- 5 minutes ago
wwii end game s01e01 Episode 1 Engsub
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:02After years of war, the leaders of a grand alliance met in Tehran to plan the downfall of Hitler and
00:10the fascist threat.
00:11The simplicity of the scene only underlines the tremendous implications of the meeting, which transcend the war itself.
00:17The United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, giants united by a common enemy and now on the path to
00:30victory.
00:31And the Red Air Force has been giving the Germans help in the sky and on the ground, shooting up
00:36the plains of the Luftwaffe.
00:38But this was a fragile alliance. As the endgame of World War II played out, would the Allies stand together?
00:45Or had the seeds of future conflict already been sown?
00:54World War II was a conflict of immeasurable scale.
00:59A total war, laying waste to entire nations and changing the world forever.
01:06From this devastation, new powers would emerge.
01:10Allies would become enemies.
01:13And an iron curtain would fall across Europe.
01:18A fragile peace would be threatened by a new kind of conflict.
01:22As two major superpowers vied for supremacy.
01:27Once again, the world stood on the brink.
01:32How did this come to pass?
01:34How did the Cold War emerge?
01:38From the endgame of World War II.
01:49The Cold War was the defining conflict of the second half of the 20th century.
01:54Marked by decades of unrest, proxy wars, and the threat of nuclear Armageddon.
02:09But what caused the Cold War?
02:13Was it anxiety over national security?
02:18The desire for international recognition?
02:22A drive for ideological supremacy?
02:25Or was it all of this, and more?
02:34I think the way to look at it is when does the World War II alliance begin to fracture?
02:41Is a better way.
02:42No one thought in 1944-45 they were going to have a Cold War.
02:47The early Cold War period is a period of great uncertainty.
02:52Some people think that the Cold War just began like you switch the lights off.
02:56It wasn't like that.
03:01It's easy to look back and see things with a clarity that they didn't have at the time.
03:05And to forget that people, when they're living through any period of history,
03:09they don't know the future, they don't know who's going to win or lose the war.
03:18At the height of World War II, three leaders united against the Nazi threat.
03:25These men would become known as the Big Three.
03:29And the decisions they made would determine the fate of Europe and the world.
03:41Like them or not, people like Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Yosef Stalin were really extraordinary global figures,
03:50extraordinary leaders in the fight against Nazi Germany.
03:55President Roosevelt had steered his country through the Great Depression and saw in the success of the United States a
04:03blueprint for free and democratic countries everywhere.
04:07He's very decisive early in the war, and particularly throughout the course of 1943.
04:1343 is the year when Roosevelt takes control over grand strategy in the war.
04:19He had no love of empires and a deep suspicion of communism.
04:27Winston Churchill was motivated by a clear ambition to protect Britain and to preserve at all costs its global empire.
04:38Churchill, despite his historic and long-running hatred for Bolshevism and communism, had come to the conclusion that Stalin was
04:45a man that he could work with,
04:47which was completely untrue.
04:49But in Churchill's mind, he felt he could sway Stalin to Western interests.
04:54As far as Stalin was concerned, the Western powers were one and the same.
05:00They were capitalists, the natural rivals of the Communist Soviet Union.
05:06The mutual suspicion that exists has its roots, obviously in the pre-war period, but also in concrete kind of
05:14steps that are taken during the war itself.
05:16But for the time being, each of these leaders recognized a much greater threat.
05:31In the early years of the war, Hitler's armies cut a path of devastation through Europe.
05:38Ironically, this was only made possible by Stalin himself.
05:42In 1939, he signed a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, allowing Hitler to focus westward.
05:53Finally, the day came.
05:56Molotov and von Ribbentrop got together, and the Nazis and Communists signed a pact.
06:03It was a betrayal by the Communists, and the world was plunged into war.
06:10The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact formalized a tentative partnership between the two ideological rivals.
06:20Before that, the Soviet Union was ostensibly a neutral power. In reality, it was actually helping, in many ways, Nazis.
