0430 hours - the summer sun rises over the English Channel...
..revealing a fleet of Allied ships heading for the French coast.
The Allies have been quietly building up their strength
for a while.
And it's time to show what they can do.
The Allies will land a large fighting force on a handful
of French beaches.
The first wave of 6,000 troops manages to land on the beach.
Up above, you've got the Royal Air Force, who are managing to keep
the Luftwaffe at bay.
But what is meant to be a display of Allied strength
becomes nothing more than a bloodstained slaughter
on the beaches.
It's a disaster.
Almost 3,500 thousand Canadian and 275 British soldiers
fall or are captured.
Losses total almost 60%.
It ends up demonstrating that a cross-Channel attack
is a very, very dangerous thing, a bit like picking up a snake -
you might pick it up and you're bigger and you're stronger, but it might turn around and bite you.
Because this isn't June 1944 -
it's August 1942.
And this is the Allied raid on the fortified French fishing village
of Dieppe.
It wasn't an invasion, it was a raid.
It was a test to see how hard it would be
to bring troops across the Channel.
And what was very clear was it was going to be very hard indeed.
The absolute disaster of the Dieppe raid convinces Winston Churchill
that landing in France would be absolutely suicidal.
But casualties are mounting in the East, and Stalin's calls
for a second front become more and more urgent.
The Allies must return to Europe...
..whatever the cost.
Autumn 1943.
At the conference of Allied leaders in Tehran,
Russia's Joseph Stalin complains that, while his forces
have the Nazis on the run in the East,
Britain and America are dragging their feet in the West.
His argument, really, is that the war will won quicker
if the war was fought on two fronts, that they shared the burden
in terms of manpower, in terms of blood expenditure.
Because just four months earlier, Stalin had felt the full force
of Hitler's obsession with the great Bolshevik bear.
1943's utter humiliation at Stalingrad and the 800,000
that had been lost does not dampen Hitler's pathological enthusiasm
for actually wanting to totally destroy the Soviet Union
and to defeat Stalin.
Hitler's opportunity presented itself for the little-known
southern Russian town of Kursk.
The beginning of 1943 was such a success for the Soviets
that they moved so far in advance that they created a kind of bulge
of troops around Kursk, a salient that was actually
sufficiently exposed. It could be exploited by the Germans.
The Germans could simply cut it off.
German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein smells Soviet blood
in the 120-mile Russian bulge
protruding into German-held territory.
Von Manstein tells Hitler what he wants to do
is to encircle the Soviets at Kursk, in this salient, and cut them off.
Now, if he can do that, he will isolate 600,000 Soviet troops.
Hitler wants to carry out Manstein's idea, but - unusually for Hitler -
he doesn't want to do it immediately.
And the reason for that is the Soviet T-34 tank.
If the Spitfires saved Britain, then the T-34 saved Russia.
It has a V12 engine, creating 500 horsepower,
but the most important thing is it runs on diesel -
and diesel freezes at a far lower temperature than petrol,
which is what the Nazi forces were using.
In fact, under the Panzers,
they had to light fires to stop them from freezing up at night.
What made the T-34 stand out from any other tank before it
is this stuff - sloped armour.
What you get is additional protection but no additional weight.
The consequence was that in early tank battles,
German tanks saw their shells literally bouncing off
the hull of the Russian tanks.
By the time of Kursk, the Soviets had over 4,500 T-34s in action -
with thousands more rolling out of their factories.
In response, the Germans reverse-engineer the T-34
and produce a close but much larger replica called the Panther.
It has a gun capable of breaching T-34 armour at close range.
And despite having twice the armour of the T-34,
it is faster across the ground.
The Germans pay the greatest tribute of all to the T-34 -
having treated the Soviets with such condescension
because they were seen as racially inferior.
They were now copying their ideas.
So, you know, it was the ultimate irony.
But the Panther is not the only T-34 killer
Hitler will unleash at Kursk.
The other was the Panzer VI,
but that's more famously known as the Tiger tank.
Now, that has this really mighty 88-millimetre gun
that can take out a T-34 at the range of one mile.
Hitler was waiting for his new tanks to arrive.
These, Hitler believed, were weapons worth waiting for.
These would turn the tide.
After 1941's invasion of Kursk, the Germans executed 15,000 civilians
and press-ganged 30,000 more into forced labour battalions.
To avoid another Nazi scourge,
terrified locals help General Georgy Zhukov's troops
dig an incredible 3,000 miles of trenches,
containing nearly 5,000 mines per mile -
almost a million in total.
This will blunt the German attack.
Zubkov uses his idea of deep defence -
so this sort of 50-mile zone of anti-tank trenches,
anti-tank mines, anti-tank obstacles.
It's extraordinary strength in depth.
It's a bit like the Western Front in the First World War.
On the 5th of July, 1943,
Hitler launches Operation Citadel.
There's a huge amount that rests on the Kursk battle.
They know, one way or the other, it's going to be decisive.
By the numbers, Russia has the upper hand - over 400,000 more men,
almost twice as many heavy guns, 900 more aircraft
and at least 700 more tanks.
What happens over the next few days is a battle that is as decisive
to world history as the Battle of Waterloo.
This would be the last time
the Germans would move forward in Russia.
The German assault is an awesome demonstration
of modern military power.
But on the first day, even a battle group spearheaded
by new Tiger tanks can only advance four miles.
200 Tigers and 270 Panthers were at Kursk.
But Hitler's much-anticipated heavy tanks performed badly.
They were seriously defective.
They were over-engineered.
They were prone to electrical failure.
They were breaking down constantly.
So they were a total failure.
By day five, Germany's northern assault peters out -
and its southern spearhead is about to be severely tested.
On July the 12th, on a field near the small town of Prokhorovka,
Soviet tanks charge toward the German southern flank.
What follows is one of the biggest tank battles in military history.
600 Russian tanks face 250 German Panzers.
What happens at Kursk is exactly what the Germans don't want.
What they wanted was a tank battle fought over great distances.
But that's not the game the Russians were playing.
The T-34s charge as close as they can to the German tanks,
nullifying the 88s' advantage.
It's a close-quarter, attritional battle.
It's almost like dodgems or bumper cars.
They're smashing into each other.
It became a case of who could turn the turret most quickly,
who could get their gun onto the enemy more quickly
at very short range?
It's a real scrap, and it's turning into this utter carnage.
The Battle of Kursk grinds on for nearly two months.
The final tally is gruesome.
Around 800,000 Red Army and 200,000 Germans are killed or wounded,
1,600 Soviet and 252 German tanks destroyed.
Now, at first glance, these numbers
actually may look bad for the Soviets.
But don't be fooled by the first glance
because this was not an equal fight.
The Russians could replace those men, they could replace those tanks.
German losses were completely irreplaceable.
No single battle can dent Russia's ability to out-manufacture Germany.
The Soviets produce over 14,000 T-34s every year of the war.
Germany, by contrast, manages fewer than 6,000 Panthers in total.
Unable to replenish their forces,
the Germans retreat from the Kursk bubble.
Before Kursk, there were still some rational German officers -
not just the Nazis -
who thought it might be possible to turn the tide in the East.
After Kursk, I don't think for a moment any sensible German officer
thought the war in the East was winnable.
What we're going to see is a retreat that's going to take place
over two years, and it's going to end with one of those iconic
T-34 tanks parked right outside the Reichstag in the heart of Berlin.
