WWII The Complete History Episode 3 The War That Wasn't
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00:00Oh
00:31For the people of Europe, the long wait is over.
00:35The tension, the fear, the anxiety of a decade has lifted.
00:41The pace of history had accelerated in the last year,
00:45taking the continent on a rollercoaster ride of emotions.
00:49In 1938, Britain had feared war, issued gas masks,
00:53and called up reserves as Hitler took the continent to the brink of conflict.
00:58Over his demands, the Czechoslovakia's German minority,
01:02the Sudeten Germans, be incorporated into a greater Germany.
01:08The democracies of Britain and France met with the dictatorships of Munich
01:12in perhaps the first modern summit meeting.
01:15The result is a settlement dictated to the Czechs that gives Hitler all he desires.
01:20The people of Europe rejoice at the news,
01:23believing a new order has come to pass,
01:26one that promises a lasting peace,
01:29with a commitment by the great powers to negotiation, not war.
01:34The continent believes Hitler has no further demands.
01:38The Sudetenland joins the Reich.
01:43The illusion of success crashes to ruins within months.
01:47The remainder of Czechoslovakia is torn apart,
01:51divided by avaricious neighbors orchestrated by Germany.
01:55The Nazis now target their ambitions upon the state of Poland,
01:59demanding the return of German territory given to the Poles after World War I.
02:05These demands conceal a dark strategy of endless German eastwards expansion,
02:11the product of an insatiable hunger for land
02:14to be taken from Slavic peoples thought inhuman by Nazi ideology.
02:20There can be no compromise, no appeasement.
02:23Unlike the Czechs, the Poles refuse to bow to Hitler's demands.
02:29Britain joins France in making an alliance with Poland.
02:34The final connection of the path to war is made by Joseph Stalin.
02:39The Soviet leader makes an alliance with Hitler.
02:42The deal gives Hitler a free hand to destroy Poland.
02:46The communists are rewarded with half of Poland,
02:49pushing their borders westward.
02:53In just weeks, the Polish state is torn apart, destroyed,
02:58either subsumed into the German Reich as German territory,
03:02or subjected to the darkness of occupation by either Nazi or Soviet troops.
03:08The Allies stand helpless as the country they promised to aid is overwhelmed,
03:14modern armored and mechanized armies sweeping aside the cavalry and foot soldiers of Poland.
03:22Then, nothing.
03:24After weeks of furious fighting, calm descends on the continent.
03:42The time that followed the destruction of Poland in just five weeks of frenetic activity
03:48came to be called the Phony War, the war that wasn't really happening.
04:03The phrase was coined in the United States.
04:06Britain talked about the Boer War and the Twilight War.
04:09The French talked of la drôle de guerre.
04:12In Germany, they called it the Sitzkrieg.
04:16France and Britain demonstrated their decision to end appeasement
04:19and honored their decisions to aid Poland.
04:22But the democracies did little to actually help Poland in any material way.
04:28They did little that could indirectly help the Poles by distracting or diverting Hitler's attention.
04:35France's commander-in-chief, Gamelin, saw the war only in terms of defending France,
04:41repulsing a German attack.
04:43This mentality spread down throughout the French army.
04:47No attempt was made by France's heavy artillery to shell German industrial towns,
04:52which were well within range.
04:55Small probing attacks were made into Germany.
04:58When the French reached the Siegfried Line,
05:00fortifications which were the German equivalent of France's Maginot Line,
05:04they stopped.
05:06The inactivity, the passive waiting, sapped the moral strength and the will of the French army,
05:12demoralizing the German army.
05:14The German army was forced to retreat.
05:17The inactivity, the passive waiting, sapped the moral strength and the will of the French army,
05:23demoralizing the many thousands of reservists summoned away from their civilian lives.
05:30Britain proved equally reluctant to engage the Germans.
05:34Britain, in particular, was seized by fear of air raids.
05:39A proposal by the RAF to set alight the Black Forest was rejected,
05:43the bombing of German arms factories forbidden as an attack on private property.
05:49A proposal by Churchill to mine Germany's rivers, important arteries to the economy of the Reich,
05:55was rejected by both Britain and France on the grounds that reprisals might be provoked.
06:07The first death of a British soldier did not occur until December 1939.
06:12This was in severe contrast to World War I when, in the same time, 50,000 British servicemen had died.
06:20It's no surprise that the war seemed phony.
06:24The public mood of determination and resolution that had swept the democracies when war broke out
06:29gradually faded away.
06:31The willingness to resist an expected immediate attack melted into boredom.
