Sunday the 7th of December 1941.
Japan was about to attack the United States Of America.
On board the aircraft carrier Zuikaku
the pilots were woken at 4am.
They gathered together for the traditional sake toast
to the emperor.
The attack on Pearl Harbour, the big American naval base in Hawaii,
was intended to deliver a decisive blow
and eliminate America as a naval power in the Pacific.
The attack would turn a European war into a world war.
This series is the epic story of World War II
as it raged across countries and continents,
as millions of soldiers fought from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It is the moving story of the millions of civilians
whose homes were destroyed and lives disrupted...
..as they were caught up in the cataclysm of war.
To tell this story, the best footage of the war
has been painstakingly transformed
using digital techniques into colour.
Along with original colour home movies, it gives a completely
new perspective to one of the greatest events of the last century.
This is the powerful story of the apocalypse
and of the people who fought the Second World War.
The attack on Pearl Harbour came as a total surprise.
Marine Corporal Carl Nightingale,
who was on board the battleship Arizona, described the scene.
An explosion caused the ship to shake.
A bomb fell, right beside me.
The lieutenant collapsed, covered in blood.
The deck was thick with dead bodies,
the ship turned over.
I jumped into the sea.
In the attack, launched without any declaration of war,
2,500 Americans were killed and 1,200 wounded.
Only 30 Japanese pilots died.
These images shocked the American people,
who would no longer oppose their country's entry into the war.
Yet Japanese forces had not landed in Hawaii,
nor did they take Pearl Harbour.
They had sunk part of the American Pacific Fleet
but only the, by now outdated, battleships.
Aircraft carriers had become the key to victory in naval warfare
and the three aircraft carriers based in Pearl Harbour
were not there that Sunday.
They all happened to be at sea, and so, miraculously, they survived.
President of the United States Franklin D Roosevelt
had been expecting an attack by Japan.
Tension between the two countries was high.
But no-one had imagined that Japanese aircraft
would be able to strike 3,000 miles away from their bases.
The next day, Roosevelt went before Congress.
December 7th, 1941,
a date which will live in infamy.
The United States Of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.
No matter how long it may take us
to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people
in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
But Pearl Harbour was only one element
in the Japanese assault plan.
On that same day, the Japanese attacked Hong Kong -
the British colony in China.
Then they bombed American air bases in the Philippines,
and landed on the Baatan peninsula.
They now invaded the British colonies of Burma and Malaya,
for their rubber, and the Dutch colony of Sumatra for its oil,
threatening both India and Australia.
A few months earlier,
they had moved into the French colony of Indochina.
After France's defeat in 1940, the Vichy regime
had not been able to refuse anything to an ally of Hitler,
and had turned some of its air and naval bases
over to the Japanese.
The United States had retaliated by cutting off its oil supplies
to Japan and by freezing Japanese assets.
These economic sanctions had pushed Japan into war.
The country, a chain of overpopulated islands
lacking in natural resources, was rapidly developing.
Japan was in need of raw materials and it set out to obtain them...
by force.
Japan had built up its navy
to become the second most powerful fleet in the world
with no less than ten aircraft carriers
and with superb fighter aircraft.
The Zero outperformed most Allied planes.
Japan had an army of two million men who were fanatically devoted
to their emperor.
Hirohito was the 124th Emperor of Japan.
The scholarly monarch used to study
marine biology in the laboratory in his palace.
He was seen as a living god.
His divine authority covered the actions of his military.
In China, the Imperial Army had carried out appalling atrocities,
like in Nanking in 1937, where 300,000 Chinese were slaughtered.
After the massacre, the Japanese army had proudly marched
through the Forbidden City in Beijing.
The Emperor probably knew nothing of the massacre.
He reigned, but did not govern.
Real power lay in the hands of General Tojo,
and an ultra-nationalist group that controlled the country
through their equivalent of the Gestapo - the Kempeitai.
The Japanese people heard through loudspeakers
of the official declaration of war against the United States.