Before the dust has even settled on Kursk, events unfolding
in the Mediterranean will force Hitler to turn his attention -
and his heavy tanks - south.
Summer 1943.
As the Soviets finally push the Germans back in the East,
the Allies hope to put the Axis on the back foot in the South
by invading Mussolini's Italy.
Churchill sees it as the kind of soft underbelly,
from which he can approach from below, carve it
and attack Germany from there.
In 1943, it seemed to be the only thing Allied forces could do.
But before they can invade Italy, the Allies need to secure the vital
stepping stone at the toe of the Italian peninsula - Sicily.
They launch the invasion of Sicily on July 10th, 1943.
Sicily falls in weeks - but in the midst of their first success
in Europe, the Allies make a fundamental error.
They leave the Straits of Messina open, allowing the rump
of the Axis force to escape onto the mainland aboard civilian ferries.
They had the German army right there in the palm of their hands,
but they failed to finish them off.
More than 50,000 troops, almost 10,000 vehicles
and nearly 12,000 tonnes of supplies
could have been seized by the Allies.
Instead, they are available to defend the mainland.
Despite this disappointment, the Allies have scored a victory,
and the taking of Sicily has massive repercussions.
Benito Mussolini is taken out of power.
And the Italians capitulate - literally -
a surrender of Italian forces as a belligerent force.
That provides hope that maybe we won't have to fight
for every last square inch of Italy.
But Germany doesn't see it that way.
They're quite pleased to be rid of their hapless ally
and they can now take control of the situation.
The Germans race in, the Germans take over in Italy.
To replace Mussolini's turncoats,
Hitler urgently dispatches eight and a half divisions -
around 125,000 of his own troops -
to defend Italy from Allied invasion.
They are led by Field Marshal Albert 'Smiling' Kesselring.
On September 9th, 1943,
American forces land on the Italian mainland at Salerno,
south of Naples.
They find themselves up against some of the most hardened battle troops
at Kesselring's disposal.
That's the 16th Panzer Division.
Now, these guys are veterans of Stalingrad.
These are the people who got out of Stalingrad.
These are people who had experienced the toughest fighting of the war.
They are seriously hard.
Many of their American foe are virgin soldiers.
A lot of these troops are no more experienced in battle
than you or I, so they simply panic.
US generals plan to advance far enough to eliminate German artillery
by the end of the first day.
But 24 hours later, their force is still pinned down by the beaches.
So Kesselring has time to pour more troops into the area.
Now the counterattack very nearly throws the Americans
back into the sea.
It's only when Eisenhower becomes personally involved
that thousands of paratroopers are landed close to the water's edge
and the forces rally.
The resulting carnage causes 15,000 Allied,
but only 8,000 German casualties.
What the Salerno landings really underlined is how difficult
it is to make a successful seaborne invasion.
This was gruelling, terrible work
for the Allies trying to move forward.
Italy will take more time for the Allies
to conquer than expected.
One reason for this is the Apennine Mountain range.
840 miles long and 80 miles wide,
it stretches along the length of central and northern Italy.
The Italian countryside is very, very beautiful.
But it's a land full of peaks and that makes it incredibly
difficult to attack, relatively easy to defend.
A combination of intense winter weather and this rather impressive
terrain slows the advance down.
Taking advantage of this terrain is the Gustav Line,
a system of sophisticated interlocking German defences.
Beyond the Gustav Line you had basically a direct road to Rome.
So it was enormously heavily defended.
The Germans were not going to allow the Allies through.
In January 1944, the Allied armies are knocking at the door
of the Gustav Line, which the Germans nickname
a string of pearls anchored by Monte Cassino.
Crowned by its ancient Benedictine monastery,
Monte Cassino is an impenetrable hill
standing 1703 feet above sea level, with a sheer 45 degree incline.
Allied attempts to take it proved disastrous.
The Americans and then the Poles and the British -
everybody gets in on the fight and cannot overcome the objective.
Some 50,000 men are going to die on that mountain
and it's all for nothing.
The enemy possesses the dominating military terrain.
So for the Germans, it's extraordinarily easy
to put up a fight, even with a small force.
So what can the Allies do if they can't go through the mountain,
if they can't go over the mountain?
They can go around the mountain.
So they tried something new.
20th of January 1944,
an Allied force of 374 naval vessels lands
50,000 troops at the beaches at Anzio,
a mere 34 miles south of Rome, which they hope to take in days.
The trouble was their experience at Salerno had taught them
that they shouldn't move too quickly
because the Germans would counterattack very strongly,
so they waited until they had enough force
to move forward in some strength.
Staying put proves a grave misjudgement.
The Allied decision to stall and to wait at Anzio
proves to be an absolute boon for the Germans
who of course can then get men and material to the area.
By the end of the first week there are 71,500 German defenders
in the Anzio area.
Facing them are 68,000 Allied troops,
still clustered round the landing beaches.
The result was stalemate. It was attrition.
The invasion force is held within a beachhead
and that invasion force is still there four months later.
We were in almost a First World War Western Front's situation.
On the 23rd of May, the third US Infantry Division loses 955 men -
the most of any US division throughout the entire war.
Anzio is a bloodbath.
This was some of the most brutal, some of the hardest fighting
of the entire war.
9,203 British and Commonwealth
and 23,860 US troops are killed or wounded at Anzio.
To relieve the remainder,
the Allies have no choice but to capture Monte Casino.
It takes them 123 days,
one massively destructive air bombardment
and four deadly assaults to finally send the Germans into retreat -
leaving the way open for the capture of Rome.
June 1944, Allied forces move into the city of Rome
and we can announce that the first Axis capital has been liberated.
NEWSREEL: First European capital is freed of Nazi tyranny.
Now, in symbolic terms, Rome is very important,
it's the Eternal City,
but strategically it's of no importance really at all.
The government has already surrendered,
the Germans are just able to move back to another defensible point...
and the fight goes on.
Italy becomes a sideshow because the day after Allied tanks
roll into Rome, the largest amphibious force
ever mustered leaves England's South Coast.
Destination - Normandy.
May 1944, in Italy the Allied invasion is about to take Rome
but America has its eye on a far greater prize.
At the beginning of the month of June,
a third front would be opened in Europe
with a cross-channel attack that would deposit
two fighting armies in upper Normandy.
BAND PLAYS
By necessity, the Allied invasion will launch from Britain,
which means that American troops will be based there.
By the end of the war,
fully three million will arrive on her shores.
The arrival of three million American soldiers on British soil
had a huge impact on British society, as you can imagine.
The British used to say the Americans
oversexed, overpaid, over here.
The Americans used to say about the British -
undersexed, underpaid and under Eisenhower.
American General Dwight D Eisenhower is the supreme commander
of Allied Forces in Europe.
He will lead Operation Overlord - D-Day.
Eisenhower has only been a commander for two years now.
But part of the reason that he was chosen was because he had
demonstrated a diplomatic air,
and it was a quality that the Chief of Staff
of the United States Army, George Marshall,
recognised as probably being the most important quality.
When it comes to planning D-Day,
one Allied leader requires more diplomatic handling
than the rest.
Churchill, in particular, had strong doubts throughout
about the wisdom of this invasion.
He's looked at the carnage at Dieppe,
he's looked at the carnage at Salerno
and he just thinks that this landing on a massive scale
is going to meet exactly the same fate.
Commander in Chief of Allied Ground Forces
will be the hero of the British North Africa campaign -
General Bernard Montgomery.