06:37The blackout, the rationing of food, the evacuation of children far away from home,
06:43the closure of places of entertainment became irritations.
06:48The numerous emergency laws passed in the first months of the war imposed controls and interferences
06:54on and into everyday life that seemed pointless and irrelevant.
07:01It was not just Allied passivity that created the phony war.
07:05The Germans were in no great haste to raise the pace of the action.
07:10They sought to consolidate their gains in Poland.
07:13Some German generals thought the army not ready for war and hoped, as many did in Britain and France,
07:20that the war might wither away and a peaceful compromise emerge if neither side upset the other.
07:27Perhaps another reason for the phony war is the simple fact that the weather of that winter
07:33was some of the most severe in living memory.
07:37It was only upon the oceans that the war seemed real, not phony.
07:42Germany's naval strategy was to attack enemy ships wherever possible
07:46using both surface raiders and U-boats.
07:49In the very last weeks of the peace process,
07:51the German navy was forced to deploy a large number of U-boats
07:55and attack the enemy ships from all directions.
07:58The German navy was forced to deploy a large number of U-boats
08:01and attack the enemy ships from all directions.
08:04In the very last weeks of the peace,
08:06numerous surface ships had slipped out of German ports
08:09and disappeared into the expanse of the ocean.
08:14The entire U-boat fleet put out to sea and took up position in the Atlantic.
08:21As war broke out, immediate attacks began upon merchant shipping
08:25with clashes between the naval forces.
08:28The anchorage of Scobble Flow in Britain's far northern Orkney Islands
08:32was used as a forward base by the British fleet
08:35in attempting to seal the North Sea.
08:38On the night of October 13th,
08:40a German U-boat daringly entered the anchorage
08:43and torpedoed the huge British battleship Royal Oak,
08:47which capsized with the loss of 833 British sailors.
08:57In the coming war, the U-boat and the aircraft carrier
09:00would become the dominant weapons of naval warfare.
09:03But the first encounters of the war at sea involved surface action.
09:07Germany had built a fleet of large ships, surface raiders,
09:11designed to make long cruises into the oceans,
09:14sinking and destroying merchant trade.
09:20One such ship was the Admiral Graf Spee.
09:23She had sunk Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean
09:26and off the coast of South America
09:28had fought a battle with British forces,
09:30which she had powerfully outgunned.
09:33Engine problems forced the Graf Spee to take refuge
09:36in the neutral Uruguayan port of Montevideo.
09:39In classic subterfuge, the ships of the Royal Navy
09:43used false signals to convince the Germans
09:45that a massive British fleet was assembling over the horizon.
09:50The Germans chose to scuttle the Graf Spee.
09:54The encounter was presented to the British people as a great victory.
10:24The Graf Spee had taken many British prisoners
10:37and transferred these to her supply ship, the Altmark.
10:41Altmark was cornered off the coast of Norway
10:44and took refuge in neutral Norwegian waters.
10:47A team of British marines daringly stormed the Altmark,
10:51the British themselves violating Norwegian neutrality
10:55and rescued the prisoners.
11:05Britain had learned some of the lessons of World War I
11:08and immediately introduced convoys against U-boat attack,
11:12resources restricting the extent to which escorts could be provided.
11:17Churchill, as Britain's first Lord of the Admiralty,
11:20in charge of Britain's Navy,
11:22showed the wild, maverick side of his nature,
11:25insisting that defense measures were not enough
11:28and demanded search and destroy patrols be launched against submarines.
11:36This was against all advice
11:38that this was proven to be a poor way to deal with U-boats.
11:42Churchill rejected the advice of the admirals.
11:45The result was that the British aircraft carrier, the Courageous,
11:49was sunk and another badly damaged.
11:58War was being fought on land, in Europe, in the forests of Finland.
12:03The global conflict that became World War II
12:06was in many ways a number of small wars
12:09that broke out at the same time and aggregated together.
12:14One such conflict was that fought between Finland and the Soviet Union.
12:20The fighting that broke out at the end of November 1939
12:24was the direct outcome of the Nazi-Soviet pact
12:27in which Stalin demanded Finland become part of Russia's sphere of influence.
12:34The fighting was a result of Finland's rejection of Stalin's demands
12:40that their shared frontier be moved further into Finland
12:44and that Finnish islands be given to the Soviet Union.
12:48The Russians feared invasion
12:50and wanted to push their borders further west as they had done in Poland.
12:55Stalin was prepared to offer compromise
12:58but the Finns saw the USSR as an implacable enemy
13:02and believed that concession would only bring further Soviet demands.