06:29Stalin calculated that his deal with Hitler would buy time for Soviet industry to grow, and for the Red Army
06:36to prepare for future war.
06:38But Stalin was playing directly into Hitler's hands.
06:43Basically, he frees Hitler to attack Poland, which then allows Hitler to conquer France.
06:54And basically makes Germany the dominant force on the continent.
07:00That would not have happened without Stalin.
07:03And so the Soviet Union itself was at least complicit at the beginning of the Second World War.
07:10With the Soviets protecting his eastern flank, Hitler strengthened his hold on Western Europe.
07:17But the Nazis' true ambitions lay elsewhere.
07:23With Europe subjugated, Hitler turned his attention, and his armies, towards the east.
07:35In June 1941, Hitler launched a devastating surprise attack on the Soviet Union.
07:42German machines and German jackboots smashing down the civilization of Europe.
07:48Torture and trial. That's the basis of Germany's new order.
07:52At first, Stalin did not believe it could happen.
07:56He starts getting reports that Hitler's going to attack him in 1941.
08:01And he said, I'm not going to believe these.
08:02I don't believe Hitler will attack me. This is disinformation.
08:05So this is British plots that Hitler and I have an agreement.
08:09We're going to stick by the agreement.
08:12Even though he's getting all these reports that the Germans are about to attack,
08:15he continues flooding Germany with resources.
08:18The Soviets are just pumping resources into Nazi Germany to the moment the Germans attack.
08:28To save the Soviet Union from annihilation, Stalin turned to Britain and the United States,
08:35forming an agreement with Churchill and Roosevelt, known as the Grand Alliance.
08:41He ultimately wants to survive, and therefore he becomes far more practical.
08:47He's like, okay, I've got to work with the British and the Americans.
08:50I've got to work with these capitalist powers to survive.
08:56It was the unity of anti-fascism that combined the two sides.
09:01And from that point onward, Winston Churchill and Roosevelt really reached out and developed a relationship with Stalin
09:11in the combined purpose to defeat Germany, by all means.
09:19The Americans and the British had to kind of forget about the pact that Stalin signed with Nazi Germany.
09:28And this was really the turning point for the alliance.
09:39Stalin now had allies to stand with him against Germany's aggression.
09:45The United States and the Soviet Union had been on very frosty terms in the immediate post-World War I
09:53period.
09:53But whatever differences the U.S. and the Soviet Union might have had during the pre-war period really was
10:03put on the back burner.
10:07However, it wasn't an easy alliance.
10:11The ideologies of each nation were not entirely cast aside in the face of a common enemy.
10:18The tensions go three ways and they simmer along.
10:23The Americans are worried that they might be propping up the British Empire and they see themselves as anti-imperialists.
10:33That was a very strong sense of their self-identity.
10:40But Churchill, of course, always wanted more support.
10:43So that was a consistent sort of nagging problem.
10:49Stalin also always wanted more.
10:52And Stalin always had the nagging suspicion that these imperialists were having some ulterior motives.
11:00He was, of course, well aware that the United States was a capitalist power.
11:06Or, Churchill was a very old anti-communist who really only threw his lot in with the Soviet Union because
11:16he thought the Nazis were even worse than the Bolsheviks.
11:25It was not just competing ideologies that divided the Allies, but strategies for the war itself.
11:32Facing the full force of the German army, Stalin was desperate for the Allies to invade France and open up
11:39a second front to take the pressure off the Soviet Union.
11:47But in 1941 and 1942, Churchill was focused on North Africa, determined to protect the Suez Canal and its vital
11:57lifeline to Britain's colonies.
11:58One of the ways that Churchill had sort of almost skewed Allied strategy was he got a commitment from Roosevelt
12:06and Eisenhower to clear the Axis powers from the Mediterranean first.
12:10Despite this commitment, Roosevelt's ultimate plans in Europe revolved around France.
12:17Roosevelt is often quite clear on what he wants for these overall military decisions.