In the planning stages, their first priority is a lack
of vital equipment.
The way that amphibious landing operations succeeded
was by putting angry young men with rifles and bayonets on a beach.
And the best way to do that was with a landing craft.
But so many landing craft have been lost in the Pacific
and Italian campaigns that there is a shortage.
So the Allies order over 30,000 new ones.
Many will be built in a place more famous for its Mardi Gras
than for producing war material.
The city of New Orleans, Louisiana, contributed significantly
to Allied victory in the Second World War
through the production of landing craft
by a company called Higgins Industries.
Higgins Industries has five industrial manufacturing facilities
and he employs 30,000 people.
Higgins was making more of them than anyone else.
The timing of the invasion was being tuned to an additional month
of output from Higgins Industries.
That's how critical this need for landing craft became.
In May '44, Eisenhower and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery
called an above top secret meeting at St Paul's School, London.
This is the unveiling of the invasion plan.
This is where the people that matter are told.
Named Operation Overlord, the invasion will take place
on five Normandy beaches.
They're going to be to beaches where the Americans attack -
Omaha and Utah.
There's going to be one beach where the Canadians attack, Juno,
and then Gold and Sword are the two beaches
where the British are going to attack.
An invasion date is also set, the 5th of June.
To maximise the chances of success,
the Allies must keep these details completely secret.
The capacity of the Germans to inflict damage on the Allies
was going to be very large indeed
if they guessed where the invasion was going to happen
and they had enough forces there.
So to swing the numbers in their favour,
the Allies turn to Black Ops.
The allies came up with an extraordinary deception operation.
Named Operation Fortitude, it is split in two.
Fortitude South tries to persuade the Germans
that the main target of the invasion will be the Pas-de-Calais,
where Hitler has 350,000 troops garrisoned.
Of course, to the Germans it seems totally logical that the Allies
would attack at the Pas-de-Calais -
it's just 21 miles across the Channel from Kent.
So of course it makes total sense from them to believe that.
What the deceivers did was absolutely brilliant.
They build up this kind of totally dummy army,
some of it's made out of nylon props from Shepperton Studios
that makes any German reconnaissance aircraft
think that there are an enormous amount of men and materiel
positioned all over Kent, ready for an attack around Calais.
There were camps full of tents with inflatable tanks,
with inflatable trucks, with inflatable aircraft
occupying airfields that were not actually functioning airfields.
And in fact it's so successful,
the Germans actually tie up a huge number of divisions,
thinking that 30 divisions are going to come across the Channel
from Dover to Calais.
It's a complete charade.
Fortitude North places another ghost army in Scotland.
This one's job is to persuade Hitler that the main invasion
might happen in Norway.
Between them, the deception plans have the capacity to tie down
more than 700,000 troops in Calais and Norway.
It's an absolutely brilliant use of distracting tactics.
Despite Fortitude's success, Allied forces will still face
five million mines and a significant German defence
protected by a bespoke fortification
that Hitler calls his Atlantic Wall.
The Atlantic Wall was a system of integrated German coastal defences
stretching basically from Norway all the way down to the French border
with Spain on the Bay of Biscay.
Hitler ordered the building of the Atlantic Wall in spring 1942.
Over two years, slave labourers used over a million tonnes of steel
and 13 million cubic metres of concrete to build a three tier
fortification system stretching almost 2,000 miles.
The construction of 15,000 separate concrete artillery and machinegun
emplacements will be manned by 300,000 soldiers.
They were armed with anti-tank anti-boat guns,
ranging in calibre from the German 50mm gun
to 75mm guns to the 88mm gun -
particularly the 88mm anti-tank gun.
RAF reconnaissance planes have been busy above the Atlantic Wall.
It's believed that over a million photo reconnaissance images
of the beaches and the inland areas near the beaches were taken
in anticipation of the D-Day landings.
The photographs reveal that each of the designated Allied landing
beaches is defended.
Getting off them will be a living hell.
The Germans have pre-ranged and pre-sighted almost everything -
so that if anything landed in front of any of those resistance nests,
they could distribute either automatic weapons fire
very effectively, or they could drop mortar fire on top of those targets.
And in fact what we see on D-Day is that despite what the movies
would have you believe, it's not really machine guns
that are doing the most killing,
it's mortars that are doing the most killing.
In the two months before D-Day, the RAF and US Air Force
engaged in a concerted campaign against strategic targets.
GUNFIRE
Come D-Day, the Germans only have 815 serviceable aircraft
that can be used against the Allies.
The Allies meanwhile have a ratio
of 14 to one superiority over them.
That's a huge mismatch.
They're aided by the French Resistance.
A total of 74 bridges and tunnels are destroyed
in the month leading up to D-Day.
By early June, rail traffic is cut by two thirds.
And as a result, the German response to D-Day
was much less effective than it ought to have been.
Everything is ready,
but the allies are still not certain of success.
General Eisenhower is so unsure that he writes a letter
taking the blame for the failure of the assault
and keeps it in his pocket in case it all goes wrong.
6th of June 1944.
At 3.30, Eisenhower wakes up.
Outside, it's wind, it's rain.
This is far from ideal for an invasion
but the weather man James Stagg says to him,
"It's going to clear.
"It's going to clear in about 30 minutes."
Eisenhower then has to make the biggest decision of his life.
"OK, let's go," he says.
Bad weather has already caused an abortive launch.
But today, the first ships of the Allied armada set sail
for Normandy.
They have a 100-mile journey and will arrive later that morning.
Rommel, who was the man responsible for the Atlantic Wall defences
isn't ready to go.
In fact, he's not even there.
He's celebrating his wife's birthday in Germany.
While the bulk of German defenders sleep,
the Allies are preparing to clear a path off the beaches
for their vast army of tanks and trucks.
Six and a half hours before the land invasion starts,
you have three gliders containing 181 British paratroopers
landing less than 50 yards from Pegasus Bridge.
Elements of the 6th Airborne Division,
particularly the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry,
conduct a coup de main aerial assault using gliders
during which they capture the two bridges across the Caen Canal
and the Orne River.
They capture them intact in a very, very daring predawn attack.
It's an incredibly successful attack but it's not without casualties.
Lieutenant Brotheridge is mortally wounded
trying to get across the bridge.
And in fact he is the first man to die as a result
of enemy fire on D-Day.
The number of ships steaming toward France is by far the largest
fleet to ever put to sea.
The Allied armada is big.
You've got almost 7,000 ships coming across in all different forms -
such as cruisers, destroyers, battleships, landing vessels
and you've got another 277 minesweepers.
That's a lot.
And they were all heading for these five beaches.
05.45 hours, June 6th 1944.
The gathered battleships of the D-Day armada began a massive
bombardment of the Atlantic Wall's big guns.
The first thing to do is that you've got to take out the big guns
on the beaches.
Meanwhile, troop landing craft and minesweepers start heading
for the beaches.
The Allied invasion has begun.
More than 4,000 landing craft are about to deliver 156,000 troops
to the Normandy beaches.
To ensure as many of them as possible survive,
supporting naval artillery fire must target
shoreline anti-personnel defences.
You have this ungoverned fire at whatever you want to
from 5.45 to 6.30
and then stop at 6.30
and then you'll start getting radio calls where you're delivering fire
on map coordinates with great precision,
so as not to endanger your own troops.
The bombardment's called in by naval shore fire control parties
on Gold, Sword, Utah and Juno beaches
are relatively successful.
But for the Americans landing at Omaha Beach,
it's a very different story.
