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00:00forlorn monsters today in may 1940 these
00:27These forts of the Maginot Line were France's first-line defense against the Germans
00:38Half a million French soldiers lurked beneath these man-made hills
00:46These were the most expensive, the most elaborate forts ever constructed
00:52Here the guns would halt the Hun, provided the Hun came this way
00:59To be continued...
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02:05Thank God for the French army, said Winston Churchill when Hitler came to power.
02:10But in 1933, the French army was no longer the superlative weapon it once had been.
02:18French military manuals devoted page after page to the tactics of the first war.
02:24Although Hitler had said, the next war will be very different from the last.
02:28The French had helped introduce the tank and the aeroplane, but now did little to extend their use.
02:41They had pioneered motor transport in warfare, but went back now to relying on railways and the horse, especially the horse.
02:58It was a period of very deep decay, probably caused by the excessive effort during the First World War.
03:11We suffered from an illness which is not peculiar to the French.
03:16The illness of having been victorious and believing that we were right and very clever.
03:23A victory is a very dangerous opportunity.
03:38France between the wars was deeply divided.
03:42Factions clashed, alliances altered, cabinets came and went in the cascade, some lasting a few hours, some a few months.
03:50Rarely did one last a whole year.
03:53On the very day Hitler came to power, France was without a government.
04:04It was again without one when he marched into Austria five years later.
04:15The left in France was concerned more with hounding rogues in high places at home than curbing fascism elsewhere.
04:24The right so hated the left, it was prepared to countenance dictatorship.
04:28As early as 1934, the victor of Verdun, Marshal Pétain, was proposed as France's saviour from communism, although he was then nearly 80.
04:40These deep divisions.
04:41These deep divisions were to fetishly.
04:42These deep divisions were to fetish France when she faced the need to rearm.
04:47The whole of the possessing classes, the right, if you like, preferred the idea of the Germans to their own communists.
04:59You didn't have to walk around these streets and see for who written on them or the hammer and sickle to realize that nobody was going to lift a finger.
05:09France in the 30s built a series of great forts along her friendship with Germany.
05:27And because her war minister then happened to be one, Andre Maginot, these forts came to be known as the Maginot Life.
05:36The Maginot forts were truly 20th century wonders.
05:42Electric trains took the troops from barracks to gun turrets, from arsenal to canteen.
05:47There were cinemas underground, sunray rooms, air conditioning, the lot.
05:52Theirs was a vast Jules Verne type of world, hundreds of feet below ground.
05:59They called it the Shield of France.
06:04The Maginot Line failed to protect all of France's eastern fleet.
06:08It was only 87 miles long, and it stopped 250 miles short of the channel.
06:16Should the alarm ever have to sound in grim earnest, French strategists argued that their troops would need to confront the Germans on Belgium, if not German soil.
06:40Besides, to extend the Maginot Line along the Belgian frontier would not only be expensive, but would make the Belgians think that if war came, France would forsake them.
06:53The folly of this thinking was shown up in 1936, when, without consulting the French, the Belgian King Leopold opted for neutrality and closed his borders, even to French military observers.
07:09All too late, France began extending the Maginot Line to the sea.
07:15But by May 1940, it was far from finished.
07:20France had suffered a terrible loss of life in the Great War.
07:46Now French military thinking became wholly defensive, forgetting Napoleon's favourite maxim, the side that stays within its fortifications is beaten.
07:56Since the French spurned any notion of taking the offensive, the Maginot Line ironically protected Germany better than it protected France.
08:15A German colonel, Heinz Guderian, the year the Maginot Line was completed, published a book with a prophetic title, Achtung Panzer, a book that was never properly studied by the French or the English general staff.
08:31Yet these pages expound a new kind of warfare, the concentrated use of tanks with infantry and air force in close support.
08:38Blitzkrieg.
08:39We had had tanks in the First World War, we knew all the difficulties of the game.