These Japanese pilots, who took off from Indochina,
eating breakfast in the air, were seeking out two British battleships
that had come to protect Singapore - the elderly Repulse
and one of the most modern combat ships of the time,
HMS Prince Of Wales,
the pride of the Royal Navy.
Three days after Pearl Harbour,
they were both sunk by the Japanese in less than an hour.
10th December, 1941,
a catastrophic day for British naval power in the Far East.
The following day in Berlin, Hitler went to the Reichstag
for a special meeting of Nazi leaders.
For four days after Pearl Harbour,
Hitler had been waiting for Roosevelt to declare war on Germany.
But no declaration came.
Hitler thought that if he sided with Japan,
Tokyo would have to support him in Russia.
So the Fuhrer declared war on America.
The German generals, however, were far from enthusiastic,
and Ribbentrop the foreign minister, had tried to dissuade Hitler,
but Hitler was the one who made the decisions.
And so Nazi Germany was at war with the United States.
Hitler proclaimed, "We know what powers stand behind Roosevelt.
"It's the eternal Jew.
"I am grateful to the German people for designating me
"to lead this historic struggle that will determine
"the history of the world for the next ten centuries to come."
Prime Minister Winston Churchill rushed to Washington.
He said to Roosevelt, "We're all in the same boat now."
This was the moment he'd been waiting for for the last two years.
Roosevelt had wanted to show his electorate
that he had done everything he could to keep the peace,
but the war had become a world war, and Churchill now felt stronger.
What kind of a people do they think we are?
Is it possible that they do not realise that we shall never cease
to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson
which they and the world will never forget?
APPLAUSE
EXPLOSION
But the war would get a lot worse before it got better.
War was now raging in the Pacific
but the Allies had severely underestimated their Japanese enemy.
Hong Kong fell in just a few days.
General Yamashita, known as the Japanese Rommel, sent his tanks
down through the Malayan jungle.
Within weeks, he had captured Singapore,
the pearl of the British Empire,
a stronghold that was considered impregnable.
Yamashita made 27,000 prisoners
line up in perfect order for a humiliating review.
The general paused for a chivalrous salute
to a Japanese propaganda crew.
General Yamashita would be hung for war crimes in 1946.
His prisoners, crowded into horrendous camps,
would die of hunger, tropical diseases and brutal maltreatment.
They were forced to build the railway that would take the Japanese
one step closer to India, including the construction of
the infamous bridge over the River Kwai.
Louis Baume, a British mountaineer who was taken prisoner in Singapore, remembered.
'The Japanese felt disdain for us.
'They didn't understand why we hadn't committed hara-kiri.'
General MacArthur, commander of US forces in the
Philippines, which were surrounded by the Japanese,
was ordered by Roosevelt to escape so as not to be taken prisoner.
As he left, he declared, "I shall return."
MacArthur's soldiers were taken prisoner.
30,000 Americans, with their old First World War doughboy helmets,
and an equal number of Filipinos,
set off for an internment camp 60 miles away.
This became known as the Bataan Death March.
One of the survivors, Sydney Stewart, recalled:
We marched for ten days and nights without eating.
We were constantly beaten.
Those who could no longer go on
were killed by the guards, who beheaded them with a sword.
Such cruelty was explained by the Japanese warrior code
that was particular to their culture.
Surrender was incomprehensible to them.
A Japanese soldier was told never to surrender.
He was trained to fight from childhood according to the tradition
of Bushido, the art of killing and of being killed.
An officer in the Imperial Navy, Matsui Fushida, explained:
Bushido can be translated as the Way of the Warrior.
It is a code of loyalty,
faithfulness and devotion until death.
We scorn death.
We kill with great cruelty as long as it is the enemy we are killing.
We scorn physical pain, we scorn death without glory.
Bushido is the art of death.
In just five months, Japan destroyed
the Allied forces in the Far East and conquered half of the Pacific.
Banzai!