One of the main reasons was that troops stepped off
of their landing craft into water that was this deep in some cases.
And so if you have the SCR-300 radio,
that they called the walkie talkie,
on your back, the radio's soaking wet,
it's not going to function when you reach the beach.
The lack of radio contact leave supporting naval vessels
unable to locate their targets.
They can't fire a single shot because they might kill
our own people.
The biggest fighting position on Omaha Beach
was the WN62 bunker complex.
That position was killing, actively killing,
men of the 1st Infantry Division from 0630 until about 10 O'clock.
The taking of Omaha Beach costs 2,000 American lives,
compared to just 197 at neighbouring Utah.
Fighting is fierce along the entire coastline.
But the Allied troops finally make it off their beaches.
It's cost 9,000 casualties.
But five days later, 326,000 men,
54,000 vehicles and 140,000 tonnes of supplies
have made it ashore.
But that's only a fraction of the entire invasion force.
To land the rest, the allies need a port.
The nearest is Cherbourg.
Three complete infantry divisions,
each one numbering almost 15,000 men,
are descending down from the heights into the outskirts of the city.
And then they bring up the three battleships -
USS Texas, USS Arkansas, USS Nevada -
and they bombard the waterfront simultaneous to three divisions
manoeuvring into an urban battle.
The Americans think they're going to take it quite easily.
But the whole assault takes about eight days, during which time
the Germans just decide to completely trash it.
Cherbourg is basically obliterated.
To allow the Americans time to build up a force large enough to break out
and head south,
Montgomery launches a head-on attack on the town of Caen.
The Germans are so dug in that it's almost impossible
to winkle them out.
In the suburbs of Caen
you've got a real war of attrition starting to develop.
It takes 1,800 heavy bombers carpet bombing the German line
with 4,200 tonnes of bombs
to blast a way through in Operation Cobra.
By July 24th, losses are almost even.
122,000 Allied troops have been killed wounded or captured,
compared to 114,000 German.
But while the Allies are being heavily reinforced from England,
little more than 10,000 German replacements have been sent.
The Allies are also winning the numbers game because Hitler
is still under the spell of Operation Fortitude's Ghost Army.
There are five armoured divisions and 19 infantry divisions
in the vicinity of the Pas-de-Calais.
That's a force of 350,000 men who could have joined
the Normandy battle, but did not.
In typical fashion, Hitler orders his depleted forces to launch
a counterattack centred on the town of Mortain.
It's a fatal error.
17th July 1944.
German commander Erwin Rommel fractures his skull when his car
is strafed en route back to headquarters.
So the Desert Fox is replaced by Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge,
who will preside over the defining moment in the battle for Normandy.
It happens when the Mortain offensive grinds to a halt
near the town of Falaise.
The Mortain counter-offensive was meant
to relieve some of the pressure on the Germans, and instead
what it does is it creates circumstances
where the Germans overexpose.
Montgomery sees an opportunity.
The German advance into what becomes known as the Falaise Pocket creates
the opportunity for the Allies to trap nigh on 200,000 German troops.
The idea is that you get the British and Canadians to pin them
down at Falaise, and then you get the US Third Army to encircle them
and to stop them escaping.
Patton breaks around,
slides around their flanks, comes up from the south
with General Leclerc and the French 2nd Armored Division,
and that ever-closing pocket begins to tighten.
And suddenly it's clear the Germans have got to get out.
Otherwise they were going to be caught,
they were going to encircled.
The encirclement is not quite complete,
so Field Marshal von Kluge orders a retreat through the gap.
He is immediately relieved of command by an enraged Hitler.
For the men left trapped inside the Falaise Pocket,
a change of leadership cannot stave off the inevitable bloodbath.
45,000 Germans are taken prisoner and about 10,000 lie dead.
Eisenhower went and saw it for himself and he said
it's one of the worst killing fields that he had ever seen.
Despite the numbers, Falaise feels like a missed opportunity.
The pocket could have been closed if the allies had moved faster
and more firmly. A lot stream out.
About 40,000 German troops make it out of the pocket.
They're literally running for their lives,
and most of them don't even have any weapons.
They're rushing for the River Seine, and many of them manage to cross it
but they're lashed together on cider barrels,
some are trying to swim.
They're absolutely desperate to get to safety.
The Germans do not have the numbers to cope with the overwhelming Allied advance.
The battle for Normandy is over.
And on the Eastern Front, Stalin's generals are about to deliver
an even more devastating blow against the beleaguered Nazis.
22nd June 1944 -
three years to the day since Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa.
Today a long line stretching over 900 miles, from Odessa
in the south to Leningrad in the north,
Stalin unleashes Operation Bagration.
Operation Bagration is quite possibly the most successful
offensive that you've never heard of.
It's significant in its timing in two respects.
It's timed to coincide, broadly speaking, with the D-Day landings.
But it's symbolic in another sense in that it's timed to coincide
with the date upon which the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union
back in 1941.
Finally this is Stalin now going,
"I'm going to get my own back in an equally devastating manner."
It was named Bagration after the prince
who'd harried Napoleon's forces from Moscow in 1812.
15 Soviet armies,
numbering 1,670,000 soldiers, are secretly assembled.
They're supported by more than 6,000 tanks and over 30,000 guns
and Katyusha rocket batteries.
They had so much artillery that the Red Army could stretch
400 artillery pieces per mile for a front 350 miles long.
That's a lot of firepower.
Because the Luftwaffe has been withdrawn to Normandy
and the defence of Berlin,
the Russians also enjoy total air superiority.
So they deploy more than 7,500 aircraft at will,
including their Sturmovik dive-bomber.
There were waves of Sturmoviks dive bombing the enemy,
then the infantry were moving forward
and simply encircling those who remained.
They were essentially reinventing blitzkrieg for their own purposes.
Hitler was not a man who liked his soldiers to retreat,
and so often they were just stuck defenceless
and, actually, their worst enemy wasn't Stalin,
it was Hitler himself.
Operation Bagration is so devastating that by the time
it stops outside Warsaw on 7th August 1944,
the Red Army has advanced 450 miles,
retaken the key cities Vitebsk, Minsk and Vilnius,
cut off Riga in the north and pushed into Poland
to seize the towns of Lublin and Lwow.
Bagration captures or destroys over 2,000 tanks...
..more than 10,000 guns and 57,000 vehicles.
It happens in the same month as the Falaise Gap assault
by the Allies over in France,
and it actually captures ten times more troops than that.
This almost knocks out completely Hitler's Army Group Centre.
It's an absolutely devastating blow.
By the end of 1944 Hitler had lost
many more than a million men in Russia and France.
And he had no way of replacing them.
The Americans and the Soviets,
on the other hand, had no problem replacing men.
The numbers are completely against him.
But Hitler stubbornly refuses to give up.
Hitler's got one more kind of blitzkrieg-shaped ace up his sleeve.
And if that doesn't work, he's going to take down the whole
German people with him.
While on the other side of the world,
the Japanese high command will do everything in their power
to convince the Americans that invading Japan is not worth
the cost in manpower...
..and pay the ultimate price when they get what they wish for.
On 19th March 1945
Adolf Hitler issues one of the most chilling orders
of his entire regime.
Demolitions on Reich Territory authorised all German units
to destroy everything that could provide any assistance
to the approaching enemy -
bridges, roads, all industrial and factory infrastructure.
Thankfully, most German commanders ignored that order,
or else it would have condemned Germany to total devastation.
