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets, and on the hills.
17:45We shall never surrender.
17:49Privately he gathered a secret group of advisers to fight with the one weapon Britain had at
17:54its disposal, secret information.
17:58A mansion called Bletchley Park outside of London had been purchased by MI6, the foreign
18:04affairs section of the British Secret Service, during the First World War.
18:08At Bletchley Park, experts worked to decode German communications.
18:14By the Second World War, the organization was successfully reading many of the German
18:18radio messages.
18:20The decrypts would be dubbed ultra by Churchill for their ultra-secret content.
18:27Britain's greatest war leader becomes prime minister at the very moment when the greatest
18:33intelligence in the history of warfare comes on stream.
18:39Stuart Menges was the man charged with providing Churchill with his intelligence updates each
18:44day.
18:45Menges was an experienced information officer and the head of MI6.
18:54Early in the war, Menges and Churchill worked out a routine.
18:58Menges would carefully select the most important decrypts from the large number that came in
19:04daily, put them into a big suitcase and personally bring them to Churchill for his review.
19:11Often Churchill was still in bed or lounging in his bathtub.
19:17Churchill's relationship with Menges was an interesting one.
19:21He regarded Menges as the man who brought him the goose that laid the golden eggs.
19:25The only time he was really cross with him was on the occasion when they tried to send
19:29him digestive decrypts.
19:31He wanted the detail.
19:32He wanted the raw data.
19:35Churchill learned the lessons of intelligence that had been misapplied in World War I with
19:40the invasion of the Dardanelles.
19:42It was a mistake he didn't intend to repeat.
19:46Churchill wasn't happy just to see the summaries which would be prepared, processed by the
19:52secret intelligence service.
19:53He loved the nitty-gritty.
19:55He actually liked to see the direct intercept.
19:59That's the flimsy that is prepared directly from the translation.
20:05Churchill always wanted to be at the center of the action.
20:08He often traveled to the front lines to visit the troops and plan with his generals.
20:13But in the beginning, Churchill still made mistakes.
20:16The raw intelligence was often like a puzzle.
20:19In some cases, Churchill got the picture wrong.
20:23One time was the battle in North Africa where the British faced the indefatigable German
20:28General Erwin Rommel.
20:31Churchill would receive Rommel's messages to Hitler requesting more tanks and assume
20:36the embattled enemy was ripe for attack when in fact the opposite was true.
20:43As soon as he read a decrypted German telegram, he would telegraph off to his two commanders
20:53at the time and say, look, Rommel says he's got no tanks left.
20:56Attack now.
20:58Of course, Rommel did have some tanks left, but he knew the only way to get some more
21:01tanks out of Hitler was to say that he really didn't have any left.
21:05And you know, Churchill interfering at that kind of micromanagement level didn't work.
21:11Over the course of the war, Churchill learned to use secret intelligence more carefully.
21:17And he learned to trust commanders like Bernard Montgomery to use the information for maximum
21:22tactical advantage.
21:25If you're looking for an example of a military confrontation, a battle that the outcome was
21:32changed decisively as a direct consequence of the use of ultra, then you can do no better
21:39than El Alamein.
21:42Precise information about where the Germans were and where they intended to attack gave
21:46Montgomery an important tactical advantage.
21:51In the period after the Second World War, Montgomery was regarded as a genius, as a
21:58military strategist.
21:59We now know that through Bletchley Park, he had a comprehensive understanding of the enemy's
22:07order of battle, of its reserves, of its fuel supplies, of its locations, and its future
22:12intentions.
22:14Any military commander going into battle with that kind of information should have to have
22:18an awful lot of excuses if he's going to lose.
22:23As the battle raged on in the desert, Churchill also struggled with the Battle of the Atlantic,
22:28where codebreaking played a crucial role.
22:34In the longest-running battle of the war, ultra decrypts of the German naval enigma
22:39code would prove decisive in locating the dangerous U-boat submarines.
22:47Something that he enjoyed more than anything else was to be able to pull a rabbit out of
22:51a hat at war cabinet and disclose an item of information that appeared to display astonishing
22:58prescience.