Japanese soldiers chanted, "Banzai! Long live the Emperor!"
Screaming, "Banzai," the Japanese carried out their own version of a lightning war.
General Tojo and the Emperor
made a public appearance to mark the victories.
In Britain, the RAF still had to defend the country
from occasional German raiders, but Churchill knew that to win the war
he would have to take the offensive, to hit back at Germany.
Churchill and Roosevelt both agreed on a strategy of Germany First,
that their original objective must be to defeat Germany.
Churchill decided to launch a bombing campaign against Germany.
RAF Bomber Command was led by
Air Marshal Harris, nicknamed Bomber Harris.
His policy was to bomb German cities in order to destroy
the morale of the people.
Harris believed he could win the war
with his big four-engined Halifaxes and Lancasters.
His strategy was criticised
for being costly in terms of men and equipment.
But it began to take a toll on German cities.
On 8th March 1942, Essen was bombed.
The city produced weapons used by the German forces in Russia.
This was a way for Churchill to help Stalin.
The Germans began to suffer the consequences of Hitler's policies
and the Nazi regime began its descent into murderous insanity.
Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and his assistant Heydrich,
decided to implement what they called the Final Solution.
The extermination of the Jews in Europe.
Heydrich started to organise
the rounding-up of Jews across occupied Europe.
Hundreds of thousands were sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
In Auschwitz, more than one million people were systematically murdered.
Thousands of Jews were crowded into fake showers and then gassed.
After the Holocaust by bullets in Russia,
the genocide intensified.
In Paris, and everywhere else in Europe,
the occupation brought poverty.
Everything was rationed.
And much of what each occupied country produced
went to feed the German army, a huge burden to bear.
The fathers of these boys were prisoners in Germany,
Stalag camps for enlisted men and Oflag camps for the officers.
Gaston Cyrec, imprisoned in June 1940, wrote:
I wasted the five best years of my life in that Stalag.
From 20 to 25,
without my wife.
In exile in London, General de Gaulle embodied the French Resistance
and in France attacks against the German occupiers were on the rise.
In retaliation, hostages were executed.
The occupation of Europe was about to turn increasingly brutal.
In early 1942 in this global conflict, the Axis Powers,
the alliance between Germany, Italy and Japan dominated on all fronts.
The Afrika Korps was just outside Egypt.
The Wehrmacht occupied a third of Russia.
The Imperial Navy of Japan controlled
the Pacific and Germany's submarines were wreaking havoc in the Atlantic.
Germany's most dangerous weapon was definitely the U-boat.
In the first few months of 1942, the U-boats sank 4 million tonnes
of Allied shipping, including oil tankers, freighters loaded with arms
and ammunition and vessels with fresh supplies for a struggling Britain.
Even though the United States had joined the conflict,
the Allies seem to be losing the war.
The world was on the brink of total chaos.
The German submariners describe this
as the happy time and called the American shores the promised land.
Through their periscopes,
they filmed the bright lights of New York.
TRAFFIC NOISE AND MUSIC
'We have information that a squadron...'
The American newspapers and radios went wild,
spreading panic and fear of German air-raids.
In reality, planes did not yet
have the range to hit America from Europe.
Still, the population was told to black out their lights.
But it was the West Coast, where the idea of a Japanese
attack seemed more plausible, that was overtaken by hysteria.
Suddenly, 120,000 Japanese Americans became suspect.
First, their radios were confiscated.
And then the local sheriffs took their fingerprints.
Then the government proclaimed emergency measures.
Roosevelt declared,
"I admit that it violates the constitution,
"but it is a military necessity".
And yet it these Americans of Japanese ancestry had lived for
generations in California, where they contributed to the agriculture
and economy of the state.
Most of them were US citizens.
They were given 48 hours to sell their shops and houses.
They were then evacuated in groups to relocation centres,
far away in the deserts of Utah, or up in the snows of Oregon.
Centres euphemistically called internment camps.
