Apocalypse - The Second World War (2009) s01e06 Episode Script
L'enfer
Italy.
Early 1944.
The Germans had stopped the Allied advance in the area of Monte Cassino.
Perched on top of the mountain was the ancient monastery of St Benedict.
The Allies thought that the Germans had turned this 1,000-year-old edifice into a lookout post.
Allied bombers dropped 420 tons of bombs on the monastery.
In this war, nothing was sacred.
Everything was turned into an inferno.
This series is the epic story of World War Two, as it raged across countries and continents.
As millions of soldiers fought from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It is the moving story of the millions of civilians whose homes were destroyed, and lives disrupted .
.
as they were caught up in the cataclysm of war.
To tell this story, the best footage of the war has been painstakingly transformed, using digital techniques, into colour.
Along with original colour home movies, it gives a completely new perspective to one of the greatest events of the last century.
This is the powerful story of the Apocalypse, and of the people who fought the Second World War.
After the bombing of Monte Cassino, on 15th March 1944, Allied troops launched their attack.
But German paratroopers pushed them back.
The German troops were now firmly entrenched in the ruined monastery.
Nothing had been achieved by the bombing.
By advancing into Germany from the south via Italy, Churchill's aim was to take Berlin before the Russians could.
The Red Army continued to advance steadily from the East.
Kiev was liberated.
The Wehrmacht pulled out of the Ukraine, obeying Hitler's orders to systematically destroy everything.
Back in Italy, the Allies finally captured their first enemy capital, Rome.
As the Wehrmacht retreated, it again left a path of destructionbehind it.
But, together with Mussolini and his remaining fascists, the Germans retained control of northern Italy and its industries.
Frequently attacked by Italian partisans, the Germans retaliated with indiscriminate violence.
At the same time, in southern England, the Allied war machine was gearing up for the Normandy Landings.
On the evening of June 5th, American paratroopers got ready for combat, decked out in their Indian-style war paint and haircuts to make themselves feel brave.
The Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, General Eisenhower, told them, "You are about to embark on the Great Crusade.
" The plan was to land onfive beaches along a 60-mile stretch of the Normandy coast, where the German "Atlantic Wall" defences were the weakest.
The Allies carried out heavy bombing raids, not only in Normandy but everywhere north of the Loire in France, and in Belgium, to prevent the Germans from predicting where the landings would come.
Anything that could be used to bring in German reinforcements was bombed.
Railways, roads, bridges.
Late in the evening of the 5th June, gliders full of British paratroopers, and American Dakota transports, crossed the Channel to Normandy.
The paratroopers were the first to set foot in occupied France.
Their mission was to secure the flanks of the landing zone.
The Allied invasion fleet was the biggest armada ever assembled - 6,000 ships.
Yet it was never detected by the Germans.
The invasion fleet crossed the Channel despite the stormy weather.
Bombardment and shelling from the battleships pounded the coast, but missed their targets on the beach code-named Omaha.
The German defences remained intact.
The German lookouts were stunned by the sight of thousands of approaching boats.
The alert was given, but the chain of command, up to Hitler himself, remained sceptical.
Everyone was convinced that the real invasion would take place further north, along the Pas de Calais coast, nearer to England.
6th June 1944.
6.
30am.
D-Day.
The first assault wave of American troops was getting ready to go ashore on Omaha Beach.
Among them was the famous American writer, Ernest Hemingway, who was a war correspondent.
He wrote: "As we moved in toward land, "in the grey, early light, "the coffin-shaped steel boats took solid green sheets of water "that fell on the helmeted heads of the troops, "packed shoulder to shoulder in the stiff, awkward, uncomfortable, "lonely companionship of men going to battle.
" Over 1,000 American soldiers lost their lives here.
As the tide rolled in, the soldiers were trapped between the sea and the gunfire from the German blockhouses.
Eisenhower had prepared a communique in case the landing failed.
In a hand-written letter, he wrote: "My decision to attack at this place "was based on the best information available.
"If there is any blame or fault attached to the attempt, "it is mine alone.
" But a small group succeeded in heroically climbing up the cliff under enemy fire, and with air support, neutralised the German guns.
Further east, the Canadian troops landed on their beach, codenamed Juno.
19-year-old sailor Alfred Turnball piloted a barge.
He said: "By what miracle are we still alive? "We made it through three mine barrages.
"The landing craft on our right is just blown up.
"Our soldiers are landing.
Oddly enough, no-one is firing on us.
"Even the villas along the sea wall look intact.
It's unreal.
" Here,there was very little resistance.
And on the next beach, named Gold, there were only a few shots at the British troops, whose landing was a success.