12:22He wants to invade France in 1944.
12:26As Churchill and Roosevelt focused on the Mediterranean theatre, fierce fighting in the East continued.
12:34In 1943, after years of losses, the Grand Alliance was finally able to seize the initiative.
12:42All across the board, the Axis forces were being pushed back.
12:48The first turning point was really in the East, in Stalingrad, in the winter of 1943, when German forces were
12:55resoundingly defeated by the Russian troops.
13:00For the first part of the war, it looked like Germany was going to win, and that only changed really
13:05after Stalingrad.
13:06But it's in the city of Stalingrad itself, among the ruins of homes and factories, that the most savage hand
13:13-to-hand fighting has been taking place.
13:17Things are going the Grand Alliance's way.
13:21The Soviets are advancing on the Eastern Front.
13:23They have essentially won the war against Germany, although the Germans don't accept it yet, but the tide has turned.
13:36Following their success at Stalingrad, Soviet forces continued to drive back the Axis armies in a series of brutal, costly
13:45battles.
13:46It's important to point out, the Soviet Union was bearing the brunt of the war.
13:51Not only the brunt of the war, sometimes they were the only ones on the continent fighting.
13:55He does think, we're the only one fighting, we're doing all the bleeding, and the Westerns are all being a
14:02little bit soft.
14:05Obviously the British had held out, when it looked like the Nazis might invade the island, but the brunt of
14:10the war was carried by the Soviet Union.
14:16In the end, 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died in that war.
14:2627 million, I mean, an incomprehensible number when you think that it's roughly, in the case of the United States,
14:32400,000, and in the case of Britain, maybe 450,000, something like that.
14:38It's an incomprehensible sacrifice that the Soviet people were bearing in the Second World War.
14:47The US and Great Britain had kept the Soviets supplied with arms and provisions.
14:53But for Stalin, this wasn't enough.
14:57Stalin had agitated with the Allies from the very beginning about the Second Front.
15:04FDR had promised that, but did not deliver for quite a long time, and Russian forces pushed back relentlessly against
15:13Germany on the Eastern Front.
15:16In 1943, the Allies finally established a European Front.
15:22Not in France, as Stalin had hoped, but in the Mediterranean.
15:28The next step of big importance is the US invasion into Southern Europe and Sicily from North Africa.
15:39Although Stalin doesn't accept that as the Second Front, and this is also after the tide of war turned in
15:47the Pacific, another Second Front Stalin doesn't like to accept as a Second Front.
15:52In the Pacific, things are also going the Americans' way, and the war in North Africa has been won.
15:58So it's a moment when there can be some confidence that they will win, it's just a question how long
16:04it will take.
16:07As thoughts turn to this endgame, Allied plans began in earnest for a massive cross-channel invasion to recapture France,
16:16and take the first steps towards Berlin and victory.
16:27The Allies now had a plan to win.
16:31But what shape would a post-war Europe take?
16:35That was still to be determined.
16:40In late November 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met in Allied-occupied Iran to discuss strategy.
16:51The Tehran Conference was the first time all three had met face to face.
16:58The Russian embassy in Tehran, ancient Persia.
17:02And this is the meeting Berlin said absolutely could not happen.
17:06The meeting Hitler and Goebbels had to prevent and could not.
17:11With so much at stake, Stalin was determined to not be outmaneuvered by the other leaders.
17:18When the Allied leaders got to Tehran, Stalin announced that he'd unmasked something called Operation Long Jump,
17:24in that the Germans were planning to assassinate all three leaders while they were in the city.
17:30Now, it is known that German agents were in Tehran, a lot of them had been arrested,
17:34but there's no clear evidence that Hitler actually authorised this operation.
17:38Though there were concerns this plot was a Soviet fabrication, Roosevelt agreed to move into the Soviet embassy for his
17:46safety.
17:46But this gave Stalin and his secret police unprecedented access to the American president.
17:54What it meant was Stalin was able to put the fear of God into both Churchill and Roosevelt,
17:59and as a result he held a series of individual meetings with those two leaders in Tehran.