22:59Of course, it was based on secret intelligence that only he was privy to.
23:07Churchill relied on secret information coming out of Bletchley Park to stay ahead of the
23:12enemy.
23:13But secret information alone couldn't win the war.
23:17Britain needed to attack Germany with weapons and not just words.
23:22But she had few military resources to wage battle.
23:26Churchill's solution was to meet the challenge with stealth and cunning.
23:31Britain would create an army of resistance fighters, train them in Britain, and drop
23:36them behind enemy lines to wreak havoc.
23:50In 1940, Churchill created the Special Operations Executive, or SOE.
23:57They would be freedom fighters who would take the battle behind enemy lines.
24:04The creation of this organization to engender resistance within occupied Europe was actually
24:10a very useful defensive tool.
24:14By creating resistance, it was hoped that the German forces would be distracted, that
24:19they would have other things to worry about other than focusing solely on the invasion
24:25of the United Kingdom.
24:28As the winter of 1941 gave way to spring, Churchill wanted daily updates.
24:34He stayed in touch with top commanders in the field.
24:38In the beginning, Churchill's strategy was to ensure Britain's survival.
24:43Once that was accomplished, the goal became victory over Germany.
24:49But Britain couldn't take back the continent alone.
24:53For this, Churchill would have to build a grand alliance, and secret information would
24:59be one of the tools necessary for its success.
25:08In the first year of the war, Churchill had relied on secret information and covert operations
25:14to frustrate the Germans and achieve battlefield success.
25:19But a clear-cut victory required one more important element, taking Europe back from
25:25the Germans with military strength.
25:29Churchill knew from Britain's past that a cloak of secrecy would be required to ensure
25:34that she had a future.
25:38There is no question that Churchill often found a lot of his inspiration in the past.
25:44He was a historian and clearly knew about the importance of grand alliances.
25:52For Churchill to fulfill the dream of a liberated Europe, he would have to create a strong alliance
25:57of powerful states.
26:00Secret information played a critical role, both in creating and in holding together the
26:04grand alliance.
26:07Churchill, the avowed anti-communist, had to make a Faustian choice, either ally with
26:13a longtime enemy, Joseph Stalin, or fight Germany alone.
26:20His decision was quick and clear.
26:24When asked why he would support a country he'd so often criticized and condemned, Churchill
26:30replied, if Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil
26:35in the House of Commons.
26:41Just as he had shared secret information with Roosevelt, Churchill used intelligence from
26:47Bletchley Park to warn Joseph Stalin of Hitler's impending invasion of the Soviet Union.
26:54The German code name for the invasion was Barbarossa.
26:58As soon as Hitler began moving troops east, the British codebreakers knew about it.
27:03As a result, an urgent telegram was sent to Stalin, warning him of the imminent invasion.
27:09Unbelievably, instead of seizing on this important information, Stalin rejected it.
27:16Stalin, with supreme pick-headedness, consistently refused to acknowledge this.
27:23Not merely did he reject the intelligence being offered by the British, but he consistently
27:29rejected intelligence being provided by his own intelligence services.
27:35But if secret intelligence was of little use with Joseph Stalin, it was much more useful
27:40to Britain's true ally, the United States.
27:45He tried to think of everything that he could of binding together Britain and the United
27:51States.
27:52And one of the ways that he thought of, even before the United States comes into the war,
27:56even before Pearl Harbor, was by sharing with Roosevelt the biggest secret in British history.
28:03In 1940, Churchill told Roosevelt about Ultra, the name given to the codes coming out of
28:09Bletchley Park.
28:12Roosevelt understood the significance of Britain's codebreaking.
28:17What he did not know was that the British were also listening in on America.
28:23The biggest secret that Churchill keeps from Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor is that Britain
28:28is not simply breaking German codes.
28:30Britain is also breaking American codes, which were far easier to break.
28:35Churchill has a real sense of responsibility to the special relationship.
28:40So the big change that comes about after Pearl Harbor is that Churchill orders that
28:45Britain will no longer break American codes.
28:49From the beginning, Roosevelt was on Britain's side, but American isolationists were a powerful
28:54lobby.