But, which were horribly reminiscent of another kind of camp.
A shadow across the reputation of the US.
But nothing diminished the loyalty of these Japanese Americans.
6,000 served as translators in the Pacific.
Nearly 20,000 signed up to fight the Germans in Europe.
The rest would be freed at the end of the war.
In 1942, America rallied around its flag.
11 million men enlisted, 6 million women went to work to replace them
in the armament factories.
Roosevelt set production targets at 60,000 aircraft.
75,000 tanks and 10 million tonnes of ships.
This was a victory programme.
But victory was uncertain and very far off.
American opinion was flagging and an exploit was needed to shore it up.
A daring plan was drawn up to bomb Japan.
An aircraft carrier, the USS Hornet sailed as
close to Japan as was possible, with a squadron of B25 bombers.
This was the first time such large
planes had attempted to take off from the compact deck of a carrier.
The air crews were trained by
Air Force Colonel, Jimmy Doolittle, who had been a famous racing pilot.
He commanded the raid.
Their challenge was to get airborne
for the long flight to Japan, fully laden with bombs and fuel.
WHIRRING OF ENGINES
Somehow, they succeeded in taking off.
Their mission was celebrated in
a popular feature film, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.
They dropped only a few tons of bombs and caused only minor damage,
but it was a huge slap in the face for the Empire of the Rising Sun.
One of the aircraft went down in Japanese territory.
The vengeance was fierce.
Tried for war crimes, the crew were sentenced to death.
For the Prime Minister, General Tojo and for Admiral Yamamoto,
the American raid proved it was necessary to extend their defensive
perimeter further east.
They made a plan to take Midway,
an American military base in the middle of the Pacific
and then capture Pearl Harbor,
as they had failed to do six months earlier.
What the Japanese did not know was that the Americans had successfully
broken their secret military code and so were aware of the plan.
As a result, the US Commander in Chief, Admiral Chester Nimitz, was
able to prepare to defend Midway.
He had fewer aircraft carriers than Yamamoto, but he gathered
them together in an ambush.
Admiral Yamamoto commanded the biggest armada ever put together.
200 warships with eight aircraft carriers and nearly 600 planes.
On board were 5,000 Japanese marines.
And a painter who had come along to immortalise the battle, Fujita.
Before the war in Paris,
he had been a famous artist and had returned to Japan to do his duty.
On the American side, it was the eminent Hollywood director,
John Ford who immortalised the defence of Midway Island on film.
Filming the men on the eve of the battle they knew was coming,
Ford made it look like one of his Westerns before the big shoot-out.
At 5am on the morning of the 7th June, 1942,
Ford filmed the first Japanese attack,
which devastated the American base.
SHELLS SQUEAL
A Japanese bomb exploded a little too close to the film makers,
seriously wounding Ford, who lost an eye.
In the jeep taking him to the hospital, Ford came to and said,
"My God, that one was close".
MACHINE GUN FIRES
Then he explained, "the Marines with me, they were kids from 18 to 22
"and they were the calmest people I have ever seen.
"I figured then, well, this war is practically won".
The pilots on board the US aircraft carriers were not much older.
They were barely out of college.
They paused for John Ford's cameramen and then took off
to attack the Japanese fleet.
The 8th Torpedo Squadron struck first.
ENGINES DRONE
One of its pilots,
25 year-old Lieutenant George Gay, nose-dived over the Japanese fleet.
RAPID HEAVY GUNFIRE
The anti-aircraft guns and the Japanese aircraft carriers
shot down the American planes one after another.
EXPLOSION
GUNFIRE
George Gay flew low over the waves.
He had been shot down.
He surfaced in the water, miraculously unhurt.
A few hundred yards away he could see the feverish activity on board
the Japanese aircraft carriers.
Aircraft were being fuelled up and bombs loaded in preparation
for their second wave of attack.
At that very moment, when the Japanese carriers
were most vulnerable, another squadron of US bombers arrived
over the Japanese ships.