The few German defenders who had survived the bombardment rapidly surrendered.
As soon as they pushed inland, the Allies came up against a more determined German resistance.
The German paratroopers, the toughest of the tough, nicknamed the "Green Devils", often got the better of the Allied soldiers.
But Field Marshal Rommel, in command of the German forces in Normandy, was pessimistic.
Hitler's orders were to push the Allies back into the sea, just like at Dunkirk four years earlier.
For Hitler, victory in the West depended on victory in Normandy.
Rommel replied to Hitler: "The stubborn defence put up by our troops "has slowed down the enemy's progress.
"But the Allies have total command of the air, "making our movements impossible during the day.
"The air superiority of the Allies is devastating.
" Rommel himself was severely wounded when his car was gunned down by the RAF.
He was evacuated back to Germany.
Every day, 30,000 soldiers and 40,000 tons of supplies had to be brought ashore.
To accomplish this, a harbour was needed.
But the Allies had decided to stay away from the big ports, which were too well-defended, and to land on the beaches of Normandy.
So,they brought two harbours with them.
Like gigantic Meccano sets, 200 concrete caissons, each one as big as a five-storey building, and weighing 6,000 tons, were assembled to create breakwaters and piers where the cargo ships could unload their supplies.
American shipyards were now turning out one of these Liberty ships, as they were called, every day.
In less than three years, the war industry had turned the United States into a superpower.
11 million men were mobilised.
Its armies were now in France, Italy, North Africa and Asia.
The power of the United States was such that just a few days after the Normandy Landings in Europe, it was able to assemble a second fleet, as big as the one in Normandy, but on the otherside of the world, in the Pacific, in order to launch the invasion of Saipan.
June 1944.
The Americans prepared to launch an invasion of the Pacific island of Saipan.
15 aircraft carriers and 800 aircraft destroyed the Japanese air force in a battle which came to be known as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.
A fatal blow was also dealt to the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Then, Japan's defences in Saipan were battered.
But when the Marines landed on this tiny island, which was only six miles wide, one of the bloodiest battles of the war began.
20,000 Americans and 30,000 Japanese were killed or wounded.
The Japanese commander on the island, General Saito, told his soldiers - "There is only one way out - death.
"We will show those American devils what courage is.
" But it was civilians, the women and children, who paid the highest price, on every front.
20,000 civilians were killed in Normandy from the Allied bombing missions, whose aim had been to destroy the German defences.
Normandy was in ruins.
But it had been waiting for four years for its liberation.
The Americans advanced with difficulty through the farmlands of Normandy, a labyrinth of hedgerows and sunken paths, ideal terrain for enemy ambushes.
The British were stuck in the plain around Caen.
German reinforcements, arriving from southern France, were held up by the French Resistance.
In retaliation, the SS hung, shot, and slaughtered Resistancefighters as well as civilians.
In Oradour sur Glane they killed all the men, then locked the women and children in the church and set it on fire.
A month-and-a-half after D-Day, the fighting was still fierce.
The Allies were advancing, but very slowly.
Eisenhower wrote - "For each yard gained, we have lost a man.
"This damned war could go on for ten years.
" Hitler wasabsolutely determined to contain the Allies in Normandy in order to protect the launch ramps for his "vengeance weapon", the V1, which he started tofire at London from northern France.
The first ever cruise missile, the V1 was a flying bomb with a pulse jet engine and a one-ton explosive warhead.
The small, swift, pilotless aircraft was difficult to intercept and shoot down.
They were called "buzz bombs" because they made a motorcycle noise that alerted Londoners when they were overhead.
By the time the V1s reached the capital, their fuel was used up and their engines cut out.
No-one knew where they would fall.
Nearly 10,000 of these missiles killed 25,000 people.
But even under these conditions, Londoners retained their pluck and their composure.
But if the V1s failed to demoralise the British, We thought we might as well I'm not interested in your thoughts.
For two years, they had had to live in underground shelters.
American bombers by day and British bombers by night hammered Germany's cities with a carpet of bombs.
Two million tons of bombs were dropped.
There were 600,000 deaths, a million wounded, seven million were homeless.
This was the outcome of the strategic bombing offensive carried out by the Allies, with the purpose of destroying the industrial and human potential of Germany's wartime effort.
In the Fuhrer's headquarters, the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, beneath the obligatory smiles, many of Hitler's officers were deeply troubled, especially those from the old Prussian military aristocracy.
Many of them conspired in a plot to get rid of Hitler.
One of these officers, Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, placed a bomb under Hitler's desk during a conference in the Wolf's Lair.