28:56But lasting memories of lost fathers in the blood-soaked trenches of World War I convinced
29:02many in the next American generation to avoid meddling in foreign affairs.
29:08England is hanging on a thread in 1940-41, so Churchill's extremely interested in U.S.
29:15politics.
29:16U.S. politics will determine whether Britain wins or loses this war.
29:22In 1940, a British Secret Service agent, William Stevenson, arrived in New York City.
29:29He set up offices in Rockefeller Center and worked under the cover of an organization
29:33called the British Security Coordination, or B.S.C.
29:39The B.S.C.'s mission was to turn American public opinion in favor of the British.
29:45Using methods later known as dirty tricks, it rigged public opinion polls, manipulated
29:50and bribed politicians, and compromised many who opposed American involvement in the war.
29:57Churchill knew about Stevenson's assignment, and he approved.
30:02When it came to propaganda, Churchill believed that actions could speak louder than words.
30:08Winston Churchill's propaganda strategy is clever.
30:12The first principle is that he thinks that the best propaganda is deeds.
30:17Whenever anybody suggested to him, Mr. Churchill, we need better propaganda in America, he would
30:22say, if we beat the Germans here, we'll need no propaganda in America.
30:28Always that was what he wanted to do.
30:30Beat the Germans and impress the Americans that way.
30:34He used secret intelligence not only for the battlefield, but for the political arena as
30:40well.
30:41When decrypts of German communiques revealed that Hitler would not invade Britain in 1940,
30:47Churchill did not share the information with his friends in the United States.
30:52He withholds it because the threat of a German invasion of Britain is an absolutely vital
31:01element in persuading Roosevelt and the Americans that the British must be supported.
31:09Between the wars, Churchill had spent many free hours building the family house at Chartwell.
31:16Building a brick wall was no different, in essence, from building a coalition.
31:20Each had to be built one brick at a time.
31:24To Churchill, America would have to be led very carefully into the conflict.
31:30He felt strongly that direct American military involvement would be necessary to defeat the
31:35Axis powers.
31:37But when he visited the American Congress in 1941, he softened his appeal and broadened
31:42his base of support by asking only for equipment and arms.
31:49When Churchill did speak directly to the Americans, he lied.
31:54I think his biggest lie comes in early 1941 when he says, give us the tools and we will
32:00finish the job.
32:01Now he says this knowing that ever since the previous September, September 1940, the British
32:08cabinet had had as its policy, as its accepted doctrine, the war could not be won without
32:14American military support.
32:18All Churchill could do was fight a holding action until the Americans came in.
32:25If Churchill misled the public, he was bold and direct with Franklin Roosevelt.
32:31The two men spent hours discussing war strategy.
32:34Both were serious men, but both found humor and friendship in the other's company during
32:39some of the most troubled moments of the war.
32:44There's the famous story of Roosevelt who, of course, was disabled and who had to have
32:48an automobile specially modified so he could drive it, greeting Churchill and saying, get
32:52in, I'll take you for a ride.
32:55He set off rather wildly towards the bluffs overlooking the Hudson River and only narrowly
33:01managed to avoid plunging over these bluffs.
33:05Churchill made some crack about this, about, you know, this is one of the greatest perils
33:08he ever faced in the Second World War was being driven by Roosevelt around the Hyde
33:12Park Estate in New York.
33:16Politics was a frequent topic discussed between the two leaders.
33:20Churchill had secret information about the enemy, but he also had secret information
33:24about Allied generals.
33:26Douglas MacArthur was the ingenious commander whose uncertain military and political plans
33:31were both alarming and threatening.
33:35This is not a story that's terribly well known, but Churchill was extremely concerned about
33:39any potential threat from Douglas MacArthur because, of course, it was widely rumored
33:43that MacArthur would stand as a Republican against Roosevelt in the 1944 election.
33:49Churchill would have been in despair had Roosevelt been removed from the scene.
33:54Through 1942 and 1943, he did have a man of his own at MacArthur's Pacific War headquarters,
34:02a secret intelligence service agent who was reporting back to him about MacArthur.