08:52While the Germans, who didn't have them, had had the feeling of those who were attacked by tanks.
08:59And while we considered that the tanks were a little awkward and difficult to use, the Germans jumped to the new weapons with the appetite of a new rich.
09:10Paris, July the 14th 1939, the last Bastille Day Parade of the Third Republic.
09:30A few days earlier, Britain's war minister visiting Paris had said, France has the greatest army in the world.
09:38Like the parade itself, such statements were meant to merely to raise morale.
09:47Parisians had hardly got back from their holidays before they found themselves once more at war with their traditional foe.
09:54But whereas in 1914 the cry had been on to Berlin, this time it was, let's get it over with.
10:13Ironically, French mobilization was too efficient. The call up of skilled technicians brought many vital war industries almost to a halt.
10:28It was only after weeks of confusion that these men were released.
10:31It was only after weeks of confusion that these men were released.
10:35Nor was France going to war united. The bitternesses of French politics continued.
10:44Ministers looked to their own futures instead of their countries.
10:47And many took their cue from such leadership.
11:02Paris didn't alter much for the coming of war, save in appearance.
11:12The most popular song that autumn of 1939 was Paris will always be Paris.
11:18Paris will always be Paris.
11:19Paris will always be Paris.
11:20Paris will always be Paris.
11:21Paris will always be Paris.
11:23Buses in Paris
11:25Your windows and steps back to the red.
11:28The roads and帶回 bay.
11:32Elysées, emmaillotées de terre battues, toutes les beautés de nos statues, voilées
11:38le soir, l'air réverbère, plongées dans le noir, la vie de lumière, Paris sera toujours
11:47Paris, la plus belle ville du monde, malgré l'obscurité profonde, son éclat ne peut
11:59être assombri, Paris sera toujours Paris, plus on réduit son éclairage, plus on voit
12:09briller son courage, sa bonne humeur et son esprit, Paris sera toujours Paris.
12:20While their Polish allies were being routed in the east, the French, like the British,
12:24did little in the west. There was the so-called Tsar Offensive, the only French offensive,
12:31in fact, of the war.
12:32A few French divisions advanced five miles, but they didn't even try to penetrate the
12:49Siegfried Line, at that time still unfinished, and while Poland fought on, there were no German
12:54tanks at all on the western front. The newsreel commentators of the day, though, didn't doubt
13:00the French resolve.
13:03We have read those communiques from the French High Command. This is the living story behind
13:07those brief unvarnished reports. Our cameramen in the advanced lines on German territory watch
13:13the observation posts at the bridge over the Rhine, between Kale and Strasbourg.
13:24This was a German railway station, now in the hands of French troops. From fortified outposts
13:32the vigilant watch is never relaxed.
13:46The Maginot Line, which was built as the first line of defence for France, has become the
13:50second line behind the attack. The gradual but steady advance of the French troops has
13:55brought their camouflaged artillery within range of the Siegfried outpost.
13:58There is no haste, only a grim, relentless pressure on the Nazi emplacement. Meter by meter,
14:03the values are moving forward.
14:05If the French army would have attacked in beginning of September, with their very strong superiority
14:19in division, in armoured cars, who lacked all armoured cars on the western front at that time,
14:27in artillery, in air force, the German forces in the so-called Western Front could stand no more
14:42than one or two weeks.
14:46But even before Poland had surrendered, the French commander ordered his men back
14:50behind the Maginot Line. The withdrawal the Germans did nothing to prevent.
14:55One Frenchman wrote at the time. After the prologue of the phony offensive, we were ripe for the phony war.
15:02The wind in the woods does ouch, the bichose to the wood does ouch, the bichose to the wood does ouch.
15:07The casserole cassée does ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.
15:09And the keen legs increasingly became hard when the constant torque,
15:10If we learned that movement would�이't rise, ouch, ouch, ou as the wind does ouch, woulosa coli Mariöfrin,
15:11se Extremeens were Barre of Palom.
