From August 31st 1939, a 43-year-old man was drugged unconscious,
dressed in a Polish uniform and shot dead in the control room
of a radio station outside the town of Gliwice in Upper Silesia.
His name was Franz Honiok and he would be the first official
casualty of the Second World War.
His death would spark a war of the world
even more horrific than the war to end all wars
that had rocked it 20 years earlier.
The Second World War was the world's first truly global war.
It involved a hundred million soldiers
and was fought on every continent on the planet.
It wouldn't be a problem collecting statistics,
but in fact, it's very difficult to get accurate figures
of every single person who'd been killed.
And here is where the numbers can help us.
It's numbers that drive this story because when you dig deep into them,
it's only then that you can look at the decisions
that the generals, the diplomats, the politicians were actually facing
and then you can see the crucial decisions that they had to take.
Numbers can help us understand how appeasement came about.
Why Hitler was so obsessed with the Russian caucuses.
Why the Americans dropped the atomic bomb.
And numbers would also create the circumstances that led
to the conflict in the first place.
Because the story of how the Second World War came about
is a story of terrible hardships and missed opportunities
driven by harsh economic numbers.
It's a story of cynical promises, made to very desperate people.
And, of course, that's as relevant today as it was then.
No-one could have believed in the last months of the First World War
that this world would be engulfed in a conflict
even greater than the one they had just endured.
The Great War was meant to be the war to end all wars.
17 million people died.
And 20 million people were wounded.
Nobody in their right minds wanted to go through that again.
This was unthinkable.
Yet, in less than a generation, cold minds full of hatred
regarded the post-war settlement with envious eyes
and slowly but surely drew their plans against it.
One man in particular was warped by disillusionment.
Adolf Hitler was a corporal in the German army
during the First World War.
Like many men who fought in that war, he was immensely traumatised
by what he saw.
And so, it's not entirely surprising that somebody like Adolf Hitler,
who had twice been wounded and won an Iron Cross,
he would have felt that he had done everything that he possibly could.
And yet, things hadn't got better after the war - they'd got worse.
Who was to blame for this?
It wasn't him.
Hitler was just one of four million veterans who came home
to find no jobs and no heroes' welcome waiting for them Germany.
They felt deeply betrayed by the treaty
hashed out at a six-month-long
peace conference in the palace of Versailles
between January and June 1919.
The Treaty of Versailles was a terrible shock for the German
Nation, and particularly for those who had fought through
the First World War and survived it.
The big players there were Britain, France and America.
There was no doubt at all that in their minds,
Germany was responsible.
And Germany was not going to be given the chance to rise up again
and cause any more trouble.
Germany's massive army of over four million men
is reduced to a mere 100,000.
Its Navy is limited to warships under 10,000 tonnes.
Its air force is completely disbanded.
This puts it on a par with the peacetime French army of 106,000.
The British have almost four times that number,
but they are spread all across the globe.
But the British Navy now dwarfs the German fleet
by more than five to one.
Worse still, Germany is saddled with a reparations bill of 132 billion
gold marks - that's worth some 30 billion US dollars.
It's something like two times the amount the Germany could produce
before the war.
And this wasn't just about money.
It was also about blame.
The French had lost 20,000 factories and more than 700,000 buildings
in the First World War.
They wanted Germany to admit responsibility,
as well as paying for the damage.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for the Germans to accept
was the War Guilt Clause.
That somehow, all this awful, hellish war
had been Germany's responsibility.
And I think that's something that the German veterans
and the German public found almost impossible to accept.
This laid the foundations for the myth of the stab in the back,
that the German army was never really defeated.
But all that had happened is a load of treacherous socialists
and communists and Jews had been responsible
for forcing Germany to give up the war.
When actually, it wasn't beaten.
So, the Treaty of Versailles was massively important
in the impact it had on people's views.
But that was because, to some extent, in certain quarters,
it was decided to make it that important.
For millions of unemployed veterans like Adolf Hitler,
this was a temptingly seductive explanation for the dire straits
in which they now found themselves.
When veterans like Hitler looked around,
they saw people who, apparently, were still doing well.
So, this was the Wall Street jury, the money men.
But equally, the communists, the Bolsheviks,
the people that those like Hitler detested on the left,
they also were Jews who were somehow in cahoots with the capitalists
to do the small man down.
The idea that the Communists were being funded
by Jewish money, and especially American Jewish money,
did have a credibility in those days and an amazing number of people
were willing to believe it.
You fought in the First World War.
You were gassed, you were injured, you were wounded
in the First World War.
And who's getting the benefit...
..of all that you put in?
The Jew.
Germany is a well of seething resentment, just waiting
for a firebrand to unleash the anger boiling up within it.
And the events that follow Versailles
will play right into the conspiracy theorists' hands.
1923.
When Germany fails to pay its reparations bill,
the French invade Germany's industrial heartland,
The Ruhr, to exact payment in kind.
The Weimar government's response to the crisis
spirals it into hyper-inflation.
This is a Reichsmark from the German Weimar republic.
At the beginning of the Republic, you would need nine of them
to buy one American dollar.
By November 1923, because of inflation,
you would need 4.3 trillion of them.
That would fill this entire marquee.
At the time, there were 300 paper mills and 2,000 printing presses
producing banknotes just to keep up with the need.
Inflation was running at such a rate the people were being paid
in wheelbarrows or baskets of money.
There was a story about some women who had just been paid.
They went to the launderette.
They left with their laundry, but they left their money behind.
They rushed back and when they got there,
they found the money was on the floor...
..but the baskets had been stolen.
So, how is Germany going to be saved?
How is Germany going to be brought back onto an even keel?
Well, the country was bailed out by something called the Dawes Plan...
..by the Jewish financiers that Hitler was railing against.
Under the Dawes plan,
America pumped some eight million marks into the German economy.
So long as the money kept coming in, Germany could survive.
But if anything happened in America to prevent that flow of money
from coming in, then Germany would be in big, big trouble.
Germany is being propped up by numbers -
massive American financial numbers -
and those numbers will ultimately bring its democracy crashing down.
Because on October 24th 1929...
..Wall Street crashes.
There was a saying at the time that if America sneezes,
the world catches a cold.
Well, actually, the world caught more than a cold.
$30 billion was wiped off the value of stocks and shares
in the American market.
And not just that - $7.8 billion worth of loans
in the European markets just disappeared.
The Wall Street crash affected all the economies,
but Germany crashed fastest and furthest.
It had been heavily reliant on American loans.
The economy was very fragile.
Germany had really rallied economically, to the point
that it would become the number two exporter in the entire world -
second only to Britain.
But now, nobody wanted those German goods any more.
So, the export figures went down from 12 billion to 5 billion.
And of course, what you get is massive unemployment.
In October 1929, there were 1.6 million unemployed in Germany.
But by 1933, that had leapt to six million.
One in two families in Germany was affected by unemployment.
So, there was desperation for an apparent saviour figure
and Hitler appeared to promise everything.
One of the reasons that the Nazi party was so successful
is how they communicate their message.
They use simple posters like this
and they presented themselves as the uber-party.
Number one - drawing people to their membership from the German people.
But also - and this may surprise us -
is they also present themselves as a party of social inclusion.