18:04It was part and parcel of Stalin's tactic of divide and rule amongst Roosevelt and Churchill.
18:10Over the course of those few days, Churchill grew suspicious of the situation.
18:17Churchill is very much the odd man out at Tehran because of his view of how the war should be
18:22fought.
18:23So at Tehran, Roosevelt and Stalin actually cultivate a very close relationship,
18:29and they really gang up in certain times on Churchill and force him into line.
18:38At Tehran, the leaders agreed on a plan to defeat Germany.
18:43The post-war order would have to wait.
18:46The grand strategy was to open a second front by launching a massive allied invasion of northern France.
18:55This would give Stalin what he had been asking for and put Hitler's forces under renewed pressure.
19:02If the United States and Britain land in France, the German army will be stretched.
19:07It can't fight both the Soviet Union and the Western allies, and it will be ground down.
19:17Stalin was crossed that the allies had been dragging their feet.
19:20He was particularly crossed with Churchill's obsession with his Mediterranean First strategy.
19:27He also thinks that the Western powers want to probably weaken the Soviet Union because they're crafty imperialists,
19:34and they should just get on with the job.
19:37In fact, there was a rail because Stalin accused Churchill of not opening the second front
19:43because of Churchill's preoccupation with the Mediterranean.
19:46Stung into action, Churchill gave Stalin an undertaking that the landings would take place in May 1944.
19:53As the prospect of allied victory came into focus, thoughts turned to what might follow.
20:05Stalin begins to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and so he is starting to think,
20:10how are we going to position the USSR in the post-war world?
20:19There were very real strategic concerns for the Soviets.
20:23How would they ensure that the disaster of the German invasion would never happen again?
20:31Stalin's biggest priority is probably to make sure that Germany is never again strong enough to challenge or threaten the
20:39Soviet Union.
20:40And in discussions with Churchill and with Roosevelt, he suggests, for example, breaking Germany up into its former constituent principalities,
20:48and making a whole bunch of tiny statelets.
20:52The other consideration for Stalin is how to secure the Soviet Union's western borders while recognizing the independence of the
21:03countries that had been overrun by Nazi Germany or its allies and then liberated by the Soviet Union.
21:09Roosevelt, however, was wary of Stalin's broader plans for Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
21:15He sought assurance that Stalin would not make any move to reincorporate the Baltic Republics into the Soviet Union until
21:24each country had voted on the idea.
21:26Stalin agreed to Roosevelt's terms, but only with a caveat that these referendums would take place in accordance with the
21:34Soviet Constitution and with no outside interference.
21:39Stalin, I have argued and many historians will argue, you know, was a realist.
21:46And by that I mean he judged his goals and his tactics by a hard-nosed kind of realist assessment
21:57of what was gainable and what was not.
22:00And so he made adjustments along the way.
22:12Through a combination of political maneuvering and brute force, Stalin steadily extended his sphere of influence.
22:22It didn't necessarily mean communization of Eastern Europe or Sovietization of Eastern Europe, at least not during the war.
22:30But an area where the Soviet Union would have considerable influence.
22:37For now, the Western Allies were prepared to look past Stalin's ambition.
22:46At this stage of the war, the Grand Alliance was still united by a common purpose.
22:55After years of preparation, the Western Allies were finally ready to make their move, an overwhelming invasion of France.
23:05Stalin, in turn, agreed to launch a major offensive from the east, mounting further pressure on German forces, who would
23:13now be dealing with an assault on two fronts.
23:27Just over six months after the Tehran Conference, the promise of a Western Front would be realized.
23:34On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched Operation Overlord.
23:41Attention men, attention. From General Eisenhower to all soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force, the eyes of
23:50the world are upon you.
23:52This was deed.
23:54The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.
24:01Operation Overlord was the biggest British and American operation conducted to date.
24:07It was a huge operation. It initially involved around 150,000 troops, almost 7,000 warships and assault ships.