15:14But boom!녹...
15:15When our mind we move
15:23asked and our heart is boom.
15:24We would say boom.
15:26The stone is boom.
15:27For several minutes each day, the Maginot guns boomed out, usually to impress visitors
15:35such as the Duke of Windsor.
15:51Little attempt was made to harass the enemy.
15:54Even bombing the Ruhr was forbidden in case the Luftwaffe retaliated against French factories.
15:59Journalists were taken up to the lines to see the inactivity.
16:03I stayed at an observation post on the Rhine watching the Germans washing and playing football and so I think
16:13and I said to the sentry, why don't you shoot them? Why don't you shoot at them?
16:19No, he said, they're behaving perfectly all right, they don't shoot at us, why should we shoot at them?
16:24No, I didn't.
16:25Boom, the world's entire was boom, all with a glid and boom, when our heart was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
16:33I don't know that boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
16:39Life at the front was dreary and drab.
16:47Badly paid, leave became an obsession for the French soldiers and was used mainly to make a little on the side.
17:06The winter of 1939 was the coldest for half a century.
17:16Even the channel froze at Boulogne.
17:19The French halted work on the margin of extension.
17:23The Germans, however, forged ahead with their plans.
17:28As winter wore on, French morale sank.
17:33Discipline deteriorated and drunkenness became rife.
17:38Special rooms were set aside in railway stations where men could recover before rejoining their units.
17:44Few French generals ever bothered to inspect, let alone meet, their troops.
17:56But then their commander-in-chief, General Gamelin, rarely set foot outside his own headquarters.
18:02Already 68 at the beginning of 1940, his military record was so impeccable that no one dreamed of asking him to make way for a younger man.
18:10Gamelin was very clever, but with no guts at all.
18:18And he was liked by the politicians because he was an easy commander-in-chief.
18:23Gamelin chose for his headquarters this chateau at Vincennes, just outside Paris.
18:29That choice reveals what the man was, you know.
18:34The enemy were not a German, it wasn't a French government.
18:38Vincennes was where England's Henry V died, and where the spy Mata Hari was executed.
18:46It was described by one visitor as a submarine without a periscope.
18:55Almost unbelievably, it had no radio communications.
18:58It was not linked by teleprompter with any other headquarters in the field.
19:01Instead, messages were dispatched regularly on the hour by motorcycle.
19:06Gamelin seldom bothered his staff with orders, preferring simply to suggest guidelines.
19:21His long-term strategy was to wait until the Allies could match the Germans in numbers and equipment
19:26before launching any major offensive, even though that would mean waiting until 1941.
19:31Meanwhile, he was concerned to keep the war away from French soil.
19:36Hence, his interests in any odd stratagem pushed his way.
19:41We had a plan to go to attack Russia through Norway and Narvik, which led to the landing in Narvik.
19:52We had a plan to attack the oil plants in Baku from Syria.
19:59We had plans to raise the Balkans with us by landing in Salonika and join the Yugoslavs and so on, you know.
20:09But all this was dreams absolutely foolish and out of the reality.
20:16But that stemmed from the fact that we thought that the war couldn't be decided on the main front
20:22because of the inviolability of that front.
20:26Gamelin had 100 divisions on that front in May 1940, plus another 10 of the British Expeditionary Force.
20:32Forty manned the Maginan Line, while five guarded the Swiss frontier.
20:39Another forty, the best, were to go into neutral Belgium once Germany attacked.
20:45But when that happened, the pivot of Gamelin's front would be here, in the Ardennes.
20:51The impenetrable Ardennes.
20:58The impenetrable Ardennes.
21:00What was it?
21:03On maps back at headquarters, its thick woods and narrow winding roads
21:16probably did make the Ardennes seem impenetrable.
21:19Which is presumably why Gamelin chose to guard this 100-mile stretch of front
21:24with ten of his weakest, least trained, worst equipped divisions.