And that appears to have been the point.
The day before the order, Hitler told Albert Speer that if the war
is lost, the German people are lost.
The idea of the Volk was lost.
By being defeated, the German Volk
had shown itself to be the weaker nation.
It actually deserved to be destroyed.
You could say that Hitler was lost in his own personal Wagnerian opera.
He was plunging Germany into the twilight of the gods.
It's a total act of narcissism.
If Hitler fails, then the nation, the people, they have failed him
and they must fall with him.
This was one last conflagration.
One last act that results in the destruction of everything.
And Hitler is not alone.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Japanese
high command is absolutely intent on fighting to the bitter end,
no matter what the cost might be.
It would take an act of Wagnerian proportions to get them to
snap out of that line of thinking.
Even in defeat,
the men who caused this war are preparing to sacrifice their
own people in apocalyptic numbers.
Between 24th July and 3rd August 1943,
more than 2,300 Allied bombers turned the German industrial city
of Hamburg into an inferno.
In every way, Operation Gomorrah brings the totality of modern
strategic bombing to the city of Hamburg,
mainly because of the use of incendiary weapons.
In just four raids the Allies
drop something like 9,000 tonnes of bombs.
45,000 people were killed.
Three quarters of the city was destroyed.
Something like a million people were left homeless.
45,000 people dead -
that's more than were killed during the entire Blitz.
After Operation Gomorrah, Albert Speer turned to Adolf Hitler
and told him, "If there are six more of these, we're done."
Fortunately for the Nazis, the British didn't have the capacity
to mount many more of these raids in 1943.
What turned the tide was a new kind of plane introduced
by the Allies in 1944.
This wasn't a bomber.
It was a fighter.
The P-51 Mustang.
I think the most important contribution made by the
Allied Bomber Offensive
was the long-range Mustang escort fighter, which proved
able to out-fight any German fighter in the air over Germany.
It's powered by the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine,
which makes it a superior performer.
It's armed with six AN/M2 50 calibre machine guns, which provides
a lot of muscle for the aircraft for strafing missions and then also
for aerial intercept.
But crucially, it can be equipped with long-range fuel tanks
that could be jettisoned when empty, and these increased its range
to something like 1,600 miles.
This meant that they could escort Allied bombers all the way
to Germany and back.
More than 15,000 P-51 Mustangs were produced
by the end of the war.
Allied bomber losses fell from almost 10% to a mere 3.5%.
The Allied bombing campaign could now rain down hell
on German cities.
In the last 12 months of the war, the Allies dropped something like
30 to 40 times as many bombs on German targets as the total tonnage
of bombs dropped by the Germans in the Blitz.
Cities like Dresden, Essen, Cologne, Bremen and Berlin
are targeted again and again by up to 1000 bombers,
with a terrible toll on civilian life.
They realised what they had to find was a series of vulnerable targets,
and they chose communications,
they chose chemicals, they choose synthetic oil, and they focused
all their effort on those targets.
These are important strategic centres for bombing but, at the same
time, they're also areas where enormous numbers of civilians live.
So by attacking these areas, and in some cases obliterating
these areas,
is it right to kill enormous numbers of civilians when you are also
targeting Germany's ability to fight the war?
In 1945,
an Allied post-war study of the bombing campaign concludes
that less than 17% of Germany's industrial capacity
had been affected by the bombs.
Albert Speer would not have agreed.
He concludes that as a result of Allied bombing there are
35% fewer tanks, 31% fewer airplanes,
and 42% fewer trucks available to the German military.
Perhaps most importantly, a third of all artillery production
had to be given over to anti-aircraft guns.
Three quarters of the Flak 88 millimetre guns that Germany had
had been pulled back into Germany to defend the airspace,
so they weren't able to participate in the fighting in the east,
they weren't able to oppose Allied forces in Normandy,
and that was the most effective general-purpose weapon
that Germany had.
The critical thing came in 1944 with the switch in
American Eighth Air Force strategy, where they focused
all their effort to starve the German forces of oil and to disrupt
communications to such an extent that it was no longer possible
for the German war economy to function effectively.
From that point on, the bombing campaign had a profound effect
on the German war effort,
as Albert Speer grimly confirmed to his Fuhrer.
This is a man who had increased production threefold between 1941,
when he took over, and 1943.
And he has concluded that Germany
has lost the war of industry as a result of Allied bombing.
They did so at a cost of over 600,000 civilian lives.
Whether that terrible civilian death toll made it all worthwhile,
that's something everybody must judge for themselves.
This is the last thing Adolf Hitler wants to hear in January 1945,
because just one month earlier he'd staked everything he had on one
last throw of the dice,
which, if it succeeded, would turn the war on its head.
16th December 1944.
Allied forces are racing across Europe towards the Rhine.
They're quite strung out, but Allied high command isn't
particularly concerned because there isn't a great enemy presence
in the area.
Allied intelligence is wrong.
Hiding in the forest of the Ardennes are 17 German divisions,
including five Panzer divisions.
Something in the region of 240,000 men.
Some of these contain the new Tiger II heavy Panzer.
This is the Tiger II, the so-called King Tiger or Royal Tiger.
It's got frontal armour of 185 millimetres.
That's seven inches.
And that gun,
it's the long 88, and it means that if that tank can see you
on the battlefield, there was nothing the Allies
have that can resist one of those rounds.
Hitler wants these in large numbers, but they're difficult
and slow to manufacture.
On the morning of 16th December, this scratch force launches
a surprise attack on six weak American divisions
containing 83,000 men recuperating in the Ardennes Gap.
The initial German advance creates a bulge in the Allied line
40 miles deep, which gives the battle its name -
the Battle of the Bulge.
At the outset of the battle, the Germans appear well
on their way to Antwerp.
But then things begin changing right around Christmas.
The crucial weakness in the German plan is fuel.
This tank is a gas guzzler.
Fully fuelled up, it could travel about 75 miles.
But to refuel took 860 litres of fuel - that's 190 gallons.
At the time, most German tanks were rationed to about 15 litres per day per tank.
So if these tanks didn't get through to their objective,
they would simply grind to a halt.
That objective is the town of Spa on the Belgian border.
Spa was where quantities of fuel were stored
literally on the sides of the road.
And one element of the German recon forces was dangerously close
to finding this massive fuel depot, when a US Army captain with some
Belgian soldiers make the decision to dig a trench in the middle
of the road, pour fuel into it, and set it on fire.
And this German recon element sees that, turns around and withdraws.
They were painfully close to finding enough fuel
that would have gotten them all the way to Antwerp.
By now the Germans are running out of time, as well as fuel.
As the skies clear above the bulge, Allied fighter bombers begin
harrying the Panzer columns,
and General Patton launches a counterattack.
By the end of the campaign, Hitler has lost 98,024 men,
around 700 armoured vehicles and 1,600 combat aircraft
for absolutely no gain at all.
It is a disaster for the Germans in more ways than one.
There are German generals that don't want this attack
because the troops could have been put to really good use
trying to hold off the Soviets approaching Berlin.
They're screaming for those troops but they don't get them
because Hitler has this grand ambition of this sudden attack
through the Ardennes that will recapture Antwerp.
The only concrete thing that was achieved was to slow
the Allies down.
So the ultimate result of the Battle of the Bulge,
well, you could say it was to expose enormous swathes of Germany
to conquest by the Red Army.