24:18This massive force crossed the English Channel towards northern France, landing across five beaches.
24:28It also involved the use of three airborne divisions again, around about 20,000 troops securing the flanks of the
24:34invasion area.
24:41By the end of that day, the Allies had successfully gained control of the beaches.
24:47They could now begin their push into France.
24:59Once the Allies are in France, that takes quite a bit of pressure off the Red Army.
25:09And that increases the speed with which they can advance the rest of the war.
25:14That together with the higher mobility they have, that does speed things up as it was intended to.
25:19But it still was a long way to go and the Germans kept defending themselves very determinately.
25:26The Western Allies had finally opened up the long-promised Second Front.
25:32It was now Stalin's turn to hold up his end of the agreement, made at the Tehran Conference.
25:38The largest Soviet operation of the war to date was about to begin.
25:44Now, on the Eastern Front, at the same time as D-Day took place, Stalin was going to conduct his
25:50own version of D-Day.
25:51And this was called Operation Bagration.
25:55And was going to involve a major assault.
25:59It was supposed to have taken place at the same time as D-Day, but actually happened almost a month
26:04later.
26:08The operation commenced on the night of June 21st, 1944.
26:15Exactly three years after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
26:22Operation Bagration is sometimes known as Stalin's revenge because obviously it was designed to revenge the Nazi invasion of the
26:29Soviet Union and Operation Barbarossa.
26:31News of the liberation of one Soviet town after another has been coming thick and fast.
26:37While Soviet forces are annihilating Germans in one great town after another, their comrades have been driving on at the
26:42rate of 20 miles a day.
26:45Garrison after garrison, left behind in a suicidal effort to check the Russian advance, has been obliterated.
26:52In the months leading up to Bagration, German forces in the central region of the Eastern Front occupied an area
27:00known as the Belarus Falcone.
27:02A landmass between the western Vina River to the north and the Dnieper River to the south.
27:08At its heart was Minsk, under German control since 1941.
27:14With Operation Bagration, Stalin sought to encircle and destroy the 38 German divisions of Army Group Centre.
27:27With new tanks and fresh divisions, the Red Army was also equipped with new tactics.
27:35The notion was to concentrate forces at one or two points at the front line,
27:43and then the enemy would not know.
27:43But do so covertly, so that the enemy would not know.
27:53And then assault the enemy positions, pierce through them, and once the defensive line has been breached,
28:02you pull through the tank forces, followed by motorized infantry.
28:07And those would then encircle enemy formations, wipe them out, and move very quickly.
28:17The offensive caught German forces by surprise.
28:21They had been preparing for an attack further south,
28:24believing the next target of Soviet attack would be Ukraine.
28:29German forces were hugely outnumbered.
28:33The Soviet force consisted of 166 divisions, totalling more than 1.6 million men,
28:4133,000 guns and mortars, and 5,800 tanks.
28:50In the air, they were supported by thousands of combat aircraft.
28:59The German troops were outnumbered four to one.
29:04The Soviets had mustered four times as many tanks as the Germans,
29:09and ten times as many artillery pieces.
29:14Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, the Germans fought hard.
29:23The Huns' resistance has grown desperately stubborn as Allied armies approach across the German frontiers.
29:30Hitler's early refusal to allow retreat meant that the Soviets were met with fierce opposition
29:37in the first few days of the offensive.
29:39Faced with such overwhelming odds, the Germans had no hope of victory.
29:46In the worst defeat in German history, they would suffer around half a million casualties.
29:54As Soviet forces regained control of lands lost three years earlier,
30:00they found stark evidence of the suffering of civilians under Nazi occupation.
30:10They saw the results of wholesale destruction of crops, livestock and villages,
30:16and discovered the mass graves of the roughly one million civilians killed in those few years.
30:26By the end of July, the Soviets had taken back control of all of Belarus.
30:32At the same time, Western Allied forces were finally breaking through the Normandy countryside,
30:39on the path to liberating Paris.