34:09Essentially, he was passing on information to Churchill about MacArthur's political intentions
34:14and trying to help Churchill get a better fix on MacArthur and the political threat
34:18this man posed to Roosevelt.
34:23An exhaustive travel schedule, late-night conferences, and exposure to the elements
34:27all took their toll.
34:30As Roosevelt's guest at the White House, Churchill experienced the first of many threats to his
34:35health during the war.
34:38One of the greatest secrets of the Second World War occurred over Churchill's health
34:45and was kept secret from Churchill himself.
34:48During his first visit to the White House in December 1941, one evening he found the
34:53room rather warm and he pushed open the window, tried to push open the window, and in doing
34:58so suffered a slight heart attack.
35:01He called in his personal physician, Lord Moran, and he said,
35:04Charles, I've got this sort of pain in my chest, and what is it?
35:09Moran very quickly came to appreciate that there had been a mild heart attack and that
35:14he was not going to tell Churchill.
35:15He did not want to frighten the Prime Minister, so he said something like, well, you've been
35:21working a little bit hard, Mr. Prime Minister, perhaps you should take it easy for a few days.
35:26But Churchill took very little time to rest.
35:30It took all the energy he had to keep the alliance between the United States, Britain,
35:35and the Soviet Union together and focused on beating Hitler.
35:40In the first few years of the war, the strategy had been simply to survive, but with the alliance
35:45in place, the goal became victory.
35:50By 1943, the Allies were preparing for one of the greatest undertakings of the war, and
35:56secret information and covert operations were a vital aspect of Allied plans.
36:06By 1943, plans were being made ready for Operation Overlord, the codename for the Allied invasion
36:12that would come to be known as D-Day.
36:17Dwight Eisenhower was the American general chosen to coordinate and lead the effort.
36:22There was little doubt where he stood on the issue of British secret intelligence.
36:28When Eisenhower came over initially as commander of American forces in Europe, he was briefed
36:33on Ultra personally by Winston Churchill at Chequers, the country house of British Prime
36:39Ministers.
36:41And Eisenhower's mind was blown.
36:44He did something at that moment which no American general had ever done before, and I suspect
36:50that no American general has done since.
36:51He said, not merely, I want this.
36:54He said, I want my chief of intelligence to be a British officer.
37:02At the center of the planning for the invasion sat Winston Churchill.
37:07Churchill knew from history and his own experience about the efficacy of surprise in war.
37:15The Germans were expecting the Allied forces to attack at the Pas-de-Calais, the closest
37:24point between France and Great Britain.
37:30One of the great problems with D-Day is how do you keep it a surprise?
37:35You're having to gather a great amphibious army, equipment.
37:40It's all going to have to cross the channel.
37:42There are only a number of places it can go, and this, of course, is where secret intelligence
37:48comes in very handy.
37:51Secret information was used in various ways to mislead the Germans, from false radio broadcasts
37:57to misleading reports of troop movements.
38:02In addition to the challenges of secrecy, the invasion presented major technical challenges
38:07if it was to truly surprise the Germans.
38:12Churchill was a great man for gadgets.
38:15He had a real interest in technology, even though he had no scientific background or
38:20training.
38:22Sometimes this went very wrong.
38:24The wrong one one can think of here is in 1943, when he was obsessed with the idea of
38:30having ships disguised as floating icebergs.
38:35But when it came to D-Day, his ideas had more success.
38:40Churchill personally helped solve some of the most important logistical problems that
38:44the Allies faced.
38:47One of the great problems in planning D-Day is how you're going to supply the Allied forces
38:54when they get there with petroleum.
38:57The obvious means would have been tankers, but tankers loaded with fuel would be sitting
39:02targets for the Germans.
39:05Churchill came up with the answer of how to find enough petroleum for the Allied forces
39:12when they landed, the so-called Pluto.
39:16Churchill understood the technical advances in metallurgy made it possible to create a
39:20pipeline that spanned the English Channel.
39:25In 1943, work began to manufacture the materials necessary to carry out the top-secret project
39:32codenamed Pluto.