13:10Russian forces attacked across the whole length of the border.
13:14The Soviet Union mounted a full invasion of Finland.
13:20The Russian soldiers were told
13:22that Finnish workers would rise to welcome them
13:25as liberators from capitalism.
13:29The Finnish army was small and poorly equipped in nearly every aspect.
13:35However, its troops had been intensively trained
13:38to operate in their native forest terrain,
13:40to operate in the dense woods of summer and the depths of winter snows.
13:47What's more, the Finnish soldiers were motivated
13:50by a fierce and determined patriotism.
13:53The Russians outnumbered the Finns by more than 150%.
13:58Their imagined easy advance ended in stalemate.
14:02The Finns absorbed and repulsed repeated attacks
14:06and the Russian superiority in air forces
14:09was negated by the short Arctic winter day and poor weather.
14:16The Russian tanks were negated by a simple improvised weapon,
14:21the Molotov cocktail,
14:23a bottle filled with gasoline and tar
14:26which was thrown into tank engines, setting them on fire.
14:30The communist tactics were naive,
14:32separating their tanks from their infantry.
14:35The Russian armor was hunted down amongst the forests
14:38by Finnish infantry on skis.
14:41The Russians attempted to swamp the Finns by weight of numbers
14:45using crude human wave mass attacks.
14:48The result was massacre by machine gun fire.
14:53Throughout the Finnish war
14:55and the early stages of the eventual conflict with Nazi Germany,
14:59Soviet forces would be severely weakened
15:01by the butchery of Soviet high command in Stalin's purges.
15:06The communist dictator destroyed the leadership of his army
15:09through a paranoid fear of plots and planned coup d'etat.
15:14Incredibly, the Russian forces had no white winter camouflage
15:18or winter survival skills
15:20and simply froze to death through the absence of winter clothing.
15:29Finland and the Soviet Union
15:54Finland appealed to the League of Nations
15:56in its last major intervention in world affairs.
15:59The League proved as impotent as ever to prevent the war.
16:03The USSR was expelled from the League
16:06and all member states urged to support the Finns.
16:10With Germany supporting the Soviet Union,
16:13such help the world could give Finland had to pass through Norway.
16:17So tortuous was this route, the Finns had to fight alone and unaided.
16:24As 1939 passed into 1940, the Finns turned to the counterattack
16:30and won a series of stunning victories against the Soviets.
16:34Whole divisions of communist infantry surrendered
16:37and vast numbers of heavy weapons were captured and turned on the Russians.
16:46The Finnish successes brought the Russians to the negotiating table.
16:51They also made the Finns believe that ultimate victory was possible
16:55and led them to push for a hard bargain with the Soviet Union.
17:04These tactical successes were a distracting illusion
17:08from the true strategic position
17:10that Finland would, in the long run,
17:13be crushed by the sheer weight of her larger neighbor.
17:17Finland was falsely encouraged by a British and French plan to aid Finland.
17:22In reality, this was a plan to seize neighboring neutral Sweden's iron ore deposits.
17:28The Finns judged that it was not a serious offer
17:31that Britain and France would really carry through.
17:36In the time being, as the negotiations persisted,
17:40the Soviet army reorganized and mounted new heavier attacks.
17:44The Finnish army could take no more and in the end crumbled.
17:49Early in March 1940, the Finns signed an armistice with the Soviets in Moscow.
17:55The USSR could have pushed on to total victory and occupied the whole of Finland,
18:00installing a puppet communist government, yet they did not.
18:04They accepted territory, more than they originally demanded,
18:07but still leaving Finland's democratic institutions
18:10and the bulk of her territory intact.
18:13It may be that the Soviet Union wished to avoid war with Britain and France
18:18and wished for freedom to negotiate in the new Europe.
18:24In fighting Finland, the Soviet Union lost more than 200,000 men to the Finns' 25,000.
18:32The Red Army lost credibility and its final success was ignored by the world.
18:39The war drove Finland, a democratic nation,
18:42a natural ally of Britain and France, into the arms of Hitler.
18:47As soon as the peace between Russia and Finland was concluded,
18:50secret approaches were made by the Nazis,
18:53who saw Finland to be an ally in the coming final conflict,
18:57a war of destiny to destroy Soviet communism.
19:01Germany supplied Finland with new modern equipment
19:05and the Finns rebuilt a modern army and planned for revenge against Russia.
19:20The armies of 1939, the armies which took their place in northern France,
19:25represented a way of fighting war,
19:28a relationship between the armed forces and society
19:31a relationship between the armed forces and society
19:34that is almost impossibly remote to the present.