21:30The Ardennes came to be chosen for the main thrust since they offered an opportunity to circumvent the Maginan Line.
21:39And besides, we were conscious of the fact that there were only minor French troops
21:45which held the positions in this section of the French front.
21:52We knew that the French High Command had dispersed his tanks.
22:02The French had more tanks and some better tanks, heavier tanks, than we have had panzers.
22:11But we managed our panzer troops.
22:16What Gudejan said in his instructions.
22:21Strike hard and quickly.
22:24And don't disperse your forces.
22:26The spring of 1940 was remarkably sunny.
22:38Nowhere was it more peaceful than here in the Ardennes,
22:41where the generals had said the Germans would never attack.
22:44Yet reports had been pouring in that nearly 50 Wehrmacht divisions were on the move.
22:49Reports which the French chose to ignore.
22:52They even learned the date of the attack.
22:55But still did nothing.
22:57As Gamla put it, they preferred to await events.
23:01Their waiting was almost over.
23:035.30am precisely.
23:14May the 10th, 1940.
23:17The German offensive began spectacularly enough with the invasion of neutral Holland from the air.
23:35Their target, the bridges over the broad Merz-Estury.
23:38If they could be captured before the Allied troops reached them, then Holland would be cut in two.
23:55The boldness of the German move stunned the Dutch.
23:59Their soldiers were soon surrendering in droves.
24:04Further south in Belgium, the Germans had another spectacular success that first day.
24:09The capture of Eben Emil, the strongest fort in the world and the linchpin of Gamla's line.
24:15That line had been breached before any Allied troops arrived.
24:22Gamla persisted in moving his armies north into Belgium and Holland.
24:37Forty of his best divisions, almost half his total strength, including the whole of the British Expeditionary Force,
24:42and they were moving straight into the trap Hitler and his generals had set for them.
24:54It wasn't long before the troops were passing the first pitiful straggling lines of refugees.
24:59Lines that were to hamper the Allied reinforcements, just as the Germans had planned.
25:04The great idea of the Germans part was speed.
25:09And they sent ahead of the army policemen with truncheons and white gloves who went on motor bicycles.
25:19They all had their mission guide for France.
25:23They knew exactly where the roads were.
25:26The German panzers were pouring over the border into Luxembourg.
25:34Their columns stretched a hundred miles, presenting a prime target to any would-be bomber.
25:39The Allied air activity that first day was busy supporting the British and French move north into Belgium.
25:46The Luftwaffe were striking at Allied airplanes on the ground.
26:01At one RAF base near Reims, the planes lined up in neat rows were destroyed in the opening minutes of the attack.
26:12Fifty British and French airfields were attacked that first day.
26:17The losses were heavy.
26:19But while Allied air chiefs were counting their losses,
26:28the panzers had just about penetrated the impenetrable Ardennes
26:33and were set to fall upon the weak French garrisons along the Meurs here at Sedan.
26:38The panzers reached Sedan late on the third day of the offensive,
26:43although Gamla had calculated they couldn't possibly be here before the ninth day.
26:47All the bridges over the Meurs were blown up by the French on May the 12th.
27:01All except one.
27:04This old weir, some forty miles north of Sedan, had been left for fear of lowering the water level so much
27:10that the river could be forded.
27:12But the French also left it relatively unguarded,
27:16as one panzer commander, Erwin Rommel, soon found out.
27:34Next morning the Luftwaffe's resources were hurled into action above Sedan.
27:39Gamla still refused to believe the Germans could mount a full-scale crossing of the Meurs
27:48before another three or four days.
27:50Hitler was unwilling to wait that long.
27:56He was working to the timetable of 1940, not 1914.
28:01What's more, the French generals still had their eyes firmly fixed on what was happening in Belgium and Holland.
28:15There were big French guns on the west bank of the Meurs,
28:18but they limited their firing for fear of running out of ammunition before the battle proper began.