It was an incredible stroke of luck for the American pilots,
who sank four Japanese aircraft carriers.
George Gay, still in the water, witnessed the drama.
"I found myself in the middle of the Japanese wrecks and the sharks.
"I saw the Japanese planes coming
"back from their first attack on Midway.
"They were looking for their aircraft carriers, the ones we'd just sunk.
"So I saw the Japanese pilots who had
"by now run out of fuel, landing in the water".
George Gay was finally rescued by an American destroyer.
He went on to become an airline pilot.
The US aircraft carrier, Yorktown, had been damaged by the Japanese.
The wounded were being tended to on the flight deck,
and the carrier set about to return to its base.
But next morning, it was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine, I168.
The Americans had lost an aircraft carrier.
♪ The Last Post
But the Japanese had lost four.
This was the first Japanese defeat and it boosted Allied morale.
"It restored our confidence", said Churchill.
But it didn't seem to have weakened Japan.
Defeated at Midway in the middle of the Pacific,
Japanese forces continued to advance south towards Australia.
Darwin, the northernmost city in Australia had already been bombed
by the Japanese and was now preparing for an invasion -
the Continent's first war.
SHOUTING
But the Americans were now focused on the island of Guadalcanal.
One of their reconnaissance planes had discovered the Japanese were
building an airfield on the island, posing a great threat to Australia.
So the Americans launched what would be the first of many landings
in the Pacific War.
On 7th August 1942, US Marines landed in Guadalcanal.
Initially, they didn't encounter any resistance
and headed into the jungle.
One of them, Edwin Morgan, observed...
We were getting to know the jungle.
It was full of suspicious noises that were frightening,
and I was afraid.
But we said to ourselves,
"There's no reason for the Japanese to be better than us.
"They all live in cities.
"There are no jungles in Japan."
The marines were professionals, and the Japanese were fanatics.
The Japanese were so confident of their superiority
that they charged with fixed bayonets,
just like in the First World War at the Somme,
against machine gun fire...
..with the same result as at the Somme - a bloodbath.
900 Japanese soldiers were killed in the Battle of Tenaru River.
The marines were then able to capture the airfield.
They secured it and enlarged the runway for the first planes
of the Marine air force, called the Black Sheep Squadron.
The airfield became the target of repeated shellings by the Japanese,
and at night, their cruisers used to sail up and down the coast
and pound the Americans with such regularity
that the marines called them the Tokyo Express.
Despite winning a victory in the sea of Guadalcanal,
an elite Japanese regiment still got through to reinforce
the garrison on the island.
These Japanese marines were fearsome warriors,
but they had not been issued with any defence
against tropical diseases.
Malaria killed half of them.
The other half would sacrifice themselves
in keeping with the Bushido tradition.
Their commander, Colonel Ichiki,
reminded them of the Samurai motto, "Duty is heavy
"like a mountain, but a soldier's death is light like a feather."
The jungle on Guadalcanal proved to be a deadly killing ground
for both sides.
The US Marines felt as if they were trapped in what they called,
"A green hell."
They, too, became ill and their wounds became infected.
But the fighting went on for six months in a bitter war of attrition.
On the other side of the world on the Eastern Front,
the Red Army was going through its own ordeal.
The Russians called it the black summer of 1942.
The Germans had resumed their march eastwards
and were taking prisoners again.
But this time, the Soviet soldiers tried to get away
before being captured
and left nothing but scorched earth behind them.
Hitler thought they were fleeing, but this was an order from Stalin.
Yet for the soldiers of the Wehrmacht,
a fierce battle had to be waged for every single town.
Major Hawke of the 18th Infantry Regiment wrote...
The new recruits are not used to this kind of fighting.
They soon get depressed, go crazy and are struck down.
On August 8th, we lost 35 young men like this
out of the 50 who were killed in the 6th Company.
Into this quagmire Hitler threw everything he had -
a total of five million men.