19:38The British force that was slowly, unit by unit,
19:41being ferried across the Channel to the fields of northern France
19:44went under the title of the British Expeditionary Force.
19:49It went under the same name as that borne by the British Army in the First World War.
19:54The army resembled that of 1918 in more than just name.
19:58In appearance and mindset, in philosophy,
20:01in the mental framework of the senior officers,
20:04it was a war equipped to bring victory in 1918.
20:10It is a fact of military history
20:12that victorious armies prepare for their next war
20:16by anticipating an exact replica of the past.
20:20One of the first acts of the army was to prepare trench lines,
20:24constructing the defensive positions which had dominated the fighting 20 years before.
20:32Initially in the month following the outbreak of war,
20:35the BEF comprised of little more than 150,000 men.
20:40It was placed along the Belgian border,
20:42between two French armies,
20:44and under the overall command of French generals.
20:47In addition, an expeditionary air force was created by the RAF.
20:52This had just under 10,000 men with 12 squadrons of aircraft.
20:58This BEF was modern in that it was motorized.
21:02Its troops traveled on trucks, not marched on their feet.
21:06Its heavy artillery, the big guns, weren't towed by horses.
21:10They were mechanized.
21:12But the BEF was not an offensive force that could carry the war to Germany.
21:17Its strength was diluted,
21:19not concentrated into specialized armored units,
21:22as had been so powerfully demonstrated by the Germans in Poland.
21:26It lacked adequate communications.
21:28It was poorly trained.
21:30The air component was weak and not integrated
21:33to supply any real support for the army.
21:37The Bef dug trenches, caught up on training,
21:40and waited to see what would happen.
22:00During the winter, the BEF dug trenches,
22:03caught up on training and waited to see what would happen.
22:09In the spring of 1940, the BEF was supplemented by territorial units,
22:14reserves of part-time soldiers.
22:16Its strength then began to approach 400,000,
22:20but nearly half of these troops were little more than labor,
22:23had little military value, and almost no equipment.
22:27The BEF conformed to the traditional pattern of what Britain expected of its soldiers.
22:37Traditionally, the British army was small
22:40and used to police less technically sophisticated civilizations within the worldwide empire.
22:46A small number of disciplined soldiers with technically advanced weapons
22:50were able to control large subject populations.
22:55The soldiers that manned this army were, by tradition, professionals,
22:59seeing soldiery as a job rather than a patriotic duty.
23:13Tanks had been one of the most startling innovations of the First World War.
23:17They had developed from agricultural tractors
23:20as armored vehicles to cross the morass of no man's land
23:24into the hail of machine gun fire
23:26that had made conventional charges by infantry with bayonet
23:30and by cavalry with sword or lance bloody killing grounds.
23:35Tanks had played significant roles in the great victories of the British in 1918,
23:40but amidst the confusion of the war,
23:43to read the true potential of the weapon required a leap of imagination
23:47that was made difficult by the Allied victory.
23:56The British expeditionary force was a conventional, traditional army
24:00that simply added tanks to the normal structures.
24:04The thinking that guided the BEF was the product of severe debate between the wars
24:09on what a tank could do.
24:11Those who argued for all armored formations, as adopted by Germany,
24:16were sidelined and defeated.
24:18So the BEF was an army where infantry fought on foot,
24:22guns were towed to battle and dug in for set-piece bombardments,
24:27and cavalry, although now in armored vehicles,
24:30used lightly armored vehicles that would enable them to fulfill the cavalry role
24:35of scouting in pursuit of defeated infantry.
24:38Tanks were attached to the infantry to allow foot soldiers to cross no man's land.
24:47The British army traditionally was small and professional.
24:53France had a different relationship between soldier and state.
24:57The tradition of the citizen-in-arms that dated back to the Revolution remained.
25:03As a continental European power with borders with aggressive neighbors,
25:07France had traditionally maintained a large army based upon conscription,
25:12upon national service, upon the duty of the citizen to the state.
25:17Once again, in 1939, their army had been called up, reservists mobilized.
25:24It was a massive force of nearly three million that stood alongside the British army.
25:29To create this vast army, France had relied on each generation of its young men
25:35passing through conscripted national service.
25:38The bulk of these vast numbers of reservists were placed in the uniform
25:42with just a single year's training, as much as 10 or 15 years previously.
25:49In terms of military thinking, the French had failed to learn the lessons of World War I,
25:55as had the British.
25:58World War I
26:07French tanks were over 3,000 in number, the equal of those in the German army,
26:12and were technically high in quality.