The volk - the people.
A woman in Nazi Germany
who had more than three babies got financial rewards.
But at the same time, they presented themselves as the party
that supported, had the back of the workers against,
in this case, the bankers. and the bureaucrats
And the key thing about the bankers
is that they were Jewish. In the East, the Bolsheviks.
In the West, the American Bankers.
And the key thing now is that the party
was going to protect the Germans against the Jews.
It's all presentation of image.
It's all presentation of massive popularity and national support.
And when you look behind the scenes, it's geared towards population
expansion, having more people to send to war.
And the male is supposed to be the strong male, protecting the nation.
Something like this had already happened in Italy
before the Wall Street crash,
with the rise of Benito Mussolini.
People often wonder why Hitler admired Mussolini so much.
I think you can look back to these early days
when Mussolini was the strong man in Italy.
In 1922, he had used his black shirt thugs to go in
and break up strikes by labourers.
A lot of small farmers couldn't afford the extra wage demands
demanded by these strikers.
And so, of course, when Mussolini had his fascist break up
all these strikes, the farmers see fascism as their saviour.
Hitler watched this happen and realised that he could transfer this
to Germany and that's what he did in Prussia.
In 1932, the farmers of Schleswig-Holstein in Prussia
overwhelmingly voted Nazi in the parliamentary elections.
This helped give Hitler 37% of the seats in the Reichstag.
This was a turning point for Hitler.
He could be electorally successful.
The Depression is absolutely crucial to the rise of Marxism,
completely and totally.
If you look at the Nazi vote in 1928...
..meaningless, almost.
But by the summer of 1932,
people are flocking to the Nazis because in those intervening
couple of years, the implications of the Wall Street crash
have been horrific in Germany.
And now, suddenly, here comes a leader
who makes them feel good again and says they have rights,
that they have a future.
They have a greatness, a destiny.
Hitler now has the numbers in the Reichstag
to dictate the balance of power.
It proves crucial in January 1933
when the German establishment begins casting round
for an alternative to socialist rule
after the collapse of their latest government.
In all the negotiations that follow,
it's the pro-Nazi, agrarian league that persuades Hindenburg
that Hitler is a man to be trusted with power.
So, it's Hitler's wooing of that agricultural vote
that's vital to get him into power.
On January 30th in 1933,
Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of the German Reich.
He has taken the economic misery caused by the Great Depression
and used it to get the numbers he needed for power.
And he's gone right to the brink to get the top job.
But the actions of Japan on the other side of the world
will convince him he can go much further.
And those events will push the world to war.
On September 1st 1923,
the Great Kanto plain west of Tokyo in Japan...
..was struck by an earthquake measuring magnitude
7.9 on the Richter scale.
140,000 people were killed.
570,000 buildings were destroyed in the firestorm that followed.
The cost of the disaster would cripple the Japanese economy.
Before the Kanto earthquake,
Japan was one of the great economic success stories
of the First World War.
During that time, it tripled its industrial output
and actually made a profit of some $400 million.
The great Kanto earthquake wiped all that out in just one day.
Just like Germany, Japan rose to the challenge
by modernising its economy and investing heavily
in overseas markets.
And then, just like Germany when the Wall Street crash happened,
all that industry collapsed.
Lots of young men and women found themselves out of work,
including in Japan's relatively impoverished countryside,
where a great deal of nationalistic politics became the result.
This opened the door to the enemies of progress
and drove Japan down the so-called dark valley of imperialism.
There is a very strong economic argument to explain Japanese actions
in the years leading up to World War II and during World War II itself.
Of course, other factors matter greatly, as well,
but sheer, hard numerical calculation of Japan's interest
was also at the heart of what that country wanted to do.
At the forefront of that argument was the Japanese military.
They saw themselves as the bearers of the Japanese nation.
They worried about all those liberal politicians, or even socialists
and so on, who were internationalist,
who wanted to collaborate with other states.
Anything that took Japan away from its proud warrior past
was utterly dishonourable.
So, they looked to China as a natural place
for Japanese expansion.
They saw it as an area where the Japanese could really move in,
secure their resources and interests
and establish a new territorial empire.
China was the third largest country in the world,
with a population of almost 500 million people,
covering a land area of about four million square miles.
During the 1920s, it was hopelessly divided.
Militarist leaders who were in charge of their own,
often very substantial armies,
controlled different provinces, different parts of China,
and were all jostling for control.
The Japanese army felt it could exploit these divisions
to seize control of the Chinese territory of Manchuria.
By 1930, 219,000 citizens had emigrated to Manchuria,
guarded by more than 10,000 soldiers
in the so-called Guangdong or Kwantung Army.
Quite frankly, the Kwantung army
were a bunch of warmongering lunatics.
And they looked to Manchuria as being an essential element
of Japan's imperial destiny.
The simple numerical reason for this is oil
and natural resources.
One of the major problems that Japan had
is we didn't have very large natural deposits of commodities,
which were necessary to create the automobile
and airplane-based modernised economies
that marked the early 20th century.
Japan is very poor in oil resources.
It imported 90% of its requirements.
One of the advantages about expanding into Manchuria
was the belief that you could somehow use the shale oil
in Manchuria and that this would provide additional resources.
To get it, the Kwantung army will have to manufacture a war.
At 10pm on September 18th 1931,
the Japanese railway line at Mukden in southern Manchuria
is attacked by terrorists.
The army retaliated by opening fire on the Chinese barracks.
They claim that the railway line was attacked by Chinese bandits.
But the real saboteurs are the Kwantung troops themselves,
who dressed up as Chinese soldiers.
This gives them all the pretext they need to invade Manchuria.
Within weeks of the Mukden incident, the Kwantung army
has occupied an area the size of France and Germany combined,
placing 30 million people under their control.
They're behaving like the Nazis
two years before the Nazis had even come to power.
Some of Japan's actions in the 1930s
do seem to be a foreshadowing of actions
that eventually would be undertaken by Adolf Hitler
when he became Chancellor of Germany.
So, think about the invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
One of the first reactions of the world community
was to send a commission from the League of Nations
to actually look at the reality of what had happened.
The League of Nations is a forerunner to the United Nations
and it's there to try and promote harmony amongst nations.
But actually, it's really, really toothless.
This report would give the impression to the Chinese
that they had been exonerated from all responsibility.
Although the report condemned the Japanese actions,
very little was done.
It eventually led to the Japanese actually storming out
of the League of Nations in 1933,
and essentially opened the doors for a much more violent,
much more confrontational style of territorial control.
By 1933, the Kwantung army has increased from 10,000 men
to 114,000.
Emboldened by their success,
its officers, now in control of Japan, turn their sights on China.
The seemingly innocuous spark that ignited Japan's war with China
happened on the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing.
On July 7th 1937, a Japanese soldier goes missing.
Immediately, the Japanese commander on the spot
blamed local Chinese troops.
A small scale shooting incident between the two sides broke out.
It turns out that the soldier has gone AWOL
and reappears just a few hours later.
Both sides, the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-Shek,
and the Japanese government in Tokyo,
ratcheted up confrontation with each other.
And within just a few days, it had escalated
to essentially, an all-out war between two nations.
The Japanese high command is convinced that China
will be a walkover.