30:42Hitler's forces were now being hammered from both sides.
30:47The German army is basically caught between a rock and a hard place.
30:52So it's steamrolled in the east during Operation Bagration,
30:55then also its forces in the west are chewed up in Normandy,
30:59and then the Normandy breakout.
31:02So it's more a case of the Allies working together to basically start strangling the life out of Nazis.
31:15The destruction of the Third Reich now seemed inevitable.
31:19As the possibility of an Allied victory loomed, Stalin had his sights set on Poland.
31:27Poland was at the crux of the Second World War.
31:32Stalin positioned himself as Poland's liberator, promising to rebuild and reshape the country.
31:42Secretly, Stalin had no intention of surrendering so valuable a prize.
31:52Stalin was interested in Poland for a number of reasons.
31:55First of all, he plain and simple didn't like the Poles.
32:01He felt that the Poles were kind of the eternal enemies, as it were, of the Soviet Union.
32:11The second reason, of course, is that Poland was used as the pathway for German armies in World War I
32:18and in World War II.
32:21But I think it also had a symbolic importance.
32:24It had belonged to the Russian Empire up until 1917, so it could be seen as part of Russian sphere
32:30of, traditional sphere of influence.
32:33And it has a history of resistance to Russian imperialism, and that resistance showed itself after the revolution in war
32:42between the new Polish state and the new Bolshevik Russian state.
32:46Poland had been the sort of lynchpin of the post-First World War settlement, and it had been revived and
32:53was supposed to be part of this network of democratic states that were really westward looking.
33:00To Stalin, the Polish question had never been fully settled.
33:06This would be his chance to do so.
33:15The Polish question had two parts. The first part really had to do with the post-war borders of Poland.
33:22The proposal was to move Poland's eastern border, shared with the Soviet Union.
33:27There's a famous piece of Tehran about the three pencils on a map where they're moved westward.
33:36And that was how Churchill described the movement of Poland in terms of territory.
33:42It would lose the part east of the so-called Kurzon Line, which had been set at the end of
33:48World War I.
33:51To compensate for land ceded to the Soviet Union in the east, Poland would be handed new lands in the
33:58west, a prize of war exacted from the Germans.
34:03Stalin had his buffer state, but political control of Poland was still at stake.
34:16Stalin definitely thought about zones of influence and hoped he would have a good chunk of eastern Europe.
34:26How exactly that would look like was another question.
34:29The Allies had differing plans for the future of Poland and supported rival Polish factions.
34:36The Soviet Union had broken relations with the Polish London government in exile.
34:42The government was not recognised by Moscow.
34:46Based in London since the fall of France in June 1940, Stalin saw Poland's leaders as tainted by the west
34:54and guilty of slander against the Soviet Union.
34:58Stalin was determined to install a communist government in Poland that would be friendly to Soviet interests.
35:06And to that end, he created a Polish communist army which served alongside the Red Army.
35:13And its job was going to be to liberate Warsaw and help install Polish communist government.
35:20Thereby shutting out the exiled Polish government that was in London, shutting them out of power.
35:30Throughout July 1944, the Red Army pushed hard through Poland, forcing back the beleaguered German army.
35:39So the collapse was much swifter on the eastern front and resulted in the Soviets arriving outside the city of
35:47Warsaw by early August.
35:51Now you can see how catastrophic that is when you consider in Normandy, it took the Allies three months to
35:57overwhelm Army Group B, which was defending northern France.
36:01As the Allies closed in on Germany from both sides, it was clear what would determine the fate of the
36:08newly liberated nations.
36:11Boots on the ground.
36:15On the western front, Operation Overlord was in full effect, with the Allied advance making its way inland.
36:33Following the Normandy landings, the Allies had seen weeks of intense fighting.
36:39Their attempts to move inland through France were met with fierce opposition from German forces,
36:44and a stalemate persisted through June and late into July.
36:55While the British and Americans advanced slowly in the west,
37:00the Soviets were left with a free hand to do as they wished in the east,
37:05seizing control and settling scores.