26:15But they were designated to accompany infantry,
26:18not to act as an independent strike force.
26:21The army as a whole was poorly equipped.
26:25France was unable to bear the economic cost
26:28of supplying such a huge force with mechanized transport.
26:32Most of France's guns were towed by horses.
26:36There were still horse cavalry regiments.
26:39The infantry marched on foot into battle.
26:42Orders were sent by messenger, not by radio or field telephone.
26:47The nation which went to war was, however, confident of victory.
26:55Opinion polls of the citizens that were soon to wear uniforms
26:59showed that 75% of France supported military action against Hitler over Poland.
27:06Generals have always stressed the need for focused goals.
27:10In this, the French army was devoid of inspiration.
27:14Its only goal was to resist.
27:17France's army thought the lesson of World War I
27:20was that the defense held the upper hand in combat,
27:24that the machine gun, in entrenched positions,
27:27could defend against battalions.
27:30This had been the hard-learned lesson of France's Western Front.
27:35For the French soldiers defending their country's western borders,
27:39the defining moment in the history of World War I
27:43had been the Battle of Verdun,
27:45a complex of forts on the Western Front
27:48that had been resolutely defended to the death,
27:51with hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides.
27:55France saw the path to victory in 1939
27:59as making their whole country into a new Verdun,
28:03against which Germany could be provoked to attack,
28:06attacks which would break against the fortress walls
28:09so decisively that German strength would be destroyed.
28:14This tactic produced the Maginot Line of forts,
28:18a fantastic complex of defenses.
28:34In the spring of 1940,
28:36the British army also sent troops into these forts,
28:39and many of the fortifications
28:41which British soldiers hastily dug and reinforced
28:44were used in attempts to extend the Maginot Line towards the sea.
28:48Economy had ended the line at the Belgian border.
28:59Britain and France were both centers of large worldwide empires,
29:04and often the soldiers both countries deployed
29:07were troops from those empires.
29:09Indian troops were to be seen in the fields of France
29:12as part of the British army.
29:14France deployed many troops from its army of Africa.
29:18Some of the forces that were being assembled against Germany
29:21were Poles who had undertaken incredible journeys,
29:24escaping via Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey and the Middle East
29:28to somehow link up once more with their British and French allies.
29:37A definitive mission of the Phoney War were the raids
29:40which the British and French air forces did mount against Germany.
29:44These were raids of leaflets.
29:47In the early months of the war, Britain in particular
29:50clung to the belief that Germany might still be persuaded
29:53to listen to reason and negotiate a peace.
29:56For several months, the Royal Air Force scattered leaflets
29:59all over Western Germany,
30:01setting out a logical, reasoned case against Nazi expansion into Europe.
30:06There appears to have been no effect on public opinion in the Third Reich.
30:11The only value of the raids was in training crews
30:14in navigation over Germany at night.
30:18Neither German, British nor French air forces
30:21sought combat during the Phoney War.
30:24Attacks were made on shipping,
30:26and photographic reconnaissance was made.
30:37If, during the Phoney War, the events on far distant oceans
30:41and peace on the supposed battlefields of Europe
30:44seemed remote and disconnected from the everyday experience of the population,
30:49so too must have seemed the far distant events of Asia.
30:54Few Europeans may have given much thought to the vicious war
30:58that was being fought in China by the army of the Empire of Japan.
31:04Little did the people of Europe envisage
31:06that the war in Asia would link together with the fighting in Europe.
31:12Japan was fighting to occupy and control the resources of China,
31:17a vast but weak and chaotic country.
31:25Japan sought to eventually replace the European powers
31:29as the imperial master in Asia.
31:32European colonies, such as Hong Kong,
31:35strengthened their defenses,
31:37fearing the war might spread across from China.
31:57That war was itself a complex tangle of wars,
32:01a conflict within conflicts.
32:03China fought Japan,
32:05but within that war, two Chinas fought Japan,
32:09the Nationalists, the official government of China,
32:12and the Communists, the alternative government.
32:15Within this war,
32:17the Nationalists and Communists continued their own civil war.
32:21Japan pioneered the strategy of extending the war to the whole of the enemy,
32:26both civilian and soldier alike.
32:29A series of brutal campaigns from the air and the ground
32:32massacred innocent civilians
32:34to intimidate and cow the Chinese population.
32:54On March 7, 1940,
32:56the Queen Elizabeth, then the largest passenger liner in the world,
33:00completed its maiden voyage, docking in New York.
33:04The liner had dashed across the Atlantic at top speed.