28:24So the German panzers were able to pick off the French pillboxes one by one.
28:29Soon, thousands of French gunners were taking to their heels.
28:34As suddenly as it had started, the German bombardment stopped.
28:51As though still performing one of their winter war games,
28:55the German infantrymen prepared to cross the Meurs.
28:59.
29:21By midnight on May the 13th, still only day four of the offensive, not only were German
29:33infantrymen across the Merzen force, but German sappers were bridging the river and making
29:39ready for the panzers to cross.
29:46That night of May the 13th, the British Expeditionary Force, far to the north in Belgium, had still
29:52not seen serious fighting, yet the battle was now virtually decided.
30:04The morale of the French High Command was very quickly broken when we happened to know that
30:12the front had been broken through at Sedan.
30:16The feeling was that everything was lost.
30:20I saw General Georges, who was commanding the northeast front, I saw him sobbing and saying,
30:30there has been some deficiencies and he fell in a chair and sobbed.
30:43French counterattacks, when they happened, were poorly organized and seldom pressed home
30:59with any persistence.
31:15Tank for tank, the French were a match for the Germans.
31:19But the panzers always fought en masse, and what's more, the French tanks were prone to
31:23mechanical trouble, time after time they had to be left behind on the battlefield.
31:45The massed German infantry divisions were now catching up with the panzers at the MERS crossing
31:50point.
31:51Everything on the German side, at least, was going according to plan.
31:58The Allied air forces, after their almost total inactivity on May the 13th, May the 14th was hectic.
32:18British and French bombers raided the pontoon bridges across the MERS with reckless abandon.
32:23Too late, the French generals had recognized this sector's vital importance.
32:32Despite the courage of the Allied pilots, the result was disastrous.
32:44Nearly half the Allied planes did not return.
32:47In the words of the official RAF history, no higher rate of loss has ever been experienced
32:52by the Royal Air Force.
32:57After May the 14th, the skies were undeniably German.
33:04On that day too, Holland surrendered.
33:09Nothing short of a miracle could save France now.
33:20With the bridgehead secure, the panzers were poised to break out.
33:25The battle for Sedan was now giving way to the battle for France.
33:30The most crucial phase of the whole German plan was about to begin.
33:34The swing north to the coast that would trap the Allied armies in Belgium.
33:38As soon as news of the Sedan defeat reached Paris, panic set in.
33:44The French high command, not yet privy to the German plan, assumed Hitler intended to capture Paris immediately.
33:57To protect the capital, troops were pulled back from elsewhere along the MERS.
34:03which only served to widen the German bridgeheads.
34:24Gamla refused to believe his tactics were at fault and assumed he must have been betrayed.
34:32While gendarmes searched for fifth columnists behind the lines, Gamla reacted by sacking twenty or so of his front-line commanders, almost at random.
34:42The Allied troops were ordered back from Belgium, and on May the 17th, Brussels fell.
35:01It was also the end for Gamla.
35:04He was replaced as commander-in-chief by General Végon, recalled from virtual retirement.
35:10France had become desperate.
35:12A seventy-three-year-old was replacing a sixty-eight-year-old.
35:16And Végon had spent the last year in Syria and was out of touch.
35:20At this time, too, Marshal Pétain, now eighty-four, became Deputy Prime Minister.
35:26Before leaving Spain, where he'd been France's ambassador, Pétain told General Franco, my country, has been beaten.
35:33This is the work of thirty years of Marxism.
35:36He was completely on the side of the defeatists.
35:40He was a very, very old man, and he'd been recalled in the hopes that his name would bolster French morale.
35:50It did nothing of the sort.
35:52Trying in their own way to contain the German breakout, the French generals drew halt lines on their maps,
36:01only to hear the panzers had passed them even before the orders had been issued.
36:05In the dash to the coast, the German commanders were always one jump ahead of the French.
36:18Hordes of prisoners fell into German hands.