37:11But in Poland, the Soviets had another rival for power.
37:18The Polish Home Army was the main resistance group in the underground.
37:24It was the biggest and most powerful underground in all of Europe,
37:29which was formed in part by local resistance groups, plus the support then of the London government.
37:39It also had an entire underground state, schools, libraries, universities.
37:46And they were poised then to undertake scattered resistance measures against the Nazis.
37:55Slogans openly appeared on walls, ridiculing and threatening the Germans.
37:59Work slow but sure, this turtle advised all saboteurs.
38:05As the Soviet advance neared Warsaw on August 1, 1944,
38:10the Polish Home Army rose up against Nazi occupation.
38:15The Home Army knew it had only one chance to seize power.
38:20What the Poles wanted to do was present the Red Army with a fait accompli,
38:24so even when the Red Army got to Warsaw,
38:27there would be Polish troops on the streets,
38:29there would be a Polish caretaker government.
38:31They would have been in a stronger position, obviously,
38:34to oversee fair and democratic elections.
38:40While Stalin promised free and democratic elections,
38:44the Poles feared he could not be trusted.
38:47If they wanted freedom, they had to seize it for themselves.
38:51So, in 1944, Polish resistance knew it was a race against time,
38:57as did the Polish exiled government in London.
39:00If they didn't do that, the Red Army would roll into Warsaw
39:04and Stalin would immediately install a communist caretaker government
39:08and pay lip service to holding elections.
39:13Despite facing a better resourced opponent,
39:17in the early weeks of the uprising,
39:20the resistance fighters had some initial success.
39:23The 63 days of fighting that followed
39:26would be the largest military action by a resistance force of the war.
39:35On both sides of Europe,
39:38anti-Nazi resistance movements were gaining traction.
39:45Buoyed by the approaching Allied armies,
39:48on August 19th, French resistance fighters in Paris made their move,
39:53with additional support from the police force,
39:56rising up against the German forces stationed in the city.
40:02This unexpected move forced a change in Allied strategy.
40:07They were going to bypass it, trap the garrison there,
40:10or allow the garrison to escape,
40:12and would worry about liberating the city
40:14once the German army was in full flight.
40:16By bypassing Paris,
40:18the Allies could cut off the German garrison from their supply lines.
40:22There was little incentive for the Allies to take on the task of liberating the city.
40:33But the uprising by French resistance groups, including the Communists,
40:38forced a change of plans.
40:41In France, the Western Allies faced a major problem because French Communist resistance
40:45was probably the most powerful of all those organisations resisting German occupation.
40:51Now, the last thing that General de Gaulle wanted, leader of the Free French,
40:54was the Communists taking power in Paris, in Toulon and in Marseille.
41:01He worked tirelessly to ensure that did not happen.
41:05General Eisenhower agreed to take back Paris from the Germans,
41:09promising to let the Free French forces take the lead on liberating the city.
41:15This mission was given to the 2nd French Armoured Division,
41:19with support from the US 4th Infantry Division.
41:28Within a day of the Allies commencing their attack on the city,
41:32German resistance had crumbled.
41:35For years they strutted in the streets of the capital of a defeated France,
41:39but now Fritz and Hans have surrendered,
41:42not to the overwhelming might of Allied arms,
41:45but to the citizens of Paris.
41:51What had been a swift success in the West played out very differently on the Eastern Front.
42:05On August 25th, the German army launched a brutal counter-attack
42:10against the Polish resistance in Warsaw.
42:14As the fighting continued into September,
42:18German forces took back more ground in the city.
42:21Morale among the civilian population dwindled.
42:26Weeks passed, with no sign of the Soviet army to lend support to the Polish uprising.
42:35Finally, in mid-September, Soviet forces had reached Praga,
42:39an eastern district of Warsaw, across the Vistula River,
42:43from where the majority of fighting was taking place.
42:47At that point, the Western allies hoped that the Soviet Union is going to come in and help them.