They take their invasion plan to the Emperor Hirohito for approval.
One general even tells Hirohito
that the war is going to be over in three months.
Hirohito is furious about this.
"That's what you told me at the start of the Manchuria incident",
he shouts, "But it's not ended for more than four years!
"The Chinese mainland is as large as the Pacific,
"so how can you tell me that it's going to be over in three months?"
Hidebound by convention,
the Emperor Hirohito has no choice but to agree the plan.
It takes the Japanese army all of the three months
they have planned for just to take Shanghai.
Eventually, the Japanese forces did overwhelm the Chinese,
but by taking three months,
the Chinese showed that they would not give up
control of their own country without a severe fight.
But Japanese brutality backfires.
The Kuomintang nationalists of Chiang Kai-Shek are so shocked
by the Japanese assault they form an uneasy truce with the communists
of Mao Zedong against the Japanese threat.
Chiang Kai-Shek needs the Communists
to help counter the Japanese invasion.
So, ironically, Mao Zedong's Communist Party is actually saved
by the Japanese invasion.
The United Chinese army has over two million men
but still, the Japanese keep coming.
They appear to be unstoppable.
It forces Chiang Kai-Shek to do the unthinkable.
In June 1938, Chiang Kai-Shek could see that the Japanese armies
were advancing swiftly across central China.
But he had one tactic that he could use
to try and prevent their advance.
And that was to create an artificial flood and he would do that
by blowing apart the dykes which held back the mighty Yellow River
at the town of Luoyang.
The resulting flood engulfs an area of more than 20,000 square miles,
drowning 11 towns and over 4,000 villages.
Between 500,000 and 900,000 people were drowned.
And up to five million more are made homeless.
So, with this one act, Chiang Kai-Shek
has killed more Chinese civilians
than all the Japanese atrocities in China combined.
It's the largest act of environmental warfare in history.
The flooding of the Yellow River
grinds the Japanese invasion to a halt.
Japan now has 34 divisions, totalling 1.1 million men,
literally bogged down in China.
And it's not over yet.
For the Japanese military,
there's no question of withdrawing once you've occupied an area.
These are not things you're going to give up.
The Japanese honour, Japan's imperial tradition, requires that
once you've occupied territory, you hold on to it.
Yet, it's painfully clear that Japan's generals have bitten off
much more than they can chew.
Traditionally, Western historiography
dates the beginning of World War II
to the invasion of Poland by Hitler in 1939.
But I think there's an argument that the real date is 1937 -
the Marco Polo Bridge Incident
that opens the war between China and Japan.
It's all-out war.
It becomes a total war
and it doesn't really end until the atomic bombings of Japan
in 1945 bring that war to a close.
So, for the Chinese and the Japanese,
World War II, it's full phase, lasts eight years - from 1837 to 1945.
Yet, despite all of Japan's naked aggression, the Western powers
and the League of Nations seem unable or unwilling to stop them.
The League of Nations is, frankly, an utter failure
and it plants one word in Hitler's mind -
appeasement.
In October, 1933 Hitler follows Japan's example
and publicly walks out of the League of Nations.
At the same time, he begins secretly rearming the nation.
Under the West Side treaty, Germany was disarmed.
Hitler not only regarded this - as the most of the German people -
as monstrously unjust,
but in order to fulfil his belief in Germany's military destiny,
he had to have the means with which to do so.
So, right at the very start, Hitler tells his government,
he tells the Armed Forces to rearm in defiance of Versailles.
So, we do it secretly until 35.
Then you have this accelerated programme in to the late 1930s
Over the next eight years,
Germany spends at least 35 billion Reichsmarks -
$14 billion - on rebuilding the army.
Between 1933 and 1935,
spending on the military as a percentage of total national
expenditure rises from 1% to 10%.
By 1936, Germany has revealed it is rearming
to the rest of the world.
It is building an army of 36 infantry divisions,
aiming to increase its strength from 100,000 to 600,000 men by 1938.
It's about twice the size of the French army,
which has a paper strength of almost 350,000 men.
The numbers are even more uneven in other sectors of the Armed Forces.
Germany has 5,112 aircraft, compared to France's 890.
Around 3,400 tanks, compared to 1,300.
And though the French Navy is triple the size of the Germans',
Hitler signs a naval accord with Great Britain
that will allow him to more than double his fleet
in the next three years.
But the numbers are more than just a comparison.
They tell us a lot about the way these countries are thinking.
The French really aren't ready for war
in the same way that Germany is.
The French military is based on a tripartite model -
a regular army of 106,000 men,
up to 240,000 annual conscripts doing military service
and around five million reservists,
who had completed military service
and could be called up in time of emergency.
On paper, France can summon up five million men
at a moment's notice.
But these are reservists.
They're old, they're fat or they're even working in essential jobs
that need to keep the economy going.
And if you look at the French economy at this time,
it can't afford, actually, to put that army out
and it can't afford to rearm.
You've got the workers going on strike,
you've got the effects of the Depression hitting France
in a kind of delayed fashion.
And so, whereas Germany's is coming into power,
France actually is more like a sick man.
Britain, on the other hand, is in good shape economically.
But before 1935, the British High Command is more focused
on maintaining the Navy and defending the empire
than building up land forces in Europe.
British military spending did not rise above £140 million per year
until Hitler announced that he was rearming in 1935.
The British have their work cut out just policing their empire.
They really can't afford to build up an effective army in Europe.
The people of Western Europe, the French and the British above all,
are still totally traumatised by the memory of the First World War.
All those ghastly casualties.
They were desperate to believe that Hitler might be trusted,
to believe that a war might be avoided.
This is what Hitler is banking on.
But he doesn't reveal his thinking until 1937.
On Friday the 5th of November 1937, Hitler convenes a meeting
of all his senior military staff, and this meeting is recorded.
And that memorandum famously gets called the Hossbach memorandum.
In it, Hitler outlines the guiding philosophy
he has been refining since he first wrote it down,
14 years before.
Hitler explains the necessity for German territorial expansion.
He calls it Lebensraum, living space,
and what he wants to have, like Britain, is an empire.
He looked at Britain, he looked at France, they've got big empires.
Why shouldn't Germany have them, too?
He makes no bones about the fact he wants to conquer other territories.
To strike East, to create a new empire for Germany
in which millions of people would just starve to death
while the food from Ukraine and the crops from western Russia
went to feed the German people.
These are populated, in his eyes, by untermenschen -
people who the Nazis regard as being racially inferior.
We are going to use their land and they can, frankly, go to hell.
Or worse.
The only thing that can stand in Germany's way
are the Western powers of World War I.
But Hitler isn't worried about them.
Hitler had seen Mussolini walk into Ethiopia in 1935
and the British and French did nothing
and they did nothing again in '31 and '37
when the Japanese walked into China.
He'd done a calculation that really, until 1943,
they wouldn't be strong enough to stop it.
That's really his object - carve out his version for Ethiopia
and the other powers will not interfere.
Hitler had already tested the ground one year earlier
when 10,000 German troops, accompanied by 22,700 armed police,
marched into the Rhineland and occupied the territory demilitarised
by the Treaty of Versailles.
If Germany really was going to be a military power,
then it had to be able to protect its factories.