On 30th January 1945, the spearhead of the Soviet Red Army,
commanded by Marshall Georgy Zhukov,
reaches the River Oder, just 44 miles from Berlin.
It is the culmination of a victorious charge
into German territory.
Yet still the Germans fight on.
From 1943 onwards, German propaganda
hammered out the same themes all the time -
"The Allies will take revenge, the Jews will take revenge."
"The Bolshevik menace is coming,
"and this will be the end of Germany."
Now, some Germans did believe that of course, and they
carried on fighting to the end.
Where the Red Army was concerned,
the propaganda wasn't entirely exaggerating.
The Soviets inflicted enormous violence against
the German population.
The evidence is pretty overwhelming.
It's pure and simply revenge.
The Germans had treated the Russians with such brutality.
But there's also a sense that the Russians are arriving
in Germany and they're seeing a standard of living
that they don't recognise.
The average German peasant lives so much better than his Russian
equivalent, and they're staggered by this -
"Why are they even invading us "when they have all this already?"
So that fuels a kind of anger
that snowballs into a brutal mode of behaviour.
Those who paid most were women.
Millions of German women were raped by the waves of Russians
that were coming through.
Many killed themselves rather than falling into the hands
of the Russians or having been mistreated by the Russians.
It was a very real revenge.
Across all fronts,
at least 400,000 German soldiers
died in the last five months of the war.
But some Nazis had darker reasons to fight on than their compatriots.
Some had terrible secrets to hide.
On 27th January 1945,
a unit of the Red Army's 107th Rifle Division came upon a camp
hidden in a forest about 30 miles west of Krakow.
This camp was abandoned...
..some of the buildings were destroyed,
but 8,000 emaciated people remained in it,
who are able to tell this unit what they had stumbled upon.
Auschwitz.
Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of the terrible crimes
perpetrated by the Nazis in the Holocaust,
and a byword for horror.
But it wasn't the only camp uncovered by the Russian advance.
The Soviets were the first to encounter death camps,
seeing Majdanek already in the summer of '44.
And this was the first, really, and only occasion on which a Nazi
crematorium unit, including the gas chambers, had been discovered
pretty much functioning.
The Nazis had been pushed back so fast they simply hadn't had time
to destroy the evidence before they fled.
At Auschwitz they tried to cover their tracks.
They'd taken people off on these horrific marches through the snowy
countryside going westwards, and they'd just left the sick
and the dying who weren't fit to walk.
Of the 714,000 concentration camp prisoners held by the Reich
in January 1945,
almost half were dead by the end of May...
..as the Nazis indulged in one last great orgy of killing.
When the Soviets discovered Auschwitz, it shocked them
in the scale and in the industrial design
of this kind of killing.
The British and Americans were very, very sceptical.
They thought that the Soviets were lying about this.
And so when the British and Americans discovered
Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and so forth,
one of the sentiments expressed was,
"It turns out the Russians were telling the truth about all of this."
Now the reckoning was coming.
On Monday 16th April 1945,
the massed batteries of Marshal Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front
unleashed 1,236,000 shells against the dug-in positions
of the German 9th Army defending Berlin.
It took 2,450 freight cars
to carry the shells that were expended
in the first day - a single day - of attacking Berlin.
The Soviets followed this up with an assault by 2.5 million troops,
6,250 tanks, 41,000 artillery,
and 7,500 aircraft
on two main fronts.
Against them were ranged around 760,000 Germans,
with 1,500 armoured vehicles and 9,000 artillery.
In actual fact, only about 85,000 soldiers
are protecting the city itself.
Half of them are old men, young boys.
Half of them are die-hard Nazis,
some of them foreign SS troops.
The rest of the German Army was actually trying to fall back
from Berlin and head west to surrender to the Western Allies.
But it's no wonder, then, that Zhukov's assault only takes a week
until he's parked right outside the Reichstag,
right in the heart of Berlin.
On 30th April 1945,
two days after Benito Mussolini had been shot and hung in Italy,
Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide
in the Fuhrerbunker.
That same day, Zhukov's forces stormed the Reichstag,
just 400 yards from Hitler's hiding place,
and raised the Soviet flag over it.
The German Army officially surrendered nine days later.
The battle for Berlin cost the Soviets 352,425 casualties,
of which 78,291 were killed.
But that was a drop in the ocean compared to their total losses
throughout the Second World War.
The Soviet Union mobilised about 34.5 million people
in World War II -
almost 11.5 million soldiers died.
By comparison, the Germans lost half that many soldiers.
The British and the Americans combined lost less than a tenth
of what the Soviets had to endure.
But it's really when you add
the civilian casualties into the mix
that the true cost of the war
to the Russians strikes home.
It's virtually impossible to put a figure on the number of civilians
who were starved or shot or simply worked to death by the Nazis
after Operation Barbarossa,
but the generally accepted estimate is around 16 million,
which means that something like 27 million Russians died
in what Stalin dubbed the Great Patriotic War.
When you compare that with the 50 to 60 million people
who are estimated to have died overall during the war, you realise
that the Russians alone lost half the total number of people who died
during the Second World War.
But for the Russians, as well as for the Americans, Chinese
and Japanese, the war isn't over yet.
The war in Europe may be won,
but the fight back in the Pacific has only just begun.
In April 1944, the Imperial Japanese Army announced the largest operation
it will ever undertake during the Second World War.
But it's not targeted at the Americans,
it's targeted at China.
We tend to forget that the Second World War actually started in China
in 1937 and it's continued unabated ever since.
510,000 troops on the Chinese mainland launch
Operation Ichi-Go -
an ambitious thrust into the heart of Chinese nationalist territory.
Operation Ichi-Go was a Japanese plan to strike at American airfields
that were beginning to bomb the Japanese home islands.
The Japanese push forward, finally conquering large swathes of
central China that simply hadn't fallen to the Japanese
in the previous six or seven years.
As the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek collapses,
the Japanese victory looks overwhelming.
The success of Ichi-Go ends up being a bit of a mirage
because this inadvertently sets the stage for bombing operations
against the Japanese home islands.
American bombers are now within striking range
of the Japanese mainland,
and they exploit this with a vengeance.
The US XXI Bomber Command is led by a man called
General Curtis LeMay.
Now, he draws up this big list of Japanese urban and industrial
targets, and he starts doing so in February 1945.
A series of punishing aerial attacks start off
small and then begin getting larger and larger and larger.
In that first month, his planes conduct 2,700 sorties against Tokyo
and Yokohama alone.
The infamous great raid on Tokyo actually killed 83,000 people,
and renders a further 1.5 million people homeless.
This campaign is going to flatten 40% of buildings in
66 Japanese cities and displace eight million people.
As unfortunate as that is, that is exactly the type of success
that LeMay is looking for.
Yet despite the pounding their citizens are taking, the die-hard
militarists in control of the Japanese government
are determined to fight on.
Having won their empire, they don't want to give it up.
There's a cold, hard calculus associated with what compels
the Japanese to continue fighting on
in the face of these bombing raids.
And that is the belief that if they demonstrate
to the United States that a potential invasion
is going to be so costly,
the United States will have to back down from the idea
of unconditional surrender.
Faced with the obdurate refusal of Japan to admit that it's beaten,
the American high command adopts the strategy known as island hopping.
All that matters is grabbing every Japanese-held island en route
to the Japanese mainland.
And one island that has to be taken is the ash-covered volcanic atoll
of Iwo Jima.
Iwo Jima is only about a third the size of Manhattan.