42:52What happens instead is that the Soviet armies wait outside Warsaw.
43:01On October 2nd, 1944, with supplies running out, the resistance had no choice but to surrender.
43:09The surviving forces were taken prisoner.
43:13The remaining population of the city was deported,
43:17and the city itself was systematically destroyed by the victorious German army.
43:23By the time the uprising ended, around 15,000 resistance fighters and over 150,000 civilians had been killed.
43:34The German forces lost around 10,000 men.
43:38The German forces crushed that resistance, and then the Soviet forces come in.
43:44The Soviet Union says, well, this is because our armies were overextended,
43:48and we couldn't just go in and join this fight at that moment.
43:51The partisans decided to launch it at that time, and that's on them.
43:57Beyond the loss of life, the fate of post-war Poland was sealed.
44:03It was clear that the newly liberated Poland would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence.
44:10There's a major Polish diaspora that's following what's going on,
44:14that's participating in the fight, and they are very upset by this.
44:19And they're making those views known and sort of saying,
44:22look, this is actually revealing of Soviet attitudes and intentions.
44:31In the aftermath of the failed uprising, Poland was occupied by the Soviet army with little ability to resist them.
44:42There was nothing left to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating post-war Poland.
44:52By the end of August 1944, the Eastern and Western fronts in Europe were starting to converge on Germany.
45:02As the war's endgame played out, victory for the Allies seemed well within reach.
45:09And there was almost a kind of race to the finish.
45:12There was a sense that the war was coming to a close.
45:15Hitler, however, refused to accept Germany's perilous position.
45:20His options had narrowed, but he was desperate to reverse the fate of the war.
45:27For years, he had hinted at a vast program to develop game-changing wonder weapons.
45:35There was a clear understanding that German scientists were working on developing new weapons.
45:42Nazi propaganda about these mysterious weapons and their imminent arrival on the battlefield helped maintain fragile German morale.
45:51Many German soldiers believed if they could only hold on until the wonder weapons arrived, perhaps they could turn the
45:58tables.
46:00In response to the Normandy landings in June, Hitler had launched the first of his wonder weapons, the V-1,
46:08known to the Allies as the Doodle Bug.
46:11This flying bomb was the world's first cruise missile.
46:21Almost 10,000 of these weapons would be fired at Britain.
46:29Despite Allied attempts to counter their threat, the V-1 campaign would go on to kill over 6,000 people.
46:42On the morning of September 8th, an explosion on the outskirts of Paris heralded the arrival of Germany's latest weapon,
46:52the V-2 ballistic missile.
46:57The first weapon of its kind, the V-2 travelled at supersonic speeds and struck without warning.
47:12During the V-2 campaign, more than 3,000 rockets were launched across Europe, claiming over 9,000 lives.
47:32The initial development happened in a city in northern Germany, in Peenemünde, but when that area was bombed, they relocated
47:42to an area in northern Thuringia, in Nordhausen, and set to work and developed more weapons.
47:53The reality was that the V-2 was expensive and resource-intensive to make.
48:03The V-weapons failed to change Germany's fortunes in the way Hitler had hoped.
48:10But the Fuhrer had one last card to play.
48:18The tide of war had turned.
48:21This bold and unexpected grand alliance had delivered the most decisive plays since joining forces, setting in motion the final
48:30stages of World War II.
48:33Does Hitler understand the war's lost, or does he believe there is an honest chance that Germany can change the
48:40trajectory of the war and win it?
48:42The Soviet Union has survived, the US is in the war, it's mobilising, Britain is still there.
48:49As the Allies advanced towards Germany, Hitler decided to risk everything on one last roll of the dice.
48:58Deep in the forests of the Ardennes, on the borders of Belgium and Luxembourg, he secretly assembled a huge force.
49:07And by December 1944, Hitler was ready.
49:18The battle to come would determine the end game of World War II.
49:38It was always a
49:38to add seven three years later...
Comments