He needs those factories to produce his tanks and his planes
and his weaponry. In order to protect that industrial heartland,
Hitler needs to create a buffer zone.
That buffer zone is the demilitarised Rhineland.
In retrospect, we can see that Hitler was bluffing.
But the French intelligence estimates he had almost 300,000
soldiers in the Rhineland.
That would be equivalent to the French army.
Quite where the French had got that figure from is anybody's guess.
But the British and the French knew that to kick Hitler out
the Rhineland, they would basically need a war and no-one wanted that.
In 1938, Hitler followed this up by unifying with Austria.
At the same time, Germany, Italy and Japan form Anti-Comintern Pact,
which will eventually become known as the Axis.
Hitler is preparing for the conflict that's to come.
1938 is a key turning point.
That is the moment of total irreversible radicalisation.
You see a shift in the army leadership.
You see the Anschluss of Austria, the so-called Kristallnacht,
November 9th, 10th 1938 is the moment when the Holocaust starts.
That is when you use brutal physical violence against Jews
and you see that other Germans are not prepared, by and large,
to step in to help their fellow Jewish Germans.
Hitler was riding his luck and the next domino he would topple
would be Czechoslovakia.
But he was a gambler and sometimes gamblers go too far.
And he would go too far in 1939.
The Eastern European state of Czechoslovakia
was a completely artificial nation,
cobbled together out of Czechs, Slovaks
Hungarians and Germans.
There are various reasons why Hitler wants to invade Czechoslovakia.
For one thing, you have more than three million ethnic Germans
who you want liberate, effectively, and the Treaty of Versailles
has put them on the wrong side of the border.
But it's not just the people that Hitler wants.
It's also all that industry.
The massive Skoda works in Czechoslovakia would be fantastic
for Hitler if he wants to rearm.
Hitler's idea in Spring of 1938
is that he will have a limited war against the Czechs,
that he would invade Czechoslovakia and nobody will stop him.
In September 1938,
Hitler begins massing troops on the frontier of Czechoslovakia.
The world is at a tipping point.
Britain's new Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, tries to avert
the crisis with a frantic whirlwind of shuttle diplomacy.
Hitler knew that Chamberlain wanted to avoid a war.
We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German
naval agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples
never to go to war with one another again.
When Chamberlain notoriously declared peace for our time,
it was peace at the price of Czechoslovakia.
And Hitler got every bit of that country
that was more than 50% German.
And he also got an enormous amount of oil reserves
and coal reserves and also industrial output.
It was a magnificent coup for Hitler.
Some people view it as a total capitulation.
Winston Churchill found it demeaning, debasing.
Britain was basically getting down on her knees, on her belly,
in front of Hitler, allowing him to do whatever he wanted.
What none of them realise is that Chamberlain has done
the maths and he knows the numbers are against him in September 1938.
He isn't just buying peace -
he's playing for time.
And Chamberlain isn't the only one who has run the numbers.
What's interesting is that the head of MI6 in 1938,
Hugh Sinclair, stepped in and said to Chamberlain, "If you don't sign
"appeasement with Hitler, we go to war immediately
"and we aren't ready."
The infamous Munich Agreement is the soft public face of a bruising
negotiation that has been taking place behind the scenes.
Chamberlain realises that if he simply caves into Hitler,
the dictator will demand more.
He has to make Hitler step back from the brink
then give him just enough to keep him happy.
On September 27th, Chamberlain sends his personal emissary to Hitler
in Berlin and says to him that France is going to honour its pledge
to Czechoslovakia and you need to know
that we will come to the aid of France.
When it becomes clear the British and French are going to interfere,
then, Hitler is forced to abandon that little war.
He gets a lot, of course, he gets his German areas
incorporated into Germany.
But what he can't have is his little war and he's furious.
Chamberlain desperately hopes
that Hitler truly is a man of his word,
that he will not expand beyond the land he's been seeded.
Chamberlain said to his sister
that he hoped Hitler would keep his promise.
He's been vilified for having sold Britain out as this weak appeaser.
But, in fact, he was anything but that.
We do owe a backhanded debt to Chamberlain because the one thing
for sure, there are a few historians who say Britain and France
should have fought Hitler in 1938.
Most of us don't buy that idea at all.
If you look at the figures at this point,
Britain really didn't have many troops
who were actually ready to fight at this point.
Britain needed more time.
Chamberlain knows that the German army has 600,000 men in it.
That compares to the British with just 100,000 men in Europe.
That's a huge imbalance.
And Chamberlain needs the time to correct it.
Time finally runs out in March 1939
when Hitler rips up the agreement and marches
into the rest of Czechoslovakia.
It's at this point that Chamberlain draws a line in the sand.
The relationship between the Munich Crisis and the outbreak of WWII
war against Poland is a very close one in Hitler's mind.
He made a mistake.
He was let down.
This time, he can have his little war
but Chamberlain and the French will do nothing.
Chamberlain was pretty certain that Poland
would be next on Hitler's list and the reason was not difficult
to fathom - because in some ways, Hitler was just ticking boxes.
He was taking back what he felt was taken from Germany at Versailles.
And so, Danzig corridor...
..looked like it was going to be next.
The Danzig corridor was a slice of land that provided access
to a seaport for the newly-created Polish nation
by driving a wedge through western Prussia.
This effectively removed 360,000
Germans from their home nation and cut off the two million
inhabitants of East Prussia from the rest of Germany.
And Hitler wants them back.
Chamberlain knows that this has got to stop and he says to Parliament
that Britain will defend Poland if Germany attacks.
Hitler hesitates.
But it's not Chamberlain who's holding him back.
Hitler is basically not scared of Britain and France.
But there was another power that he was nervous of.
And that's the Soviet Union.
As the fate of Poland hangs in the balance, both sides frantically
work behind the scenes to get Stalin on their side.
But the numbers tell for Hitler.
During all this diplomatic horse trading,
Stalin said that he would commit 300 divisions to the defence of Poland.
And he asked the British ambassador how many the British would do.
And the ambassador replies, "Two."
And two later, unsurprisingly,
Stalin chose the Germans.
On August 23rd, 1939,
Russia signs a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany,
promising Germany oil supplies and control
of western Prussia in return for all of eastern Poland.
Stalin said that Britain and France had wanted to use the Soviets
as hired men without wanting to pay for it.
Well, from the Germans he was going to get eastern Poland
and the Germans were going to get the Danzig corridor.
Hitler is now certain that the numbers are on his side.
He wants his little war.
He didn't have it with the Czechs,
so he's going to have it with the Poles
and he becomes obsessed with this idea.
He tells the generals
and his colleagues over and over again,
"Britain and France are not going to do anything."
And so we come to Gliwice.
Poland's fate is sealed by the murder of Franz Honiok
in a nondescript radio station on the Polish-German border.
And it's that manufactured evidence that the Germans show the world
that the Poles had mounted an attack on their territory.
Hitler has used exactly the same ploy that the Japanese used
at Mukden to justify his naked aggression against Poland.
But he has miscalculated the numbers.
Four days later, on 3rd September, 1939,
Britain and France declared war on Germany.
Hitler is furious.
It wasn't what he expected.
And the following day he's busy working out his own theory
of what happened and his own theory is that actually
it was the Jews who drove the French and the British to war.
And that's the only way he can explain to himself how Britain
or France finally decided to go to war.
What Hitler doesn't actually appreciate is that appeasement
isn't just spineless pacifism.
This is actually the British buying themselves time.
More important still, it's very doubtful indeed whether if Britain
had chosen to go to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia,
the Dominions - Canada, Australia, New Zealand -
would have come in too.
What completely changed by 1939,
everyone understood that Neville Chamberlain
might be a naive man but he had been a completely honest, honourable man
who had striven to make peace with Hitler
and, by 1939, had been seen to fail.
The British people and the Dominions all understood by September, 1939
that Hitler must be fought.
Hitler could only go so far.
When he moved into Poland, enough was enough.
By September '39, the British and French had just about mustered
the numbers to face down Hitler and take him to war.
They're not declaring it as a gesture, they declare it
because they honestly think
they have the military capacity to defeat Germany.
By actually pushing his luck too far,
Hitler brings war upon himself a good four years earlier
than he had expected it.
Hitler had come to power thanks to the huge amount
of economic misery caused by the Great Depression.
He had turned the punishing numbers of the Versailles Treaty
into a rallying cry for his people,
and he had taken the Allies to the brink of appeasement
as they scrabbled for the numbers to oppose him.
In these, as in so many other ways,
numbers lie at the heart of the events that pushed the world to war.
It would become another Great War driven by numbers.
And in the years to come, those numbers would keep on rising.
At half past midnight on Saturday, 26th August, 1939,
a small band of men sneak across the Polish-German border
near the town of Mosty in the Carpathian Mountains.
These men were a secret battalion called
Construction Training Company 800 for Special Duties.
In fact, they were combat saboteurs.
Their mission was to seize the vital railway tunnel
at the Jablunkov pass, which was the shortest route to Warsaw.
This was one of the first moves of Plan White,
the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Only problem is, shortly after the unit crosses the border,
Hitler postpones Plan White.
And Polish guards then confronted them
in the tunnel at the Jablunkov Pass.
Then there was a gun battle.
The Germans suffered two wounded and then had to retreat.
This was very embarrassing for the Nazis.
The German authorities explained away the whole incident
as simply a unit having gone rogue.
And the Poles chose to believe it.
Five days later, on September 1st, Germany invades Poland.
The Poles demolish the Jablunkov tunnel just 75 minutes
after the first German tanks roll across the border.
It does them little good.
When the attack actually did come in Poland,
the Poles didn't seem to be prepared for it.
The speed with which they came.
What we had now was lightning war.
September, 1939.
On Germany's frontier with Poland
are gathered 1.5 million German troops,
200,000 military vehicles and more than 2,000 tanks.
It's the largest show of military force seen in Europe
since World War I.
But nobody, not even the Fuhrer, is prepared for World War II.
Hitler increasingly convinces himself that Britain and France
are washed up as great powers.
At this point, none of the democracies want to fight.
The only people preparing for war,
preparing for a fight, are the fascists.
British governments have always had a shocking weakness
for what I've christened gesture strategy.
That's that they realise where we may have to fight a war,
but they don't do anything about it.
The Allies lose no time demonstrating the actual strength
of their commitment to the defence of Poland.
Hours after Britain declares war,
ten RAF Whitley bombers take off,
bound for Germany's industrial heartland.
When they reach their targets over the Ruhr,
these ten mighty bombers open that bomb bay doors
and unleash 5.4 million...
..propaganda leaflets.
What was known as the Confetti War.
That is how the Royal Air Force began the war.
On the leaflets is written,
"Your rulers have condemned you to the massacres, miseries
"and privations of a war they cannot ever hope to win."
Quite what the Allies are expecting to achieve is anybody's guess.
A lot of Germans were perfectly happy with their Fuhrer.
Five days later, the French make their contribution
to the defence of Poland.
Ten French divisions advance across a 15-mile front,
pushing into the south-western German state of Saarland.
But the advance lacks purpose.
They go five miles.
They sit there for five days,
and then they turn back.
It was a crazy, sentimental gesture with no real strategic basis at all.
What if the French had pressed home that attack
so early on in the war?
How far could they have gone?
Could they have knocked Germany out of the war
before the war had even begun?
Well, we'll never know the answer to that.
The Allies don't feel they have the numbers to confront Hitler.
They need time to get their troops in place.
While Hitler was busy roasting and eating Poland,
the French army could get ready to fight the real war.
General Gamelin actually said,
"We have every interest in the conflict
"beginning in the east and generalising, little by little.
"That way we have time to prepare."
The Poles were betrayed by the British and French governments.
It's all very well for everybody to say today,
"Oh, well, very honourable,
"the British and French went to war for Poland",
but we didn't make the smallest attempt
to fulfil our earlier promises to Poland.
The Allies expect the Poles to keep the Germans occupied.
On paper at least, Poland does possess the numbers.
At the start of the war, the Polish Army
was the fourth largest army in Europe.
Against approximately 1.5 million invading Germans,
the Poles can muster 1.3 million troops.
On the face of it, the German and Polish Armed Forces
are reasonably evenly matched.
But the Germans have two significant advantages.
They have much better tanks and much better aircraft.
The Polish air force is pretty hapless.
Out of 900 planes, only 36 are brand-new.
Germany's 2,000 aircraft quickly take control of the skies.
This leaves the way open for Germany
to play the ace hiding up its sleeve.
A military strategy designed to take ground quickly
and avoid the punishing trench conflict
that cost the Germans hundreds of thousands of lives in World War I.
German Armed Forces have been thinking about,
if there's another major war,
how are we going to be able to achieve
what we couldn't achieve in the First World War?
We really do need decisive battles.
We don't want to mess around for four years.
We want to be able to defeat the enemy
and to defeat the enemy quickly.
When the Germans unleash their new attack strategy,
it will soon strike terror around the globe.
1st September, 1939.
In Poland, Nazi Germany introduces to an unsuspecting world
a whole new way of waging war.
They call it Blitzkrieg.
Blitzkrieg means "lightning war."
That's the translation.
And that's exactly what this was.
Tanks and motorised infantry moving through at enormous speed,
breaking through an unsuspecting enemy line.
You punch a hole straight through the enemy's front.
You then send your tanks through this hole
and you then envelop the enemy's rear,
and you therefore cut off his supply lines.
This entirely new type of warfare
requires an entirely new type of unit -
the Panzer division.
Tanks have been around since the First World War,
but the Germans are using them in a very novel way as shock weapons.
They are concentrated at a particular spot.
They breach the line.
So the enemy doesn't really know what's hit them.
Germany only began building new tanks in 1933.
Now it has nine Panzer divisions,
each boasting 328 tanks.
Almost 3,000 in total.
This is the Panzer Mark III,
the mainstay of Panzer forces
at the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939.
It was developed specifications drawn up by Heinz Guderian himself
and it was intended to act as a mobile anti-tank gun
in support of the lighter Mark IIs and the infantry.
Armed with a 50 millimetre gun there,
and travelling at 25mph on the road,
it was very, very capable of dealing with any Polish opposition.
But in 1939,
the Germans don't possess motorised armour in sufficient numbers
for a full-scale blitzkrieg.
Their armies rely heavily
on the oldest form of military transport,
the horse.
We tend to think about blitzkrieg being about motorised vehicles
but in fact, in 1939, in the invasion of Poland,
the Nazi forces had only 16 fully mechanised divisions out of 157.
Everything else depended upon horses.
400,000 German soldiers rode into Poland on saddles like this.
Ultimately, they used more horses in World War II
than they did in the First World War.
For every 93 German soldiers,
there was one motor vehicle.
But for every three or four German soldiers, there was one horse,
which means that the horse is the mainstay of blitzkrieg.
Despite isolated pockets of spirited resistance,
the Poles inevitably cave in
and fall back to rally around Warsaw,
ready for the promised Allied push on September 17th.
But it never comes.
Instead, the Poles receive a stab in the back.
Three weeks earlier,
the Nazis sign a surprise non-aggression pact
with Hitler's political nemesis, Bolshevik Russia.
The associated credit and trade deals
mean that for as long as they are allies the Soviet Union
will effectively fuel and feed the German war effort.
The scum of the Earth, I believe?
The bloody assassins of the workers, I presume?
On 17th September, 1939,
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin claims his part of the bargain -
Eastern Poland.
Almost half a million Soviet troops invade their neighbour.
Within days,
the Soviets annexe 200,000 square kilometres of Poland.
On 28th September, 1939,
Warsaw finally surrenders.
German General Blaskowitz receives the surrender of Warsaw
from the Polish emissary representing the garrison.
The stern-faced commander of the besieging army
lays down the terms.
Polish resistance lasts barely three weeks.
Blitzkrieg has struck like lightning.
Of 1.5 million men, Germany loses just over 8,000 dead
and 27,278 wounded.
The Western powers have failed to protect their ally.
The Allies have sat on their hands
and they let the whole situation play out.
That will prove to be a huge mistake.
As early as November 1937,
Hitler outlines his master plan for Poland
in his notorious Hossbach Memorandum.
The plan was very, very simple.
Capture as much territory of Eastern Europe as you can,
kick out all the untermenschen - the subhumans -
and replace them with your own
ubermenschen, or Aryans, superior human beings.
To us, this sounds an incredible concept.
The idea that Germany had a right to expand,
that Germany had a right to fulfil its greatness of destiny,
it is quite extraordinary that even German generals
should cheerfully go along with this.
But go along with it they do.
And as Poland falls,
mobile SS killing units named Einsatzgruppen
spearhead a Nazi policy
given the simple code name Schrecklichkeit,
or Frightfulness.
Their job is horrifically simple.
It's to murder as untermenschen as possible.
Hitler made it quite clear that the war in Poland
was going to be a war of utmost brutality, beyond normal warfare.
And in September, 1939, when the Germans went in
they were accompanied by the first batch of Einsatzgruppen.
And they went in along with the army and did horrific things.
They'd been supplied with a list of key individuals and groups
that they were to target,
mainly the Polish intelligentsia, Polish political elites,
Catholic priests, academics, people in leading roles,
but also leaders of Jewish organisations,
Jews in prominent positions.
By the end of October, the SS,
together with the active collusion of the German army,
raze 531 towns to the ground
and execute more than 16,000 civilians.
By the end of the war,
17% of the Polish population has been killed.
But the Poles refuse to be cowed.
Up to 150,000 escape,
and join the Free Polish forces in Britain and France.
They want to take the war to the Germans.
But their allies remain less keen.
Between September '39 and April 1940,
you get this six-month period called the Phoney War.
Everybody was nominally ready to go to war,
but nobody really wanted to start it.
France, in particular,
is terrified of becoming the battleground in a second Great War.
France is still totally traumatised by the memory of the First World War
and all those ghastly casualties.
About four million men had been wounded.
They were living testament to the horrors of war.
To avoid another such debacle,
the French have built the Maginot Line,
a continuous chain of underground fortifications.
Made up 55,000 tonnes of steel
and 1.5 million cubic metres of concrete,
the line stretches 450km
from the Swiss frontier, all the way north to Luxembourg.
The idea was that the Germans
would not be able to get past.
"Ils ne passeront pas". They will not pass.
But history suggests the Maginot Line
adversely affects French war preparations.
There was no sense that the French
were actually actively seeking to fight the Germans.
Instead they were passively resisting the Germans,
just expecting this border, this wall to keep the Germans out.
To the north, the French remain vulnerable to German attack.
Their original plan had been to take the Maginot Line
all the way up to the Channel coast,
but that meant going along the Belgian frontier,
and the Belgians said that would violate
their neutrality so they forbid it.
The French have got to prevent the Germans from invading
through Belgium as they did in the First World War.
So you need a mobile army
as well as your fixed army on the Maginot Line.
Your mobile army is going to move towards
the Belgian frontier to block the Germans from coming in.
General Gamelin's French forces mass on the Belgian frontier.
But what concerns Hitler more
is what's happening in the English Channel.
The Royal Navy is 1,400 ships, including 330 warships,
make it the largest in the world,
and it's blockading Germany's sea trade routes,
making the Reich's raw materials harder to come by.
In response to the British blockade of its shipping lanes,
German High Command draws up Plan Yellow.
Hitler wants to send his men up towards the Channel coast
so he can then have his U-boat bases there.
Unfortunately, or perhaps rather fortunately for the Germans,
Plan Yellow is abandoned,
for the simple reason that a plane carrying the plans
crashes in Belgian territory
and the Allies are able to read Hitler's plans.
He's absolutely furious.
But, as we'll see, there's actually a lining in this very dark cloud.
Hitler finds an alternative place to base his Atlantic submarines.
Norway.
The Norwegian coastline is the perfect place
to build submarine pens.
It's absolutely festooned with all these fjords
which just make great hiding places.
On 9th April, 1940,
the Germans launch a combined offensive
against Denmark and Norway.
Almost 8,000 paratroopers are dropped
onto key strategic locations,
backed up by more than 800 warplanes.
The subsequent British attempt to retake the Norwegian strong points
only serves to highlight how unprepared for war they are.
British operations, both at sea and on land,
after the Germans invaded Norway was absolutely shambolic.
The British can only scrape together a single carrier fleet
and 12 territorial battalions to help them take Norway.
Their kit is out of date.
Some of its from the First World War.
It's seriously old.
In addition, the British only have 100 planes
to back them up.
British troops are sent to Norway with no clear military plan.
A staff officer was sent back to London to try and find out
from the powers that be
what exactly the forces in Norway were supposed to do.
And he came back and told the British senior officers
"You can do what you like, because they haven't the slightest idea
"in London what they want you to do."
It would have been kinder to everybody to say to the Norwegians,
"Sorry, we can't do a thing", than to land this token force
and fight these token battles
and then stage this pathetic, pretty humiliating retreat.
The defence of Norway is such a failure
that on 10th May, 1940,
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigns.
Chamberlain is not cut out to be a wartime leader.
What you need is a man who can unite people behind him
as a very strong-willed, dogged determination,
a lot of energy, and that man is clearly Winston Churchill.
Churchill liked war.
Chamberlain hated war.
And if you're going to have to fight a war,
you darn well better be led by somebody
who relishes every second of the struggle.
Churchill saw, with a blinding clarity or stubbornness,
that Hitler represented something so evil
that he had to be fought absolutely to the last ditch.
VOICE OF CHURCHILL: Every trace of Hitler's footsteps,
every stain of his infected and corroding fingers
will be sponged and purged,
and, if need be, blasted
from the surface of the Earth.
Though not apparent at the time,
the loss of Norway will provide another benefit to the Allies.
The blond, blue-eyed magnificent Norwegians
represent Aryan perfection.
Norway was Hitler's zone of destiny.
This was the nation that he wanted to create.
This is why the Germans tie up so many men in defending Norway.
For the rest of the war,
Norway would be garrisoned
by 12 divisions with up to 350,000 men.
That's one German soldier for every ten Norwegians.
This is one of those occasions where you see the Nazis tying up
their soldiers for reasons of ideology rather than strategy.
But Norway and the Atlantic War are not the only reason why Hitler
hesitates to commit his forces against France.
Hitler's prerogative, early on,
was very much to see where he stood with the Soviet Union.
It turns out that Stalin is not interested
in pushing further westward.
He wants to consolidate the gains he's just made.
And to do that, he has to protect Leningrad.
Leningrad, formerly St Petersburg,
is the old capital of Tsarist Russia.
It sits less than 50km from the border with Finland.
If Finland falls to a German invasion,
that's going to make Leningrad very vulnerable.
And the last thing Stalin wants is to lose Leningrad.
So what does he do?
He decides to invade Finland in order to create a buffer zone.
On 30th November, 1939,
more than one million Russian troops,
supported by 1,500 tanks and 3,000 aircraft,
cross the finish border.
Ranged against them is a tiny Finnish army
of little more than 340,000 men,
with just 32 tanks and 114 planes.
But as one Finnish commander says,
this is a war of numbers against brains.
And the people with all the brains? The Finns.
One reason for that could be that Stalin's most competent commanders
are either dead or locked up in gulags.
Stalin is particularly scared
of some kind of Napoleon-type figure emerging.
The officer corps is the obvious place to look
for any other such opposition.
And so that's basically why he purges the officer corps.
It's fear of a coup.
By 1939,
three Marshalls, 13 generals,
57 corps commanders,
and over 50% of senior Russian army officers
are either imprisoned or executed.
Many of its senior officers are gone.
And it was poorly-led, poorly-equipped.
A pretty shambolic force at that stage.
By contrast, the Finns are extremely inventive.
What do you do if you've got a tiny guerrilla army
and no anti-tank weapons?
Well, the answer is you improvise.
And this is it, the Molotov cocktail.
During the Winter War,
the Russians claimed they were dropping food aid on Finland.
The Finns responded,
"Well, if Molotov, the Russian Foreign Minister,
"is sending us bread baskets, we'll send him back cocktails."
It was so effective that, during that Winter War,
the Finns produced 450,000 of these and it worked.
It stopped the Russian army in its tracks.
The Finns use all kinds of innovative ways
to ambush and kill the Russians.
And they have no shortage of targets.
There are more Russians than we have bullets said one Finn.
In fact, there are so many to kill
we have no idea where we're going to bury them all.
Up to a quarter of a million Russians die
for only a tenth that number of Finns.
By March, 1940, Stalin has had enough.
He signs a truce with Finland.
The fact that this mighty, huge Red Army suffered humiliations
on the battlefield in these forests and snows,
explains why Hitler was convinced
that he could just sweep across Russia in 1941.
What Hitler does not realise
is that the Red Army has learned a lot from the Finns,
not least how to fight a winter war.
Finns had been much better prepared for winter,
not only in terms of their clothing,
but they had special ski battalions,
they used white camouflage.
The Soviets thought very carefully about how they could conduct
a counter-offensive in those conditions.
But Hitler is not yet preparing to attack Russia.
He's looking west.
May 10th, 1940.
Almost 400,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force
are in France and Belgium, awaiting a German invasion.
It will begin today.
29 German divisions, supported by more than 2,500 aircraft,
are storming into Belgium and the Low Countries
trying to punch through to the North Sea ports.
Just what the Allies have been waiting for.
French commander General Gamelin immediately orders the British
and French troops to advance from their positions
on the Belgian frontier and to implement Plan D -
General Gamelin's long-anticipated strategy
to blunt the German assault.
94 French divisions accompanied by nine British divisions
advanced to link up with Belgium's 22,
along a line between Breda and the Dyle river.
In all, they number more than a million men.
Allied tanks outnumber Germany's by 1,000.
But despite the events in Poland,
the Allies are not prepared for a German blitzkrieg.
The British and French simply dissipated their resources.
The Germans concentrated them all in one place,
the place they wanted to win.
South of this line, the River Meuse in the Ardennes forest
is guarded by just six French divisions,
with another six in reserve.
They are weaker and less well-prepared
than their northern counterparts.
The Meuse line didn't need to be fed by anything stronger,
because this was the impenetrable Ardennes forest.
So thickly forested, a lot of streams and rivers to cross
and the French believed that the Ardennes were virtually impassable
to an invading army.
So can you imagine the Allied surprise when the Germans
sent their Panzer tanks through the Ardennes?
There was a traffic jam all the way back along the roads leading
into the Ardennes.
The French aircraft observed this,
but they were not quite sure what to make of it,
and then they began to report back.
The reports were dismissed, of course.
"Nobody's going to invade through the Ardennes. Don't be silly."
Seven Panzer divisions,
supported by 35 infantry and three motorised divisions
are painstakingly snaking through the Ardennes.
On paper, their task is simple.
Breakthrough the Meuse line and charge for the coast,
cutting off the entire northern Allied army
from its supply lines in France.
Not as easy as it sounds.
You've got to imagine trying to get 134,000 men and 40,000 vehicles
through this kind of labyrinthine mess of roads through the Ardennes.
They dressed some of their scouts up as tourists who were actually able
to prepare the ground in advance for the units coming through.
They're there to seize vital junctions
and police the four main highways that the Germans will need to use.
These vehicles were shepherded through the Ardennes forest.
This is basically brilliant traffic control.
Although the plan is conceived by Erich von Manstein,
one of his generals,
Hitler claims the Ardennes strategy as his own.
Hitler had a very high opinion of himself to begin with
but after his success,
with the Ardennes attack he started to consider himself infallible.
It takes General Erwin Rommel's Panzers just two days to reach
the river Meuse.
Further south at Sedan, General Heinz Guderian,
the inventor of blitzkrieg, is stuck
The French were dug in on the Marfee Heights above Sedan.
Now Guderian has absolutely nothing to winkle them out with. Why?
Because his artillery is still stuck at the back of that traffic jam.
It looks as though Guderian
is just going to smash himself against the French line.
But the French haven't reckoned with the blitzkrieg.
1,000 planes are diverted on their missions over Belgium
to come along and rain down hell on the Marfee heights.
The Luftwaffe launches what, at that point in time,
is the heaviest and most sustained aerial bombardment ever seen.
It lasts eight hours and numbers almost 4,000 bombing sorties.
Among the attackers are 200 Junkers 87 Stuka dive-bombers.
Which unleashed their bombs and auto cannons on the dug-in defenders atop
the Marfee Heights.
The Stuka is a seriously scary piece of kit.
It can go into a vertical dive down towards the enemy,
and drop a 550lb bomb right on top of his head.
The Stuka's dive not only delivers a deadly payload,
it is accompanied by a terrifying sound effect.
It has what's known as a Trumpet of Jericho,
which is a siren attached to the undercarriage
and as it comes down, that siren screams.
The whole effect would have been absolutely bloodcurdling.
The remorseless Stuka attack is enough to break French morale.
The defenders flee.
The way is clear for Rommel and Guderian to race for the coast
and take on the 400,000-strong British Expeditionary Force.
14th May, 1940.
Holland surrenders to the German blitzkrieg.
In France, the fortresses of the defensive Maginot Line
have been bypassed,
and northern coastal ports are now dangerously exposed.
Rommel and Guderian are the two major proponents of blitzkrieg,
this very fast, tank-based warfare.
They go in hard and they don't stop.
Within ten days, they've advanced 150 miles
all the way to the Channel.
The advance is so fast that Rommel's Panzer force finds its supply
lines massively overextended,
when the Allies do finally manage to fight back.
If the Allies are able to mount a counterattack,
they could actually cut off the Panzers,
and the Panzers would be the ones who needed rescuing.
Viscount Gort, Commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force
in the besieged town of Arras,
decides on a counterattack, codenamed Frankforce.
The attack force is supposed to number 15,000 men.
In the confusion, just 2,000 carry it out,
supported by 74 tanks.
The battle will expose both the weaknesses
and the strength of the German blitzkrieg.
Due to shortages of raw materials,
the German Army's Ordnance departments downgraded the weapon
on this tank from the 50-millimetre that we see here to a 37-millimetre.
This is not what Guderian wanted,
and this was to prove to be very short-sighted.
Operation Frankforce will test
the Panzer III's lacklustre firepower.
Just how short-sighted it was to downgrade the gun
on the Mark III tank becomes apparent
when Rommel faces a British counterattack at Arras.
The British are equipped with this tank.
This is the Matilda II.
Armed with a 2-pounder this tank can penetrate
any German armour on the battlefield.
But, the German pop guns, the 37mm,
their rounds just bounce off this thick armour.
At Arras, the Matildas run amok.
The British tanks move forward and were able to attack and destroy
much of what was in front of them.
And they very, very nearly overcame Rommel's force.
Faced with this onslaught,
Rommel's Panzers are thrown back in disarray.
But Rommel is not hailed as a military genius for nothing.
So what did Rommel do?
Rommel basically lured the tanks in,
and then opened up with 88mm anti-aircraft guns.
These weren't intended to be used against tanks -
they were intended to be used against planes.
But Rommel was always thinking outside of the box -
he was always trying something new, and it worked.
Not only did it work, it saved the day.
It meant that his position wasn't lost.
Rommel's reaction shows just how versatile the combined arms
of his Panzer divisions could be.
But his recklessness spooks an already jumpy high command.
Hitler has been screaming for days
that the Panzer groups are hopelessly overexposed.
He wants them to stop and to regroup and to protect themselves.
And it is at this point when the German high command
starts to reassert its control.
Over 300,000 soldiers of the BEF
is gathering in the coastal port of Dunkirk.
But, two days after Arras,
both Rommel and Gadarian are told to halt their advance.
There are a number of very good reasons why the Germans
issue the very famous halt order.
The Panzer tanks are not ideally suited for one thing,
for going into Dunkirk - a town situation - not ideal for tanks.
Secondly, very marshy area around.
People know from the First World War it's not ideal.
Why commit them to a fight that they're not actually suited for?
But beyond even that, Hermann Goering gets in touch
with Adolf Hitler by telephone,
and he says we, Luftwaffe, are a National Socialist Organisation.
Let us finish off the British because we can do it,
and that way, you will get the glory.
But the Luftwaffe fails its Fuhrer.
Hitler's halt order buys the British Navy just enough time
to mount the most famous rescue operation of the war.
Over nine long days, often under fire from the air,
and at the cost of over 170 vessels,
a makeshift fleet of at least 800 British boats
traverse the English Channel and transport over 330,000 British
and French soldiers from Dunkirk to Britain.
In the Houses of Parliament Winston Churchill described it
as the miracle of deliverance.
If the Germans had captured that army, it would have been impossible
for Churchill to convince anybody that we could rationally go
on with a war because there wouldn't have been anybody to fight.
The British celebrate Dunkirk as if it was in some sense a victory.
But of course, it was a defeat.
At a conservative estimate,
the British leave behind 75,000 tonnes of ammunition,
64,000 vehicles,
and almost 2,500 guns.
The British army wasn't properly re-equipped until 1943, 1944,
not for three or four years.
But the fact those men got back just enabled Winston Churchill
to convince his colleagues in government, against the judgment
of an awful lot of other people, that we could carry on with the war.
The French fare just as badly.
They lose 38 out of 103 divisions to the blitzkrieg.
The rest now face the daunting task of holding back the German onslaught
on their own.
There was a strong sense in 1940 in France
that they'd been let down by the British,
that Britain had been the wrong ally for the French,
that Britain was more interested in saving itself than in saving France.
But the battle for France is not yet over.
As the French attempt to rally their forces for the defence of Paris,
they are hampered by a civilian tragedy unfolding all around them.
German bombers were absolutely ruthless in who they targeted.
They didn't just aim at soldiers.
They also aimed at civilians.
And in Holland, you see the German Luftwaffe carpet bombing Rotterdam.
1,000 people were killed, and over 80,000 are forced
to flee their homes.
News of the terrifying bombing raids quickly reaches France.
This has a huge effect on the French civilians,
who think they're going to be bombed into submission,
their families will be killed and vaporised by the Luftwaffe.
So ten million of them take to the roads.
These are internal refugees.
What happens is that they clog up the road system,
which means that the French army can't get to where it's most needed.
Even so, some French still fight on.
It's a little known fact that the Germans lost twice as many men
in the two weeks after the retreat from Dunkirk
than the two weeks before it.
But, on June 10th,
the French government abandons Paris and retreats.
Six days later, it resigns in favour of an interim government
based in Vichy, led by the First World War hero Marshal Petain.
Petain's government, which agrees to collaborate with the Nazi invaders,
orders all French troops to lay down their arms.
The French didn't just roll over and play dead.
But, let's face it, they were hopelessly outgunned and outplayed.
On June 22nd, 1940,
Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering accept the unconditional surrender
of the French people.
In the very same carriage of the Orient Express
where Marshal Foch had witnessed the German surrender
in World War I.
If you want to get a sense of how much
this victory over the French meant to Hitler,
look at where he signed the treaty.
It was in the same train carriage, brought out of a museum,
placed back at Compiegne, and there the French surrendered.
I mean, just to call it symbolic isn't even to scratch the surface.
It seems as if Hitler's revenge is all but complete.
In the space of less than two months,
the British and French have lost more than 103,000 dead.
Germany just 27,000.
The German blitzkrieg through France was absolutely phenomenal.
What the Germans achieved in just seven weeks
is what they couldn't achieve in four years
during the First World War.
The Nazi war machine looked unstoppable.
The battle for France is over.
The Battle for Britain is about to begin.