But it's an important island because it is exactly halfway
between the three air bases in the Mariana Islands and Tokyo.
This puts it right under the flight path of American bombers
on their way to bomb Japan.
It provides airfields from which Japanese aircraft
can intercept the B-29s 700 miles before Tokyo.
They've got to take out the airfields on Iwo Jima.
Easier said than done.
Iwo Jima was just one big beehive.
A warren of fighting positions.
They were so well dug in
that even a 79 day aerial and naval bombardment
hardly does any damage at all.
This island imposes unspeakable casualties.
American GIs have to winkle out the defenders with flame-throwers
and grenades at murderously close quarters.
The fighting on Iwo Jima was so hellish
that the Marines start to call every valley, every ridge,
names like Meat Grinder, Death Ridge, Blood Valley.
And then, once it looks like maybe the enemy has been suppressed,
the army sets up the fighter base, only then to have 300 Japanese
appear out of caves and conduct a banzai charge into an area
where ground crewmen are living.
The taking of Iwo Jima takes 45 days and cost the US Marines
6,821 dead and over 18,000 wounded.
This is the only time an American fighting force sustains
more casualties than there are defenders.
The Japanese lose over 21,000 people on that island.
The island hopping campaign is going to be nothing but a nasty
street fight from start to finish.
But Iwo Jima is merely the warm up to the desperate struggle
for the island of Okinawa, which begins five days later.
It's important to the Americans because it is basically a gateway
to the home islands.
If they can take Okinawa, they've therefore got a post
that's just 350 miles from the Japanese mainland.
On Sunday 1st April 1945,
more than 1,200 US vessels escort 60,000 Marines onto the
landing beaches as the prelude to an invasion of over 170,000 men.
They expected a rain of steel,
and instead the landing craft hit the beach,
Marines and soldiers exit them, and it's silence.
They're completely unopposed.
And it's not until they start going into the centre of the island
that they start to realise what's lying in store for them.
It takes the Marines 82 days to fight their way
across the ferociously defended ridges of Okinawa.
By the time that was over, some 7,000 Marines had been killed
and around 32,000 to 37,000 had been wounded.
Off the coast of Okinawa,
a macabre death ritual is being carried out
that will drive home just how costly the invasion of Japan
will be to the Americans.
One of the most unnerving experiences that American sailors
had to face was the suicidal missions
carried out by Japanese Kamikaze pilots against American shipping.
Kamikaze refers to the divine wind which sank the fleet
of the great Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan in the 13th century.
It's imbued with Japanese heroism and folklore and myth
given to these young pilots.
But behind all the ritual and self-sacrifice.
lay cold, hard, numerical reality.
The attrition rate for the Japanese pilots by this time
in the war was approaching 96%.
What they're left with are inexperienced pilots and a dramatic
fuel shortage, so they can't even train the pilots
that they have.
All a Kamikaze pilot has to do is get his plane
up in the air, point it at a conning tower and crash into it.
It was very effective.
During the three months of the Okinawa campaign,
1,465 Kamikaze attacks
sink 29 ships and damage 120 others,
killing and wounding 9,083 US naval personnel.
Add the losses offshore to the losses among the army
and marine divisions fighting onshore,
you have over 10,000 killed.
When you consider the killed, wounded and missing,
the number increases to 53,000.
Add 36,000 cases of combat fatigue,
the number pushes toward 90,000.
And all of that for an island that's
90 miles long from top to bottom, and eight miles wide.
So when the Joint Chiefs of Staff commission a kind of casualty
estimate for what it's going to cost them to invade
the Japanese homeland,
you only have to look at what the Japanese were doing
with their Unit 731. Now, that was developing biological weapons.
Japanese school students are being trained
for suicide tactics.
Then you add to that a large number of one-way suicide boats
were discovered.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff had to confront
one basic question and it was - "Is it worth it?"
There's got to be another way.
In August they find one.
On the morning of August 6th 1945,
people in Hiroshima look up to see three B-29s above the city.
The inhabitants of Hiroshima actually thought they were immune
from bombing because Hiroshima had been spared the onslaught
of the B-29 bombing campaign.
The awful truth is that General Curtis LeMay was ordered to set
aside three Japanese cities for special treatment.
But now the time has come for the people
of Hiroshima to experience bombing.
The one single atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay
flattens half the city and immediately incinerates
more than 40,000 people.
And more civilians will die in the months that follow.
People begin to die of this new thing -
radiation poisoning.
And as time goes by, it elevates the total loss of life at Hiroshima
and brings that number all the way up to about 140,000.
But the Japanese fail to surrender.
So three days later, the US drops Fat Man on Nagasaki,
killing almost 30,000 instantly and condemning more than 73,000
to a lingering death.
In the early hours of the same day, almost two million Soviet troops
supported by 5,500 tanks,
surge into Manchuria and overwhelm the Japanese garrison there.
Emperor Hirohito insisted then that his civilian representatives
open up communications with the government
of the United States toward a negotiated settlement.
Hirohito's inclinations when he comes to the throne in the 1920s
of course is to be a pacifist, an internationalist
and a democrat and so on, and he finds himself hostage increasingly
to a militarised society
which is engaging in violent imperial conquests.
And he never really manages to square that circle
until finally at the very end of the war
with the Russian invasion, starvation, the atomic bomb,
puts him in a position where he can say to the military,
"Well, you were going along and I was right.
"It's time to end the war."
Now he's going to make a radio broadcast on August 14th
that's going to announce Japan's surrender.
Even now the die-hard militarists refuse to accept defeat.
He's still got this hardcore clique of militaristic officers
who try to get into the Imperial Palace,
locate the recording that's going to announce the surrender
and destroy it.
Their belief is that the emperor's wisdom has been tarnished
by "defeatists" - people who did not believe that victory
was still possible because to them, it still was.
The emperor and his Chamberlain
actually have to hide from these rebels.
There was even gunplay on the grounds of the Imperial Palace
as the mutineers sought to find the discs
upon which the imperial rescript was recorded.
And it's not until troops loyal to the Emperor
actually manages to fight off the rebels
and the rebels end up committing suicide
that actually the broadcast is finally safe.
Whether the Emperor could have prevailed over these fanatical
hawks without the impetus of the atom bomb,
is something historians still argue over today.
If I'd been in the shoes of the American leadership in 1945,
would I have dropped the atom bombs?
And I'm afraid my answer to that is probably yes.
The Japanese were still fighting.
The idea that they were ready to surrender -
I don't buy that at all.
This hardcore clique in the Japanese high command
still want to fight on.
It was Nagasaki that really is what got through to the Emperor
and made him intervene.
From the American perspective,
the atomic bomb was dropped because they really did think
they might bring the war to an end quickly
and save lots of American lives.
But I think they were also impelled very much
by a kind of technological imperative -
that they were desperate to see if it worked.
Very few people in 1945 understood the unspeakable,
shocking horror of atomic weapons.
They hadn't been demonstrated.
And for Roosevelt's successor, President Truman,
the atom bomb must have seemed like a perfect solution.
The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor.
They have been repaid many fold.
Do remember the firebombing by conventional bombs
that killed far more Japanese than did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And I'm afraid it is true of all wars that people will do things
when they are sick of the killing and sick of the dying
and they want it to be over, and the Japanese refused to quit.
To me, it doesn't look like an issue of atomic weapons
versus conventional weapons.
It looks to me like an issue of whether or not it's right to bomb
civilians at all.