39:34It was a daring plan to supply the Allied landing force with a never-ending supply of
39:39fuel that could not be bombed by the Germans.
39:45But a pipeline only solved half of the problem.
39:48The other half was finding a place for the ships to dock.
39:53Churchill came up with answers for both.
39:56What you created, first of all, were these artificial floating harbours, mulberry harbours,
40:01which would allow you to unload heavy equipment, and pipelines under the ocean, which would
40:06allow you to supply the petroleum without the risk of the Nazis being able to blow it
40:11all up.
40:13For all the secret plans, one essential component at the heart of the D-Day invasion was intelligence.
40:22The operation would stand or fall upon the Allies' ability to monitor the movements and
40:27the plans of the enemy.
40:30The great system of deception which makes D-Day possible would have been impossible
40:35without ALTRA, because without the ability to work out how much the deception was working,
40:41you couldn't have done that without reading the German ciphers.
40:48Intelligence had helped Great Britain survive, and it was clearly a key component in the
40:52planning for D-Day.
40:55Secret information also revealed other problems, problems that had to do not with Britain's
41:01enemy but with her French ally, Charles de Gaulle.
41:05De Gaulle, never popularly elected in France, had nonetheless become the French leader representing
41:12resistance against the German occupier.
41:18Living in London, de Gaulle spent as much of his time building his own power base as
41:22he did fighting the Germans.
41:27Churchill's relationship with General de Gaulle is rather like that of Dr. Frankenstein with
41:31his monster.
41:33Churchill created him and could not control him.
41:37By 1943, American intelligence was also keeping tabs on de Gaulle.
41:43One of the things they learned was that de Gaulle's methods for acquiring his secret information
41:47were in a civilized democracy less than savory.
41:53One of the things that the Americans reveal, which is actually something that the British
41:57Secret Intelligence Service already knew, is that in de Gaulle's secret police headquarters
42:03in King Street in London, there are reports of torture, that people who've come out of
42:08France claiming to be free Frenchmen who are suspect are actually taken down to the cellars
42:13of King Street, and some very unpleasant things happen to them.
42:18Churchill confronted de Gaulle and demanded that his interrogations stop.
42:22For a time, they did.
42:24But throughout the war, Churchill was repeatedly frustrated by de Gaulle's behavior.
42:36Despite the enormous logistic and political problems, the Allies were ready to attempt
42:41the cross-channel invasion by 1944.
42:45There was no guarantee that D-Day would be a success.
42:49Churchill was so anxious about the impending invasion that he wanted to be there when the
42:53troops landed.
42:56Churchill actually wanted to go on D-Day.
42:59Churchill actually wanted to be there with the landings and wanted to go ashore.
43:03Not quite in the first wave, although I'm sure that he had fantasies about that.
43:09The only way they could find to stop him was the king said, well, he wanted to go.
43:14And Churchill said, no, your majesty's safety is far too important.
43:18And the king was then able to use that to blackmail Churchill into staying and saying,
43:22well, if I can't go and you go, it makes me look like a coward.
43:26So Churchill, of course, had to stay at home as well.
43:35As D-Day began, Churchill closely followed the decrypts coming out of Bletchley Park.
43:41He was anxious to know of any success and worried about the possibility of failure.
43:54But Churchill had approved a secret plan, one that would serve as a backup if the invasion
43:59failed and the war was prolonged.
44:04We now know that Operation Foxley, a plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler, was approved
44:12by Churchill in the summer of 1944.
44:15Now, in the end, it never took place for all kinds of obscure and complex reasons.
44:20One of the arguments that was used by some people who were opposed to this plan, who
44:24said the worst thing we could do is kill Hitler because Hitler is driving Germany into destruction,
44:29so why should we take away the man who's doing it for us?
44:33The success of D-Day made it clear that the Germans could be beaten.
44:39The organization and high standards Churchill established had paid off.
44:48But just as the threat from Hitler seemed to be contained, new problems appeared on
44:53the horizon.
44:56The Soviets, once an ally, were becoming the new enemy.