36:35Many columns, ten and sometimes twenty thousand strong, simply threw away their weapons and marched,
36:41without being told, their officers at their head toward the German lines.
36:48The French troops did not prove the same soldierly discipline as in the First World War.
36:56I think this is caused by the marginal spirit and the long, phony war,
37:05so that the French soldiers believed that they will have no more war.
37:11It wasn't just ordinary troops that were falling into German hands, but generals too.
37:20On May the 19th, General Giraud, newly appointed commander of the French 9th Army, was captured by a group of tanks, according to the French,
37:38by a field kitchen unit, according to the Germans, by a field kitchen unit, according to the Germans.
37:47But most tragic of all was the plight of the refugees.
37:58At one time, twelve million people were on the roads of northern France, bound for goodness knows where.
38:07All the civilians used to come up to us and to ask us what they were to do, because the government had not told them what to do.
38:31And we all said, for heaven's sake, stay where you are, don't get on the roads, but they all got in a panic and left.
38:39One old lady had a key which she gave to us and said, and we said, why, you can't, mustn't give us your key.
38:45Oh, well, last, in the last war, I took away my key and when I came back, I had the key but no house.
38:51My worst memory was seeing two German planes coming along at roof level, machine gunning, and one realised then how awful it was for the refugees.
39:17The End
39:19The End
39:21The End
39:23The End
39:25The End
39:27The End
39:29The End
39:31The End
39:33The Germans had advanced 200 miles in just seven days.
40:03And on May the 20th, they reached the Channel.
40:08The Daily Telegraph reported that telephone lines between Paris and London had been cut.
40:13A post office spokesman said he didn't know when normal service might be resumed.
40:19With the panzers at the coast, the best of the Allied armies drawn into Belgium were
40:29now cut off from the south.
40:32Related that the French tried to force a way through to them.
40:36That attack was too puny, but they argued the British had let them down.
40:43The recrimination started with the unilateral withdrawal of the British army.
40:52The orders were to attack southward near Arras.
40:58And without warning, we happened to know that the British were withdrawing to Dunkirk.
41:11We have not the right to criticize this too much because, after all, we were the bosses
41:16and we lost the battle.
41:18And this gives a good excuse for the British to be selfish.
41:22Anyway, they were very selfish.
41:23On May the 25th, Boulogne fell.
41:29On May the 26th, Calais.
41:39Weygon's appointment had given the French a flicker of optimism.
41:42It soon failed him when his counterattack failed and news of Belgium's capitulation reached
42:00Paris on May the 28th.
42:01Thereafter, the mood became steadily more and more defeatist.
42:13I think the defeatism came at the top.
42:16There was a very strong peace move among certain politicians.
42:21Some of them were even pro-German and wanted jobs with the Germans.
42:26When things went badly, this group got larger and became more dominant.
42:33Prime Minister Reynaud fought back by dismissing from his cabinet some of the weaker spirits
42:38and bringing in fighting men like de Gaulle.
42:41Now entering the political arena for the first time, the war was virtually out of their hands.
42:47Perhaps it was that that prompted the special service of prayer at Notre Dame on that Sunday
42:52before Dunkirk.
42:53The French very soon accepted the idea of defeat and surrender.
43:07The French very soon accepted the idea of defeat and surrender.
43:13To them it was rather conception of the old days of the royalty when you just exchanged a couple
43:21of provinces, paid a certain number of millions, and then called it the day hoping you'd be
43:28more lucky next time.
43:38Dunkirk fell on June the 4th.
43:42Hitler ordered church bells to be rung for three days throughout Germany to mark what he
43:47described as the greatest German victory ever.
43:57With the panzers reorganized and re-equipped, the day after Dunkirk fell, the second major German
44:04offensive in the west began.
44:10.
44:17.
44:17.
44:25.
44:25.
44:26.
44:28.
44:29.
44:29.
44:29.
44:30.