But he estimated that he still needed 800,000 more men
to win the campaign,
so Hitler called on his Romanian, Hungarian and Italian allies
to provide the rest,
and most of these men were forced to go and fight for him.
Sieg Heil!
The Italians, thrown into this war by Mussolini's megalomania,
suffered dreadfully.
Out of 300,000,
only 10,000 ever returned home.
Hitler's goal was no longer Moscow but southern Russia.
He was planning a colossal pincer movement
that would sweep through the oilfields in the Caucasus,
linking up with Rommel advancing through Egypt
and the oilfields of the Middle East.
Hitler's other goal was Stalingrad, Stalin's city, and its factories.
Hitler launched both offensives at the same time.
This alarmed his military commanders.
Hitler split up his forces, just as he had done in the previous year.
One part of the Wehrmacht advanced deep into the Russian steppe.
General von Kleist remarked...
"In front of me, no enemies.
"Behind me, no reserves."
They reached the Caucasus mountains and headed for the Iranian border,
which had become a supply route for American aid to the Soviet Union.
But they never got there.
Meanwhile, the rest of the German forces, the 6th Army,
led by General von Paulus, was advancing towards Stalingrad.
To try to stop the relentless advance of the German tanks,
the Russians began to use desperate means...
dogs.
The Russians had hastily put together a technique
based on the work of the famous scientist Pavlov
and his theory of conditioned reflexes.
The dogs were starved and trained to seek their food
under a tracked vehicle.
They were strapped up with remote-controlled explosives
and freed at the last minute when a German tank came into view.
BARKING
TANK APPROACHES
EXPLOSION
In August 1942, Churchill and Harriman,
Roosevelt's ambassador, flew to Moscow to meet with Stalin.
He was demanding that a second front be opened in the west.
Churchill made his famous "V for victory" sign,
but he was forced to admit to Stalin
that the Allies were not able to help him
against the Germans on the Eastern Front.
Harriman promised aid and equipment, but Stalin was furious.
He knew that for the time being, he would have to fight Hitler alone.
So he assigned the defence of Stalingrad
to one of his most ruthless henchmen,
the Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev,
who'd been responsible for several of Stalin's massacres
before the war.
Khrushchev passed on Stalin's order not to retreat.
He would have 15,000 men shot for lack of courage.
But even he was unable to stop the German advance
from arriving in the outskirts of Stalingrad.
At the beginning of September 1942,
Paulus reached the main railway line to Moscow.
He followed the line all the way to Stalingrad
and took the central train station.
GUNFIRE
GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS
The Stukas prepared to dive-bomb the city
that was the pride of the Soviet Union,
the greatest industrial city in the communist world.
It had been built to look after the workers,
with its garden estates and its model factories.
AIR RAID SIRENS
The German bombs killed thousands of civilians.
AIRPLANE ENGINES
The mammoth tractor factory where T-34 tanks had been manufactured
was reduced to a pile of rubble.
Yet these ruins then became blockhouses and fortresses
that the Germans had to capture one by one
in intense hand-to-hand combat.
And they suffered heavy casualties,
but nothing compared to the Russian losses.
GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS
SHOTS FIRED
GUNSHOT
After four weeks of dogged fighting,
the Germans finally got to the top of the only high point in the city,
Mamayev hill.
From here, they could look out over most of Stalingrad.
Then, on 15th October 1942,
the Germans reached their next goal -
the great Russian river, the Volga.
Only a thin strip of land was left,
still held by a few Soviet fighters.
General Paulus informed Hitler
that the swastika was flying over the city,
now occupied by the 6th Army.
Hitler had a special medal made to commemorate
the capture of Stalingrad.
He was delighted.
Hitler gathered his henchmen together - Goering, Goebbels,
Himmler and other devotees - and announced the good news, saying,
"I wanted to take that city, Stalin's city.
"It's finally ours.
"Ships can no longer sail up the Volga.
"This is the most important thing."
But in Stalingrad itself, the battle was far from over.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd