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00:00Oh
00:30You
00:32Hitler's dark ambitions his dreams and fantasies of Germanic world domination lie shattered amid the ruins of Berlin
00:41the destruction of the perverted science of Nazism has involved the laying waste of the great cities of Europe and the
00:48loss of millions of lives
00:51The
00:54Spring of 1945 has seen Soviet armies rampage mercilessly through Eastern Germany
01:00enacting an orgy of sadistic revenge upon the people of the Third Reich
01:06In the skies of Germany the true strength of air power has been proven as
01:11American flying fortresses and British Lancasters fly unopposed and unchallenged to systematically rain destruction
01:19city by city
01:22as
01:24Allied armies penetrated ever deeper into the heartland of Nazism the secret horror of Hitler's state was exposed to the world
01:32As the invaders encountered the camps and the victims of the final solution
01:40The armies on all sides fighting in those last desperate days
01:45Were aware that their leaders no longer fought for victory
01:49No longer looked to the end of the war, but were contemplating the beginning of the peace
01:56Stalin already regarded Britain and America with suspicion
02:00Seeing a deep conspiracy between his Western allies and their soon-to-be defeated enemy to confound and destroy
02:08Soviet communism
02:10Already the leaders of Britain and America did fear an
02:14expansionist Soviet Union that would seek to replace Nazism with another
02:19totalitarian dictatorship across a European Empire
02:23In the eye of the storm of flame and smoke that had engulfed his capital Hitler had died by his own hand
02:31Italian dictator Mussolini was executed his body set to hang in public humiliation
02:38As
02:39The people of America and Britain rejoiced in the streets celebrating victory in Europe
02:45Already the battlegrounds of Europe were being prepared for a new confrontation
02:51On the other side of the world men still fought there was still suffering there was still
02:58world war
03:08The
03:10Great party that was VE day was May 8th
03:141945
03:16The surrender terms agreed that all German forces on all fronts were to unconditionally lay down their weapons and cease fire
03:23on the 8th
03:25Yet fighting in Europe continued for days after
03:29Isolated pockets of German troops fought on far behind the front line of fighting deep in occupied France
03:36Fortress garrisons of German soldiers left as far behind as the Atlantic coast continue to hold out
03:43These forces were surrounded and isolated and had been bypassed by the Allies as strategically
03:49Unimportant in the big picture of the war these troops were to surrender days after the official end of the war
03:59In the east Stalin did not accept the surrender and he demanded that a separate peace be made
04:05In fact Russian soldiers were ordered to carry on fighting even after this eastern truce
04:12They pushed deep into Czechoslovakia aiming to extend the area of territory that would fall under communist domination
04:21It was three days after the supposed surrender that the Russians ceased fighting
04:26By then the Soviet forces had liberated the Czech capital city of Prague
04:31Amongst the Nazi soldiers who fought in this last battle were a large contingent of ex-prisoners of war
04:37Former Soviet soldiers who had changed sides to fight against Stalinism
04:42Millions of Soviet citizens had seen the Nazis as liberators
04:47The fate of these men in the peace was to be grim
04:51execution for the officers long incarceration in the gulag for the ordinary soldier
04:56On VE day as Churchill stood with the British King George
05:01Acknowledging the adulation of the British people. He perhaps knew that like Hitler his time was gone
05:09Churchill had come to power in the direst days of the war as a man
05:14unassociated with the appeasement of the 1930s
05:17He was a man of great ambition
05:19Churchill had come to power in the direst days of the war as a man unassociated with the appeasement of the 1930s
05:27Churchill's defiant and stubborn will to resist had been the only weapon in Britain's arsenal for much of 1940
05:35He kept the war alive when it would have been easy to give in to Hitler
05:41Churchill's scheming to somehow bring America into the war had led to the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany
05:50Churchill
05:52Wanted the wartime government a coalition of all British political parties to continue into the peace
05:59the British Labour Party refused
06:02Churchill was forced to resign and a general election was called
06:07Despite being cheered wherever he went
06:10Churchill's conservatives were destroyed in the poll with the Labour Party winning a massive majority in Parliament
06:18Churchill had been a disastrous peacetime politician and was too close to the policies of the 30s that had brought
06:25poverty and mass unemployment
06:28The mood in Britain was that the war had been fought to win a better future and that the new peacetime world
06:35Had to be better than the 1930s
06:38Thus it was that in the last days of the war and the coming peace
06:43Britain's Prime Minister was to be Clement Attlee a small and quiet man in
06:49Many ways the exact opposite of all the Churchill was
06:57It was to be Attlee that sat in Britain's chair at the Potsdam Conference
07:02held between July 17th and August 2nd
07:061945
07:08Potsdam was to be the last great conference of the leaders of all three great powers
07:13The Potsdam Conference was to shape post-war Europe draw its borders
07:18Determine the type of society in which the peoples of Europe would live
07:23The state of Poland was physically moved westwards into Europe
07:27The USSR took Eastern Poland
07:30Poland was compensated by territory taken from Eastern Germany
07:35The Potsdam communique described the move as temporary pending a final peace conference
07:41It authorized the ethnic cleansing of millions of Germans who were expelled westward
07:47In fact that final settlement was not to come and the new map was not accepted by Germany until
07:531990 and the final withdrawal of Soviet armies
07:57It's often forgotten that even in July
08:001945 the Soviet Union and the Empire of Japan were actually at peace
08:06It was via Moscow that the Japanese had made requests for peace to America and Britain
08:12Japan wanted a negotiated peace
08:15The Potsdam Conference told Japan there could be no question of an honorable face-saving peace
08:22That their surrender would have to be unconditional that the Japanese government would be removed
08:28Japan occupied and stripped of colonies that Japanese leaders would face trial for war crimes and
08:35above all the Japanese society would be forcibly modernized and
08:40democratized
08:48An image which came to be seen as an iconic demonstration of the total defeat of Germany
08:54Was the meeting of Western armies the troops of Britain and America with those of Russia coming from the east
09:01the unification of the two arms of Allied attack
09:05underlined the totality of Nazi defeat
09:10The camaraderie of the soldiers often staged for the newsreel cameras was soon to dissolve and
09:17Be replaced by mistrust and suspicion
09:21At
09:22Potsdam the decision had been taken that the territory of Germany would be divided into different zones of occupation
09:29Each under the control of one of the Allied powers
09:34The Soviet Union came to insist that British and American forces which had penetrated far to the east of Germany
09:41Pulled back and the Soviet Union pushed its forces and the border of communist domination further west
09:49Germany was divided between America Britain the USSR in France
09:53The German capital Berlin although deep in the Soviet zone was also divided into occupation zones
10:01Berlin was to remain an occupied city until the very last decade of the 20th century an island of the West
10:08deep in the Soviet bloc
10:11Without
10:14Anyone of the three allies America Britain or the USSR the defeat of Nazi Germany would have been impossible
10:22Of the three allies the Soviet Union and its people made a tremendous sacrifice
10:28Paying the highest price in death and destruction
10:31Theirs was the only territory that was to become a battlefield
10:35It was Soviet soldiers that did most of the dying for the Allies
10:41from a position of near defeat in 1941 as
10:45Barbarossa brought German forces to within the sight of the Kremlin victory had fallen into the lap of Stalin and the Soviet system
10:53What had begun as a desperate war of national survival?
10:57Ended with a triumphal reversal of fortune as the Red Army swept westward
11:03The Soviet Union of the 1930s had abandoned any idealism of spreading world revolution
11:10Stalin chose instead to build absolute power in Russia rather than indulge in political conversions
11:17with Hitler's defeat though vast prizes of territory and population fell into Stalin's hands and
11:24Policy towards this new empire had to be improvised
11:28it is a fact of history that Stalin was personally responsible for more deaths than was Hitler and
11:36That Stalinism was a more encompassing and comprehensive system of terror than Nazism
11:54Winston Churchill contributed a legendary phrase to the language of the world when speaking at Fulton, Missouri. He said
12:01From Stettin
12:03in the Baltic
12:05to Trieste in the Adriatic
12:07An iron curtain has descended across the continent
12:11Behind that iron curtain two generations were to live as subjects of the Soviet Empire
12:19Eastern Europe was to be an unhappy place from which its citizens sought only to flee
12:27As
12:29Europe resumed normal life and contemplated the peace the war in the Pacific reached its conclusion and
12:36Japan was to reap the final fruit of its militarism and aggression
12:42In August 1945 a single action a single aircraft
12:48changed history a
12:50Single B-29 bomber dropped a single weapon which devastated the city of Hiroshima
12:56Revealing to the world the greatest Allied secret of the war codenamed the Manhattan Project the atomic bomb
13:08The nuclear weapon was built to be used against Nazi Germany
13:12Against the fear the German scientists the discoverers of nuclear fission were also building a bomb
13:21As we look at the haunted and ghostly ruins of the city
13:25Eliminated in an instant. We must contemplate that even in the spring of
13:301945 with Americans and British across the Rhine and Russian guns in earshot of Berlin a
13:37German nuclear bomb dropped on a massed Russian army group a
13:42nuclear tipped v2 missile fired at London a
13:45Nuclear v2 launched from a U-boat at New York for the Germans had designed that technology
13:52Would even at that last desperate late stage have reversed the fortune of war and brought Nazi victory
14:04Germany had in fact neither the industrial resources nor the quantity of scientific expertise to build the bomb
14:12Many of the scientists who built the bomb for America were themselves
14:16European exiles from Nazism
14:19the Manhattan Project has a complete history of its own an
14:24Enormous enterprise that involved the construction of vast industrial plant and the labor of more than
14:32600,000 industrial workers
14:34By the time the first bomb had been tested in the desert of New Mexico and bombs were ready for use
14:41Germany had already been defeated
14:44History must ask why the bomb fell upon Japan
14:49the lessons of fighting at Iwo Jima and Okinawa
14:53Showed the Japanese forces would fight to the death in defending the home islands of Japan
14:58It is true that many thousands of American lives were to be saved by the use of the bomb
15:05The saving of American life may in fact have been a byproduct of United States policy
15:12It was clear that the Soviet Union was to become an enemy and that the atomic bomb would be a master card in any
15:19dealings with Russia in the post-war world
15:22The true horror and power of this weapon could not be described in words or in tests
15:29It's awesome power and what is more the will to wield that strength to unleash that horror
15:36had to be demonstrated in war as
15:39As
15:4178,000 lay dead or dying in the ruins of Hiroshima a White House statement demanded that Japan
15:49surrender now or
15:51Expect a rain of ruin from the air
15:54the Japanese gave no reply and
15:58Three days later a second bomb fell upon Nagasaki
16:0325,000 died
16:08The
16:23Soviet Union cynically declared war on Japan on August 8th. Their long-promised offensive was now no longer needed
16:32Stalin used the opportunity of a certain and imminent victory to seize territory
16:37Islands in the north of Japan and to occupy the north of Korea
16:43in the end Emperor Hirohito broke the deadlock and
16:47Broadcast to the Japanese people five days after the attack upon Nagasaki
16:52His broadcast never mentioned the word surrender. He asked his people to be prepared for the coming of peace
17:00on September 2nd in
17:02Tokyo Bay
17:04General Douglas MacArthur took the surrender of Japanese forces
17:13Let us pray that peace
17:16Be now restored to the world
17:20And that God will preserve it always
17:25These proceedings are closed
17:30World War two was over
17:35You
17:41The celebration of VJ Day on August 15th
17:451945 once more filled the streets of America and Britain with celebrating crowds
17:51Finally the families of the two countries could look forward to the future with certainty
17:56already in both Britain and America the process of
18:00Demobilization for the armed forces and the realignment of society had begun in the second half of
18:071945 in Britain alone
18:10170,000 men and women each month returned to civilian life and war industry in both economies
18:17rapidly shed jobs
18:20For many of these war workers this meant that a delayed retirement could be enjoyed
18:25For the many millions of women the peace meant a return to a traditional female role focused on home and family
18:35This was the time of the baby boom a time described as when everyone and her sister was having a baby
18:47For the people of the two principal Western allies the experience of homecoming stood in sharp contrast
18:55Americans came home to a land
18:57Untouched by war with an economy and industry taken to new heights of efficiency to a society
19:04brimming with confidence
19:06British soldiers found a homeland that had seen many cities destroyed by bombing
19:12They returned to a country bankrupted with great power status eroded by the war
19:18with its role as the center of a worldwide Empire questioned and
19:23impossible to maintain a
19:26Major consequence of the war was the slow death of European colonial empires
19:33The first and the most dramatic step in this process was the decision by the British in
19:381947 to set aside the jewel in the imperial crown
19:43India it
19:45Is paradoxical and ironic that Japan had gone to war?
19:50Proclaiming its aim to be the liberation of the people of Asia from colonial domination and
19:55That Britain fought its war in Burma and the Pacific to defend that Empire in
20:02The post-war world a poverty-stricken Britain was unable to maintain the forces to rule that Empire
20:09it was a post-war Britain led by a government elected to sweep away the past and build a new Britain a
20:16Government with a socialist priority to build a new welfare state
20:21The decision to quit India was taken quickly
20:24Nearly 200 years of Anglo India history were unraveled in just two years
20:30the resulting division of the Indian Empire into a Muslim state of Pakistan and
20:36a Hindu India
20:38produced mass movements of population and many thousands of deaths in internal fighting
20:45In the coming years a wave of decolonization was to sweep the world
20:50It was not a change of direction that was universally acclaimed
20:55Many Britons wondered why the war had been fought if the price of victory
21:00Was to be the demolition of all that they had been raised to hold dear
21:05Winston Churchill showed himself totally disconnected from the post-war reality as he
21:11Passionately and stubbornly argued for preservation of the status quo
21:17With Indian independence the British were beginning a long slow and
21:23Gradual retreat from Empire all over the world
21:26The impetus to end Empire was not always accepted with such realism
21:32France felt the loss of great power status even harder than Britain
21:37France had been defeated and occupied the collaboration with that
21:41Occupation by many French at all levels of society had stirred difficult and uncomfortable questions
21:49In contrast to Britain France attempted to reassert control over its Empire
21:55Most notably it attempted to return to normal in Indochina the land today known as Vietnam
22:08No sooner had France found peace in Europe it embarked on a war against the Viet Minh the National Liberation Army of Vietnam
22:17led by Ho Chi Minh
22:19This was to be a long and painful experience for the French that would eventually cost them
22:2590,000 lives and the Vietnamese people millions
22:30Decolonization was a result of World War two and the war was to compound this strand of history even further
22:38simple struggles for national independence became entwined with the Cold War the
22:44confrontation between the Soviet Union and its former allies
22:48The Vietnam War became a battle of the Cold War the Viet Minh were to become the Viet Cong
22:55Communists armed by the Soviet Union while the French came to be armed and financed by the United States
23:05Indian independence created a massive new democratic state from the second most populous people on earth
23:13Because of World War China the largest nation on earth underwent a no less dramatic change, but not to democracy
23:22China had suffered longest of all
23:24enduring invasion and occupation since 1937 a
23:29long civil war fought between
23:31Communist revolutionaries led by Mao Tse Tung and the nationalist government led by Chiang Kai-shek
23:38had merged into a tangle of conflict with the war against the Japanese invaders a
23:44War of shifting alliances of betrayal and factionalism had spread out across the vast Chinese countryside
23:54Once the Japanese had collapsed in defeat the civil war resumed and
23:59techniques of revolutionary war perfected by Mao were turned against the nationalists
24:05Despite American backing the result was defeat for the nationalists the nationalists retreated to the island of Taiwan
24:13to set up a government in exile
24:18In Beijing Mao Tse Tung proclaimed the People's Republic of China and a new thread of history
24:25sprang from the source of World War two a
24:35Direct result of the Second World War was the creation of a new state
24:40Israel
24:41the British Empire famously stretched around the world a
24:45Small corner of that vast Dominion was the territory of Palestine
24:50Acquired in the aftermath of the First World War from the ruins of the Turkish Empire
24:56Britain had then promised to establish a national home for the Jewish people a vow that had remained unfulfilled
25:04in
25:051945 as the revealed horrors of the final solution became known
25:10The impetus to establish a Jewish nation became irresistible
25:17Palestine became wracked by terrorism with shootings and bombings of British forces
25:22crowds of young Jews stoned British soldiers and the British Navy intercepted ships
25:29Carrying Jewish settlers many of them survivors of the death camps
25:34Palestinian Arabs refused to become part of any Jewish state a
25:41Succession of attempts to find a diplomatic solution failed. There was no compromise possible between British Jews and Arabs
25:50Britain's withdrawal in 1948 was in effect an
25:54Abandonment of an insoluble problem and the new state of Israel was born into war
26:03All
26:09Conflicts advance both the techniques and tools of the art of war
26:14Scientists and engineers are inspired to invent new weapons
26:18commanders rise to the moment and
26:20Devise new types of fighting or they grasp the potential of new weaponry to be used in classic ways
26:28World War two was no different bringing forth a massive arsenal of new and terrifying weapons
26:35the World War two inventions of the ballistic missile and the nuclear bomb when combined together
26:42Have changed all subsequent history despite never having been used in anger
26:57a
26:59Military art was created that was no less history forming than the bomb in the struggle against occupying armies
27:08irregular low technology warfare came to be perfected in
27:13Occupied Europe and in occupied China the professional highly trained armies of sophisticated
27:19Industrial societies were engaged by partisans
27:23resistance fighters and guerrillas
27:25These wars were political about controlling populations as much as territory
27:31The tactics were those of ambush and sabotage the random terror bombing and the murder of collaborators
27:40Often these resistance armies married nationalism to revolutionary communist politics
27:46To this very day in wars all over the world in Vietnam Kenya and in Cyprus in
27:54Northern Ireland Zimbabwe and Cuba the wartime invention was used by often small
28:01motivated and fanatical guerrilla armies
28:07The United States of America emerged from World War two as a world superpower
28:13Able to project an overwhelming and absolute force anywhere in the world
28:18America had developed total industrial and economic superiority over the other nations of the world and
28:25developed an armament industry
28:27Capable of producing sophisticated weaponry the match of any other state
28:35Historians can convincingly argue that the USA enjoyed a similar dominant position after World War one
28:42Yet had turned its back on the world in an isolationism that had helped to create World War two
28:50Those who do not understand their history are condemned to repeat their past
28:57The United States understood its history and had resolved not to repeat the error of
29:031918 in
29:051945 the USA assumed a preeminent position in the post-war world
29:12Despite a promise by Roosevelt that all American forces would be home within two years of peace in Europe his successor
29:19Harry Truman saw the transformation of the USA into a European power
29:24With permanent garrisons of troops in Europe and as the leader of a new transatlantic alliance
29:33The Europe of 1945 was in fact a desperate wilderness of ruin and human tragedy in
29:41Britain the joy of the victory and the peace was soon to be tempered by a harsh reality
29:46The hardships endured by the British people increased with the peace
29:51Britain had enjoyed a wartime lifeline the American lend-lease program
29:57Vast quantities of goods and food were supplied by the United States free of charge on
30:04August 15th
30:051945 President Truman suddenly and abruptly ended lend-lease
30:11America suspected that the British were actually using lend-lease to subsidize their economy that lend-lease supplies were being
30:20re-exported for cash
30:22The result for the British people was a decrease in the food ration lengthening queues and greater hardship
30:29It is in the continent of Europe though that there were as many as 30 million of what bureaucrats came to call
30:37displaced persons
30:39People driven from homes and homeland
30:42sometimes stateless as well as homeless
30:45Many of these were Germans who had fled from the east or had been ruthlessly
30:50ethnically cleansed from all over Eastern Europe
30:54It
30:56Was a professional United States Army soldier who was to do most to reconstruct and rebuild the ruins of Europe
31:03Giving these people new hope
31:06General George C. Marshall had served through the war as United States Army chief of staff
31:13recalled to public service as US Secretary of State
31:16Marshall formulated a massive program of economic aid that was to come to bear his name
31:24The Marshall plan was an enormous transfusion of wealth that enabled Western Europe to regain stability and prosperity
31:34The victory of 1945
31:36Allowed Stalin to feed his paranoia and push back both borders and potential enemies
31:44The map of the post-war world was drawn with Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia
31:50Romania and Bulgaria all becoming communist countries built to a Stalinist plan
31:58Forbidden by Moscow to apply for Marshall aid they struggled to rebuild and
32:03Condemned their people to the grim austerity that was to characterize Eastern Europe
32:11The war was still being fought as in San Francisco the foundations of a post-war system of international
32:18Security were laid. This was the United Nations Conference and established the organization
32:24We know as the UN
32:26The new organization was designed with the lessons of history in mind
32:31following World War one the League of Nations had been established as a worldwide peacekeeper and
32:37Its failure in this task was a major cause of the Second World War
32:43In
32:45Designing the United Nations the states of the world learned from the failings of the League
32:50The League of Nations was a club that had at first refused to allow Germany or the Soviet Union to join
32:58America had turned its back on the League and never joined
33:02The UN was inclusive any state who wished could join and all major powers took a dominant role
33:10In the 20s and 30s
33:12It had been too easy for a state that wished to to simply ignore any censure or sanction by the League
33:20Hitler simply left
33:22Japan and Italy ignored sanctions over Manchuria and Ethiopia
33:27Too often the League had seemed slow and indecisive
33:32Its last act had been to expel the Soviet Union for its invasion of Finland in
33:381939
33:40The new United Nations was designed to be everything that the League was not
33:46With a structure that allowed decisions to be made and capable of fielding troops in its own name
33:57The phrase trial of the century is a form of words
34:01Debased by cheap tabloids as they use it to describe the bringing to justice of the common murderer
34:07The real trial of the 20th century can only be that held at Nuremberg Germany in
34:141946
34:15The surviving Nazi leadership was brought to trial to answer for the crimes of the Reich
34:22Like Hitler many leading Nazis escaped justice through suicide
34:27Those who stood trial were a mix of Nazi politicians most notably Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess
34:35Military officers and civil servants and administrators
34:41The defendants were charged with both breaking the existing international laws such as the Geneva Convention
34:48which prescribed the treatment of prisoners and enemy civilians and
34:52with new charges
34:54crimes against humanity
34:57The trial was held before judges from all the Allies
35:05Had history been different, how would the bombing of Germany in Japan's cities be judged?
35:11How would the submarine attacks of the US Navy on Japan be seen?
35:17Above all could a Stalinist regime accuse another of crimes against humanity?
35:24The intuitive truth remains that the Nuremberg defendants were able to defend themselves and were given a fairer
35:33trial than any Nazi court would give
35:35The defenses that were offered included military and bureaucratic claims to be solely obeying orders
35:43nimble-minded legal defense
35:46fanatical defiance and claims of insanity of
35:50actions
35:52perpetrated under a mesmeric trance in the spell of Hitler
35:56the Nuremberg trials
35:58Acquitted some defendants, some were imprisoned, many were executed
36:04Some died shouting Heil Hitler
36:07Goering escaped execution by suicide
36:16Horrors that rank alongside the final solution emerged in Asia
36:21Japan's war criminals stood trial for crimes that included massacres of both civilians and prisoners of war
36:28and even mass human vivisection
36:32Again, many of these war criminals paid for their crimes with their own lives
36:46Most prominent among the executed was ex-prime minister Hidekai Tojo
36:51The Cold War in Europe started where World War II ended, in Berlin
36:58In April 1948 the Soviet forces in the Russian zone of Germany
37:03blockaded the city. They refused to allow road or rail supplies to the western areas of the occupied German capital
37:12The Communists did not use military action
37:15The Communists did not use military action
37:17The Communists did not use military action
37:20Afraid of risking war with America
37:22Their intention was to starve the Western allies out
37:27Seeing their influence and martial aid as undermining the Soviet position in eastern Germany
37:34The Western nations though refused to back down and mounted the famous Berlin airlift to supply the beleaguered people of Berlin
37:43Aircraft flew day and night carrying supplies of all kinds, even coal
37:50It was not until a year's siege that the Soviets relented
38:00The tense standoff between the two
38:02eventually nuclear armed factions was to dominate nearly 50 years of world history
38:09It was a war of confrontation
38:12Intimidation and bluff
38:14Actual fighting was by proxy in remote parts of the world
38:23That the world of 1945 learned a lesson from the history of
38:281918 is shown by the treatment of the vanquished powers
38:32The planes flew supplies to save the citizens of Berlin as much as to supply the Western troops
38:39It would have been easy to abandon Berlin and its people to communist domination as not of strategic value
38:47Long before a later US president was to describe himself as a Berliner. Those words were put into practice
38:56Germany was not punished with the crippling reparations that had provided Hitler with such ammunition in the interwar years
39:04The Western sectors of Germany were rebuilt given secure democratic structures and
39:10Eventually became a full member of the Western Alliance
39:17Eastern Germany was eventually given a communist government and within the Soviet satellites
39:23East Germany became a fanatical hardline police state that entrapped its citizens behind a wall of
39:30concrete and steel
39:34As
39:37A US general was instrumental in the recovery of Europe. So it was with Japan
39:44Douglas MacArthur having received the surrender of the Japanese became the governor of Japan and framed a new society a
39:54democratic state that
39:56constitutionally rejected militarism and aggression
39:59Through industry and hard work the Japanese came to achieve the economic wealth and status in the world
40:05That they had sought through military aggression
40:11Winston Churchill said that it was the World War two of numbers of statistics that terrified him the most
40:20the war when expressed in numbers
40:22Reveals a tremendous cost in human life and suffering in numbers that lie beyond the ordinary imagination
40:31The greatest numbers of lives lost were suffered by the Soviet Union and by China
40:37the USSR lost thirteen and a half million soldiers and eight million civilians in
40:44The post-war Soviet Union women were to outnumber men by a third such were the wartime losses
40:52In China, perhaps one and a half million troops were to die, but the total of civilian dead was over 20 million
41:01Japan's ruthless ideology of racial superiority had seen a deliberate famine sweep through China as the Imperial Army
41:09appropriated entire crops
41:12The defeated nations reaped the rewards of aggression
41:17German armed forces had reached a peak number of over 10 million men in uniform
41:23Three and a half million of those were never to return to their homes
41:28Two million German civilians were to die under the weight of Allied bombing and in the dreadful last days of the war in the east
41:37Japan's armed forces were to total nearly six million
41:41Nearly half of that number more than two and three-quarter millions died as did one million
41:48Japanese civilians
41:51In the occupied countries the experience of the war would be determined by race and political ideology
41:58occupied France lost less than a quarter of a million soldiers and
42:04173,000 civilians many to Allied air raids
42:08However in occupied Poland Nazi racist ideology a belief system that saw Slavic peoples as
42:15Subhuman and Jews as the origin of all evil worked to its logical conclusion
42:22Six million Polish civilians died
42:25Three million of those Polish Jews one part of the final solution
42:32Every
42:37Occupied country in Europe shares in the final solution
42:41It is to some state shame that the non-jewish population gladly collaborated with deportations to the death camps
42:51Equally some nations can be proud that whatever other collaboration was made with Nazism
42:57No part was taken in the Holocaust
43:00Denmark transported all its five and a half thousand Jews to neutral Sweden only
43:0677 Danish Jews were to die
43:09All Bulgarian Jews escaped due to the refusal of the Bulgarian king to allow deportation
43:16Even fascist Italy refused to take part in deportations
43:20It was not until the fall of Mussolini the Jewish Italians fell victim to Nazism
43:27Poland
43:29Was squeezed on two sides with attacks by an equally ruthless and sadistic Soviet Union of
43:361 million Polish servicemen
43:40600,000 did not live to see the peace
43:43the discovery by the Germans in
43:461944 of the bodies of many thousands of Polish officers killed by the Red Army was one of the first
43:53Indications that the Soviet Union was not the friendly ally portrayed in the newsreels
43:59Compared to the dreadful bloodshed of World War one
44:03Britain lost less than half a million servicemen and just
44:0870,000 civilians
44:10It is a fact of war that it is in defeat that armies are destroyed
44:15Victors rarely have to pay heavily for their triumph
44:18The United States fought largely a winning war
44:22With a maximum of 16 and a half million under arms less than
44:28300,000 Americans were lost perhaps less than 10 US civilians were victims of the conflict
44:37The number of deaths in the major combatant nations
44:41overlies a long catalog of suffering of death and loss that reached into all corners of the world as
44:50Many as 55 million lives were lost all over the planet
45:00From when we first realized that now is preceded by a before
45:06we become aware that we're traveling on a timeline of history that is personal and
45:12Unique and yet is intertwined with the big flow of history
45:18The history of World War two is perhaps the defining moment in the history of humanity
45:24Yet the place of the war in history is not absolute and fixed. It's a different thing to different people
45:32the people of Germany Britain and France talk of World War two
45:371939 to 1945
45:39the people of Russia of the Great Patriotic War from June 1941 to May
45:451945 the United States of a war beginning in December 1941 and
45:52lasting until August
45:541945
45:55For China the war began as early as
45:591937
46:00When did the war really end?