At the start of September 1945,
General Douglas MacArthur accepts the Japanese surrender on board
the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
The Second World War is officially over.
Even before the dust begins to settle,
the Western Allies are faced with two problems to solve.
One is how they're going to deal with the Russians.
The other is what to do about the Nazis.
In July 1945,
two months before the Japanese surrender,
the Allied leaders Churchill, Truman and Stalin
meet at Potsdam, Germany,
to hammer out the post-war settlement of Europe.
Germany is divided into four occupation zones.
In November, the Allies agreed to try the Nazis
for crimes against humanity
at a military tribunal in Nuremberg.
But the number they can put on trial is severely limited.
The International Military Tribunal only puts in the dock the number
that can sit on the bench
and they figured out that there was room for 24.
Even before the trials begin,
one of the 24 was deemed mentally unfit
and another committed suicide.
The classic defence trotted out by many of the senior Nazis
at Nuremberg was one of only following orders.
But Allied intelligence had proof that the atrocities were widely
known in Nazi military circles.
Trent Park is a stately home in north London
and during the Second World War,
the British intelligence held Hitler's captured generals
and they lived a life of relative luxury.
But of course what they didn't realise was that everything
in the house was bugged.
From the transcripts, we can see that the Wehrmacht, the German army,
was complicit in war crimes,
that it was involved in the killing machine and in the Holocaust.
Other criminals of course, such as Goering,
were utterly unapologetic about what they had done.
Then you had people like Albert Speer
who decided the best way to save his life was to apologise for it.
He distanced himself very much from Hitler.
Of the 22 Nazis who stood trial at Nuremberg, three were acquitted,
seven were imprisoned and the other 12 were sentenced to death.
Though Nuremberg was not the only trial of Nazi perpetrators,
only a handful actually paid for their crimes.
Historians reckon that between 200,000 and 800,000 people
were involved in murdering Jews.
Of those, 99% of people who actually killed Jews were never
brought to court.
In West Germany, somewhere between 106,000 and 140,000 people
were investigated
and only 164 people in West Germany
were actually found guilty of murder.
164 people for six million plus murders.
That is a quite extraordinary figure.
If you look at overall numbers,
including the trials carried out by the East Germans and the Austrians,
again the outcome is absolutely pathetic in terms of sheer numbers.
The reason for such leniency was political.
The biggest reason was the switch from the war to the Cold War.
So at that point, chasing Communists became a higher priority.
Because as the Second World War came to an end,
the biggest danger to democracy
appeared to be the Western powers' erstwhile ally, Joseph Stalin.
Stalin's big winner from the Second World War.
He's got a lot more territory in 1945 than he ever did in 1939.
One of the tragic dimensions of World War II
is the fact that it seems to vindicate Stalin personally.
Yes, it's cost him millions of lives
but he's now also got a kind of narrative
attached to his personality.
He presents it afterwards as his own personal victory.
But the Soviet command economy was not geared to sustain the empire
that Stalin and his successors created
off the back of the Second World War.
You could say the Soviet bloc became, on the face of it,
very strong, but actually it got far too big, far too unwieldy.
And within really quite a short time,
the whole thing collapsed again.
As the Cold War heated up, the Soviets found it increasingly
expensive to compete with the other great winner of World War II.
The United States was overwhelmingly the biggest winner.
It came out of the war incomparably richer
as well as more powerful than it had been at the outset.
The United States then navigates into the post-war time period
as really a beacon of economic strength and security.
Whereas almost every other belligerent
was both physically ruined and also financially bankrupt.
The Second World War cost the nations of Europe an estimated
958 billion US dollars
and brought France, Britain and Germany to their knees.
As the iron curtain of communism began to sweep over Eastern Europe,
General Marshall, ex-US Chief of Staff from World War II,
realised that something had to be done.
It wasn't enough for America to be strong,
Europe had to be stable as well.
And the best way for Europe to be stable
was for its economies to thrive.
Marshall advocates a generous programme
that shares economic wealth with the countries
that were affected by the Second World War -
to include the former Nazi Germany.
He was smart enough to recognise that restricting Germany's economy
would probably mean that we would repeat the cycle
that was created by the Versailles Treaty
at the end of the First World War.
Under the Marshall Plan, 16 European nations received a total
of 13 billion US dollars in financial aid
between 1948 and 1951.
West Germany received $1.4 billion.
France almost 2.3 billion.
But by far the biggest recipient of US aid was Great Britain.
There's also a vital strategic reason for the Marshall Plan -
to make sure that Europe is prosperous enough
in order to be able to arm herself as a bulwark against any form
of encroaching Soviet Union.
But Marshall aid wasn't the only legacy of the Second World War.
Some admirable institutions emerged,
certainly the United Nations, later NATO,
and of course the EU because of the determination to bind
together France and Germany in such a fashion
that they would never think of going to war again.
In 1950, you had the European Coal and Steel Community
coming into play.
Now, that's a bloc of six nations there to trade
in those essential materials.
You have France, Germany, Italy Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg -
the six European nations most physically affected by the war.
And you can see by incremental steps,
these countries are deliberately coming closer together
so the kind of disaster that took place with the First World War
and the Second World War couldn't happen again.
If you can create this kind of trading bloc,
or almost this idea of a single state,
you can't therefore have a war
because you no longer see each other as separate countries,
you see each other as kind of brothers and sisters.
And that makes a lot of sense to the French, to the Germans,
to the Dutch.
These nations experienced what it was to have foreign soldiers' boots
marching up and down their lanes,
to have their people subject to control by foreign nations.
Britain never experienced that.
So perhaps it's not surprising that Britain feels
it's never lost its sovereignty,
it's damn well not going to lose its sovereignty now.
The economic boom that followed the post-war slump
created a new prosperity that particularly benefited
the war's biggest losers.
Germany would not count itself as a big winner in 1945
but it certainly looks like it came out of it in the best possible way.
One of the huge ironies of the Second World War
was that if Germany had not gone to war,
nothing could have prevented Germany from dominating Europe
within 20 years by entirely peaceful economic and industrial means.
Look at Germany today.
Germany is a thriving, representative democracy
with a strong economy.
Japan also benefited from the post-war settlement.
But there was another winner from the Second World War
and that was China's Mao Zedong.
It's said that when the Japanese Prime Minister
visited Mao in Beijing in 1972
and apologised for the Japanese invasion of China
back in the '30s, Mao supposedly said to him,
"Well, actually, you don't need to apologise
because if you hadn't done that,
the Chinese Communist Party would never have come to power.
Victory of the Japanese opened the way
for Mao and the Chinese Communist movement
to confront Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists, effectively,
and to win the civil war four years later.
In 2019, as we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start
of the Second World War, the forces that drove it into being seem
to be raising their ugly heads once again.
One of the reasons for fighting the Second World War was to free
the world of tyranny, from suppression
and in order to foster liberalism, democracy and all these big ideas.
Today there's an almost near collapse of trust in the liberal
elites and one's fear that all sorts of very illiberal elites
may once again be ascendant
is something I think we should be very frightened of.
It's always easy to look at the past and make distinctions and say,
"No, no, it was different then. We've moved on."
Well, believe me, the world really hasn't changed all that much.
We need to be aware in the 21st century
that the shadow of these wars hangs over us
and we that don't want to repeat them.
But that's something we have to educate people all the time
into understanding what happened in the Second World War
and making sure it never happens again.
Because if the world does go to war again then the numbers
are going to be much bigger than the World War II numbers.