45:04The success of D-Day in June of 1944 and the growing inevitability of Germany's defeat
45:10presented new problems for Churchill and Roosevelt.
45:14Churchill had always viewed Stalin as a temporary ally, a man to be feared, watched, and where
45:19possible thwarted.
45:23For his part, Stalin was certain that the West would destroy the Soviets if given the
45:27opportunity.
45:28Stalin, like Churchill, worked to obtain secret information about his enemies and his allies.
45:38Marshal Stalin's paranoia knew no bounds.
45:42Determined to uncover the plot against him by the West, he ordered his secret intelligence
45:46service, the NKVD, to learn all it could about American and British post-war plans.
45:53At conferences designed to plan joint military strategy, Stalin took the opportunity to spy.
46:01At Yalta, in the Crimea, the old tsarist palaces in which the British and the American delegations
46:09are staying are 100% bugged by the Russians.
46:15It has transcripts provided of what's going on in every room.
46:19It probably redounded to Britain's advantage because all that Stalin and the Russians would
46:24have heard, both at Tehran and Yalta, was just how determined Churchill was to carry
46:28on fighting the war.
46:31When the war ended in 1945, Churchill became increasingly concerned that the grand alliance
46:37he had carefully built was beginning to crack.
46:42By early 1946, he's becoming convinced of two things.
46:48First of all, that cooperation with the Soviets is not working.
46:51And secondly, that America and Britain are in danger of drifting apart, which, given
46:56the fact that the Soviets probably can't be trusted, is a great danger.
47:00The greatest danger, he thinks, to world peace.
47:03In March 1946, at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, he takes the opportunity not just
47:09to give the usual address at graduation, but to give, as he sees it, an important warning
47:16to the world.
47:22It was one of the most famous speeches of his career, and in it he created a metaphor
47:26that would stand as a symbol of the division between East and West.
47:32From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended
47:40across the continent.
47:43Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
47:55Winston Churchill had almost single-handedly changed the way wars were fought.
47:59By institutionalizing secret warfare, he made it one of the most powerful weapons of
48:04all future wars.
48:08Churchill didn't use intelligence perfectly.
48:11But he did use it clearly better than any politician in any country had ever used it
48:15before during the Second World War, and I think for two reasons.
48:19First he had longer experience.
48:22He'd been a British spy in the Boer War at the beginning of the century.
48:26He'd been a member of a cabinet which in 1909 had set up the British Foreign Intelligence
48:30Service, MI6.
48:32As the minister in charge of the Royal Navy, first Lord of the Admiralty at the beginning
48:35of the First World War, he presided over the rebirth of British code-breaking.
48:40Ironically, at the end of the war, Churchill was forced out of office.
48:48The nation was grateful, but it was also ready for change, for a new beginning.
48:54Churchill the statesman retired.
48:57He would return again in 1951, but his finest hour had passed.
49:02In the years after the war, he returned to his favorite hobby, painting.
49:09Today he stands as an example of how the indomitable spirit of man can transcend the ephemeral
49:15evils of any given time or place.
49:21Churchill's legacies is an example of what a war leader in a democracy ought to be.
49:30It's difficult now to remember just how difficult it was for leaders before Churchill, as civilians,
49:37to get a handle on wartime planning.
49:40Churchill's constant attention to detail, Churchill's dominance because of his attention
49:45to detail and his mastery of secret intelligence over the military, I think really have provided
49:51almost a template that every Western leader since has tried to live up to.
49:57You can look at the Gulf War, you can look at the war in Kosovo, and on each occasion
50:02the British leaders, the American leaders, have at least tried to strike a Churchillian
50:07pose.
50:11When the war ended, Churchill remembered the harsh lessons he'd learned after the First
50:15World War when he'd written about Britain's success in breaking the German code.
50:21At the end of his life, he held many of the secrets of the Second World War and fully
50:25endorsed the Official Secrets Act, which required strict confidentiality about past wartime activities.
50:35Many of the most fascinating secrets of the war are only now becoming public.
50:41Many are yet to be discovered, and some, perhaps more than we will ever know, died
50:46with the man who led his nation to victory in democracy's finest hour.