46:04The history of World War two is heavily laden with irony
46:09The Nazi delusion and the Stalinist paranoia that the alliances and antagonisms of the war would somehow
46:16realign
46:17came true a
46:20post-war Nazi plan
46:22dreamt of a united Europe with the Mediterranean South turned into a holiday playground for the north with a single currency
46:31controlled by the German economy
46:33Japan
46:35talked of an Asian co-prosperity sphere where the states of Asia free of colonialism would become
46:43independent leading economies with Japan in the dominant position
46:50The war becomes ever more remote in living memory as
46:55Historians stand ever further back from the big picture of the 20th century
47:00It may be that World War two is seen as part of a conflict that began in
47:081914 and ended in
47:101990 as
47:12the Russians finally left as
47:14communism crumbled across Europe and a reunited Germany a
47:19Democratic Germany was allied to its former enemies in an ever closer political and economic Union
47:26There
47:29Can only be a handful of people on this planet
47:33Unaware that the war happened to serve through the documentary programs of a multi-channeled media world is
47:40To experience a place where somewhere
47:44Hitler is always speaking the tanks are always driving forward
47:49the bombs are always falling if
47:54We are unaware of the history of the war then we know its mythology
47:58Where fact merges into fiction in the Hollywood epic and the TV sitcom?
48:05impossibly handsome commandos are always mounting daring raids on secret weapons and
48:12bungling bank managers forever plays slapstick comedy in Britain's Home Guard a
48:18Spitfire victory rolls in the clear English sky of
48:231940 for the people of Britain the Battle of Britain was fought in the heat of a glorious English summer
48:31That is a myth
48:33Records detail a climate wetter and cloudier than even the normal summer
48:39The Red Army fights alone against the Nazi invader it did not
48:46Only American boots kept the soldiers fighting
48:51for many nations the mythology of the war remains a definition of national identity in a
48:58Thousand reruns it is the finest hour once more
49:07We live with the results of the war and are ourselves the consequences of the war
49:15If we seek any further evidence that our timeline is entwined with that of Hitler Churchill Roosevelt and Stalin
49:22We need only look at our own family history
49:26the war was a time of passionate and hurried marriage of shattered expectations of
49:33futures and dreams lost with boys who never returned of
49:38Moments seized right here and right now for fear that happiness might be lost forever
49:44Many of us owe our ancestry to the war to parents grandparents and great-grandparents
49:51Who met because of the war?
49:55Evil will always be present in the world
49:58Its eradication is not in the power of men yet
50:02If there was ever an action by men that aimed to eradicate evil
50:07It is that war waged upon Nazi Germany by Britain and America
50:14The
50:17History of the war is a complicated weave of the politics of national self-preservation and of power games
50:25Yet refine and reduce that history to its elemental facts
50:30Strip away post-war maneuvering for power and the war is a struggle between good and evil
50:39The world will never be free of wicked men who will arise and through sheer aggression and envy
50:46Tap into prejudice and the basest of instincts
50:49These men will start wars and will perpetrate terrible cruelties
50:56It is only through the history
50:58Created by the millions of individuals who fought and died in World War two that we in the present and future
51:06Generations shall know the dictator and the aggressor and shall see the ideologies of hate and evil
51:14For what they are
51:16wherever and whenever they arise
51:20the lesson of the history
51:22created by those millions of men and women to both present and future is
51:29That we must never forget
51:36Oh
52:06You