44:30.
44:30.
44:34.
44:34Although outnumbered now by more than two to one, the French fought stubbornly.
44:43Much more aggressively, in fact, than at any time during the battle for the Meurs.
45:02But after three days of bloody fighting, disaster once more overtook the French.
45:16Another breakthrough by Rommel.
45:19In a matter of hours, he had reached the Seine at Rouen.
45:31Elsewhere, the panzers were passing almost effortlessly through the heartland of France.
45:47All roads pointed to Paris.
46:00On June the 10th, the French government left the capital.
46:04On that day, Mussolini brought Italy into the war.
46:11The day we left Paris, we went to this Vincennes headquarters of Gamelin.
46:24And we had on the radio all the songs and music of the Italian war.
46:33You know, Giovinanza and all that, you know.
46:37And we thought, and that is where I heard the first time somebody say,
46:43it can't go on like that.
46:45We must have an armistice.
46:47We had the greatest difficulty getting out of Paris because everybody,
46:51although Paris was empty, all the roads outside Paris were absolutely full of motorcars.
46:58People even going in and out of the trees at the side to try and get ahead.
47:03But we were able to get off the main roads into the countryside.
47:10And then it was most extraordinary because it was beautiful weather.
47:14All the villagers were very welcoming and brought out their best cognac, their best wine,
47:20because they said, what's the good of leaving it for the Germans?
47:23Arriving in the airspace over Paris, I observed that great columns of German infantry
47:30had already entered the town.
47:35Observing this and remembering that we had failed to reach this goal all through the First World War,
47:45I felt such joy and exultation that I asked the pilot of my small plane, a so-called stork,
47:56whether it would be possible to perform a landing on the Place de la Concorde.
48:02After circling around some time, he and we came down on the Place de la Concorde,
48:13which was entirely free of any traffic, and landed on the outset of the Champs-Élysées.
48:26Two days after Paris fell, the new Prime Minister, Marshal Pétain, asked the Germans for an armistice.
48:36Reynaud had been opposed to a separate peace and resigned.
48:40In most of France, the news of an armistice was received with relief.
48:45Hitler insisted on using for the negotiations, Marshal Foch's old railway carriage in the woods of Compiègne,
48:56where the 1918 armistice had been signed.
49:00It was the supreme humiliation of France.
49:04One must have lived the retreat in France with this enormous movement of crowds,
49:21It's something which you can't understand if you haven't seen it.
49:38We thought that really that had to be stopped.
49:42Once the French had signed, Hitler ordered the site destroyed.
49:57Germany had had its revenge.
50:00The German government declared solely to the French government
50:06that it has no intention to use for its own rights of war.
50:11The French entities will be in the ports of control.
50:15Paris Radio, now under German control, broadcasts the terms of the armistice.
50:20The German government is declared solely and expressly
50:27that it will not have any revendication in front of the French government
50:32during the construction of the French.
50:35The German government is declared solely and expressly
50:40that it will not have any revendication in front of the French government
50:45Paris had now to adapt to a new wave of tourists.
51:00Among the first was Hitler himself,
51:03making the only trip of his life to the city,
51:06and a fleeting one of that.
51:08For four bleak years, France was to disappear from the forefront of the war.
51:27Some Frenchmen chose a courageous resistance at home or overseas.
51:33Others were to settle into a routine of apathetic collaboration.
51:38Many connived as Hitler's new order for Europe,
51:42the Vichy version.
51:44For Paris there remained one more humiliation.
52:11The German triumphal parade followed the exact route of the French victor de procession
52:27after the First World War.
52:46It had taken the Wehrmacht just five weeks to humble their historic foe.
52:52In the words of Winston Churchill,
53:09the Battle of France was now over.
53:12The Battle of Britain was about to begin.
53:15The Battle of Britain was about to begin.
53:20The Battle of Britain was about to begin.
53:22THE END
53:52THE END
54:22THE END
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