33:07The voyage was kept a total secret.
33:10The ship had traveled alone, without escort,
33:13relying on her high top speed
33:15to outrun any possible attack by Germany's U-boats.
33:19She was sent to New York to complete fitting out
33:22and escape attack by air raids.
33:25The enormous size of the liner and her high speed
33:28made her as potent a weapon of war as any battleship,
33:32delivering the resources of war in vast quantities.
33:36In the coming years, she and her sister liner, the Queen Mary,
33:40would make any number of high-speed journeys across the ocean,
33:43always alone, always in top secret.
33:51In April 1940, the phony war disappeared
33:54and broke into real action.
33:57Germany mounted an invasion of the neutral Scandinavian country of Norway.
34:02Hitler saw Norway as a weak northern flank.
34:06The remote port of Narvik, in the far north of Norway,
34:09was the outlet for Swedish iron ore, essential for the German war effort.
34:14During the Finnish-Russian war,
34:16France and Britain had planned to seize the port
34:19and deny it to German shipping,
34:21on the pretext that they were aiding the Finnish fight against Russia.
34:25This scheme was abandoned after the Finnish collapse against the Soviets.
34:33Germany's war effort was largely economically self-sufficient
34:37and did not depend on international trade.
34:40For those resources which Germany did not possess, rubber and oil,
34:44advanced technology had found exact substitutes
34:47which could be created from coal.
34:50One of the few materials which Germany needed to import
34:53for its armament industry was ore,
34:55with which to produce the highest grade steels.
34:58These had to be obtained from Scandinavia,
35:01actually from the neutral country of Sweden,
35:04but via the equally neutral Norway.
35:12Britain's war of resources was dependent on free Atlantic Sea trade.
35:16Shipping came under intense attack,
35:19and the Battle of the Atlantic between the two navies
35:22was to become a crucial conflict of the war.
35:26For Germany's navy, the key problem was access to the open sea.
35:31Germany's coastline was short
35:33and easily closed off by the opposing British.
35:36The German navy had already put to sea before the war had broken out.
35:41Now, as the conflict extended,
35:43the key resource for the German navy was to gain further coastline
35:47from which to base U-boats and surface raiders.
35:50The coast of Norway, with its fjords and deep inlets,
35:54provided a series of harbors and bases to the Germans
35:57that would enable them to threaten merchant shipping
36:00and evade the efforts of the Royal Navy to counterattack.
36:05Norway and Sweden were countries walking the tightrope of neutrality.
36:10In a war which depended on internationally traded materials,
36:14it would be increasingly difficult to remain neutral
36:17and have neutrality respected.
36:20If Germany violated Norwegian neutrality, so did Britain and France.
36:31At the same time as the attack upon Norway,
36:33the Nazis turned against Denmark.
36:36Denmark had remained a neutral country in every European affair since 1815
36:41and was accepted by all powers as part of Germany's backyard.
36:49Denmark was, by nature, pacifist in politics,
36:52with the military held in low regard.
36:55In 1940, the Danish army was just 14,000 strong,
36:59the navy just five ships, the air force 50 planes.
37:04Denmark's invasion
37:08The invasion of Denmark began at 4.15 a.m. on the morning of April 9th.
37:14The Danish government capitulated just one hour and 45 minutes later.
37:20Denmark was attacked because it was in the way,
37:24an innocent bystander in the path of the attack upon Norway.
37:29All the countries that were to come under occupation in the war
37:33had to choose how to deal with their conqueror.
37:37Denmark chose the path of least resistance.
37:40As a result of the capitulation,
37:42the Danish government retained power over Denmark's internal affairs.
37:47The price was what some call collaboration.
37:50Yet it was a policy supported by elections.
37:55For the Danish population, it was a recipe for survival.
38:01Norway had hoped to remain neutral.
38:04Although a country comparable in size to Denmark,
38:07its armed forces were stronger,
38:09and the country was to provide a stronger resistance to the Nazis.
38:16Norway had its own Nazi party,
38:19and its leader, Vidkun Quisling,
38:21was installed by the Germans as president of the occupied Norway.
38:25His name was to become synonymous with treachery and collaboration,
38:29as he tried to impose a Nazi system on his country.
38:33As the Germans mounted their invasion,
38:35their troops embarked, their aircraft and ships fueled and armed.
38:39They were taking part in a carefully planned operation
38:42to grab resources needed to further fight the war.
38:46History conceals from us the confusion endured by both sides in 1940.
38:52If there is a lesson of military history,
38:54it's the way in which the most extensively planned operations
38:57simply do not turn out as planned.
39:00The fighting in Norway became caught up in just such confusion.
39:05As the German forces sailed up the coast,
39:07they encountered British forces, not a defense.
39:11They were involved in an offensive operation of their own.
39:15There had been intensive pressure in Britain to end the phony war,
39:19to do something.
39:21Britain and France had decided, unbeknownst to Germany,
39:24to lay mines in Norway's coastal waters.
39:28The aim was to force German shipping out from Norway's neutral waters
39:32into the open sea,
39:34where they could become victim to British destroyers and submarines.
39:41The mining operation ran into the German invasion.
39:45Hastily, the British revived the plan to occupy Norway.
39:49It was planned badly, poorly controlled,
39:52and from the first to last,
39:54an operation conducted in a climate of confusion.
39:58The action started badly.
40:00Units embarked on ships, got off their ships,
40:03were ordered back aboard, leaving behind their heavy artillery.
40:07An amphibious operation,
40:09it was planned by admirals and generals
40:11who so jealously kept their independence,
40:14they traveled on separate ships.
40:17The fighting was to be amongst the subarctic mountains
40:20and fjords of Norway,
40:22yet ordinary British infantry was pitted in combat
40:25against special mountain troops of Germany.
40:28Troops were sent without anti-aircraft units,
40:31only to be subjected to bear constant Stuka attack.
40:36Despite some determined action by the Royal Navy,
40:39after having been initially caught off guard
40:41when British destroyers completely devastated
40:44a large force of German ships,
40:46the poorly equipped and organized British troops
40:48were pounded from the air
40:50and driven to constant retreat by the mountain troops,
40:53led by some of Germany's best generals.
41:07After just two weeks of fighting,
41:09the Germans were in complete control of the south of Norway,
41:13and British and French troops were undertaking
41:15the first of what were to be
41:17a series of desperate evacuations by sea.
41:36The initiative for this action came from Churchill
41:56and displayed Churchill's habit of proposing
41:59wild strategic adventures on the fringe of war
42:02at its very worst.
42:04It was a habit which had caused his downfall once before.
42:07In World War I,
42:09just such a similar venture into Turkey at Gallipoli
42:12had caused the deaths of many thousands of British troops,
42:15and since many of those troops
42:17had been from Australia and New Zealand,
42:19had even threatened the British Empire.
42:22Fear and hesitancy that Gallipoli was being repeated
42:25only contributed to the failure of the Norway campaign.
42:29The combination of the utter surprise
42:32the Germans managed to effect
42:34and the chaotic organization of the British and French forces
42:37meant that just such a fate may have again awaited Churchill.
42:46Instead, the events in Norway
42:48were to project Churchill to the height of power,
42:51that a disaster that might have consigned Churchill
42:54to the footnotes of history
42:56catapulted him to a paramount position
42:59proves such a thing as destiny exists.
43:04The timeline of the war is a complex weave of events,
43:07of cause and effect tangled together.
43:11Already elsewhere in Europe,
43:13the war shifted into a higher gear.
43:16A picture was being drawn upon a bigger canvas
43:19as the German invasion of France and the Low Countries began.
43:23Yet in Britain,
43:25the chain of cause and effect
43:27that spread from the Norway campaign
43:29was still to play out.
43:31The government had been led by Neville Chamberlain.
43:34Chamberlain has earned an unfortunate place in history
43:37as the principal architect of appeasement,
43:40forever to be associated with the Munich Agreement
43:43that had consigned Czechoslovakia to oblivion
43:46with promises reneged and trust betrayed.
43:50Chamberlain, in fact, only represented the views
43:53of nearly everyone in Britain and her ally France.
43:57Chamberlain's fault was to take Hitler at his word.
44:01He has compounded his fall in the eyes of history
44:04by a series of dramatic speeches
44:06that were all too quickly to be confounded by events
44:09to the discredit of the man.
44:12On his return from Munich,
44:14describing a meeting with Hitler
44:16where the dictator had made a vague agreement
44:18never to go to war with Britain,
44:20Chamberlain had waved a single sheet of paper
44:23and famously promised peace in our time.
44:31A principled man,
44:32Chamberlain had been devastated by the outbreak of war,
44:35seeing it as a failure of his political life.
44:38The conduct of the war, its phony nature,
44:41was as much a product of Chamberlain's clinging to a desire
44:45that somehow a peace might be grabbed,
44:47even at that late stage.
44:49While Chamberlain led Britain,
44:51no bomb ever fell on German territory.
44:55After six months of the phony war,
44:57on April 6th,
44:58as the Germans were leading their invasion fleet for Norway,
45:02Chamberlain had made a speech
45:03where he famously declared,
45:05Hitler has missed the bus.
45:07Chamberlain confidently predicted victory,
45:10arguing that Hitler had failed to act
45:12while Britain and France were still arming for war.
45:15Once again, Chamberlain's words were soon to be ridiculed
45:18by events as the war began for real.
45:22A debate in Britain's House of Commons was called
45:25to discuss the Norwegian campaign.
45:28The House met for two days in continuous session.
45:31Member after member rose to criticize Chamberlain.
45:35Aged war heroes came to the House in uniform and medals
45:39and stood in condemnation.
45:42Famously, Leo Amory,
45:44one of the most senior members
45:45from Chamberlain's own Conservative Party,
45:48quoted words from Oliver Cromwell,
45:50spoken in the House 200 years previously.
45:54Pointing at Chamberlain, he said,
46:07A vote followed.
46:08Chamberlain's party deserted him
46:10and the government's majority of 200 was cut to 81.
46:15The result stunned Chamberlain
46:17and, visibly shaken, he left the House
46:20with chants of go, go, go,
46:23resounding in the chamber.
46:29Chamberlain, in fact, did not relinquish power easily.
46:33He asked the opposition parties,
46:35principally the Labour Party,
46:37to join a coalition government.
46:39The Labour leader, Attlee, refused,
46:41saying Labour would only serve under a different Prime Minister.
46:45Chamberlain held a meeting with King George VI, Churchill,
46:49and the most senior minister, Lord Halifax,
46:51who was Britain's Foreign Secretary.
46:54Halifax was the choice of those in government
46:56to succeed Chamberlain.
46:58The King asked Halifax to form a government.
47:01Halifax declined.
47:06Uncharacteristically,
47:07Churchill achieved his life's ambition by remaining silent.
47:11Churchill was chosen because of his dissociation
47:14from the politics of appeasement.
47:16He alone, of politicians outside the central establishment
47:20of British politics,
47:21had an arsenal of political and strategic creativity,
47:24coupled with instinctive, innate, and powerful talent
47:28for the game of war.
47:29He himself later remarked on his taking office,
47:33I thought I knew a great deal about it all,
47:35and I was sure I should not fail.
47:41As he became British Prime Minister,
47:43Churchill regarded himself as fulfilling a personal destiny.
47:48Churchill's rise to power was the last act of a course of events
47:52started by the fighting in Scandinavia.
48:03The War of Independence
48:17One of Churchill's acts in those first days of office
48:20displayed a wise presence.
48:22Taking the advice of RAF officers,
48:25he forbade sending more units to France,
48:28reasoning they would be fighting a lost cause.
48:31These planes had a place in another battle,
48:34the Battle of Britain, that was to follow.
48:40Churchill was a natural leader, a natural strategist,
48:43but in those first days,
48:45he was incapable of influencing events.
48:48Already, history was swirling about Britain,
48:51her leader, and her people.
48:54History which was already swamping Britain's French allies
48:57under an avalanche of war.
49:02Next time, on World War II, The Complete History.
49:08The population of Europe comes to yearn
49:11for the years of the Phoney War,
49:13as all expectations of victory,
49:15all predictions of how things will be,
49:18are wiped away in weeks.
49:21As the German success in Poland is repeated and magnified
49:25by a new, ever greater blitzkrieg of armored war.
49:31The Maginot Line is bypassed,
49:34and the British and French armies
49:36are drawn into a simple German trap,
49:39cut off, surrounded, with their backs to the sea.
49:47The British are evacuated by an armada of small boats.
49:51In the miracle of Dunkirk,
49:53the army is saved to fight again.
49:58The Germans swing south and destroy France.
50:02The ancient, dominant power of Europe is defeated in weeks
50:06and forced into humiliation of surrender by a vengeful Germany.
50:12A weary and defeated France
50:15descends into a hell of occupation
50:18and the shame of collaboration.
50:27Britain now stands in its direst hour,
50:30alone, weak, separated by only 20 miles of sea
50:35from her Nazi enemy.
50:42The people of Britain experience the terror,
50:45the fear that other European powers have endured,
50:49the fear of invasion, of subversion, of occupation.
50:54Invasion and attack is expected.
50:57Every desperate reserve of improvised defense is deployed.
51:06Hitler offers peace once more.
51:09The reply from Churchill is of pure defiance.
51:13To fight on the beaches, to fight on the streets,
51:17to never surrender.