But this heavy table saved Hitler - it deflected the blast that killed two generals and wounded 20 people.
Hitler, who had now escaped five assassination attempts, was convinced once again that he was protected by divine providence.
That very same evening he met with Mussolini, who was still the leaderof the fascist regime in northern Italy, but was now looking for a way to end the war, a compromise.
Hitler consoled him by telling him about his secret weapons and the failed assassination attempt.
Hitler was only slightly injured in the arm, but the July Bomb Plot had deeply traumatized him, affecting his mental state, intensifying his cruelty and his paranoia.
After the Bomb Plot, he unleashed his revenge.
The main conspirators were tried.
5,000 suspects were executed and their families deported.
Hitler had no second thoughts about executing his generals.
Because he had agreed to replace Hitler at the head of the army, Rommel was forced to commit suicide.
Hypocritically, Hitler gave him a state funeral.
From now on, real power in Nazi Germany was in the hands of the SS.
The Russians continued to advance in the East.
The Great Patriotic War, as they now called it, had a new impetus.
The Red Army was able to strike with a strength that amazed all sides.
There seemed to be an endless supply of men, even after the costly battles of Moscow and Stalingrad.
The offensive in Belarus in the summer of 1944 was the biggest battle of the Second World War.
The front was 600 miles wide, and the Russians were able to push forward 400 miles in two months and destroy three German Army groups.
The Wehrmacht retreated towards East Prussia, leaving behind 200,000 casualties and 200,000 prisoners.
In the West, the Allies also slowly gained the upper hand.
50,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner in the Falaise pocket, or, as the Germans called it, Stalingrad in Normandy.
It was a great victory for the Canadians, the Poles, and all the Allied armies.
In Paris, the Resistance movement came out of the shadows and openly fought to liberate the city.
Barricades were erected across Paris.
Most of the German army had retreated to the east, but 20,000 men remained behind, under the command of General von Choltitz, who had received orders from Hitler to destroy the city.
Violent fighting broke out.
On the fourth day of the insurrection, a French unit, General Leclerc's Second Armoured Division, arrived from Normandy, and Paris was finally liberated.
The Germans surrendered, and General von Choltitz was taken to the French army's headquarters.
Just before being arrested, Choltitz had received a call from Hitler, who asked the question, "Is Paris burning?" But Choltitz preferred to turn himself in.
For the first time, this highly disciplined officer from an airborne regiment disobeyed an order.
He would not appear on the list of war criminals.
Then de Gaulle arrived, with eloquent words for history.
With France and Belgium liberated, and the Red Army waiting outside Warsaw, on the other side of the globe, Douglas MacArthur, the American general, landed back in the Philippines.
After escaping from the Japanese siege three years earlier, MacArthur had said, "I shall return.
" His return was well staged by his public relations staff.
He proclaimed, "People of the Philippines, I have returned.
"The hour of your redemption is here.
" But it took four more months to liberate the Philippines.
Manila, the capital, became the second most devastated city of the war, after Warsaw.
Everywhere in the Pacific, the war was marked by a form of savagery.
Everywhere there was the same story of Marines trapped on the beaches of one island after another, and everywhere there was the same suicidal obstinacy of the Japanese.
For them, surrender was the ultimate disgrace.
If they were captured, they committed suicide with a grenade.
Like this Japanese pilot, who was shot down over the Philippine Sea and whom the Americans were trying to fish out of the ocean.
The man pulled the pin out of a grenade with his teeth.
The Americans stopped taking any risks.
Whenever they saw a Japanese soldier, their instinct was to kill him.
Both sides were locked into a vicious cycle of hatred.
Along with imperialism, the underlying cause of World War II was racism.
Racism had given birth to Auschwitz, the killing factory in Poland, liberated by the Russian offensive on 27th January 1945.
Exterminating the Jews was, as Hitler had written in Mein Kampf, his mission.
He sent more than one million Jews to their death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
6 million died of starvation, brutal treatment, or were shot and burned in the crematoria in Majdanak, in Sobibor, in Treblinka.
The Russians found a few hundred survivors, tattooed for life.
They also intercepted the trains full of deportees.
The Nazis continued to give priority to these death trains, even over the munitions convoys.
They continued making their journeys to the 100 concentration camps that were still operating at the beginning of 1945.
20 million partisans, political opponents, homosexuals and gypsies were deported to these camps, and five million of them died of hunger, abuse or exhaustion.
Like the slaves working in the underground factory where the Nazis were building another secret weapon - the V2.
This was the first ballistic missile.
With a one-ton explosive warhead, it had a range of 180 miles.
1,500 of them were launched against London, and 2,000 against Antwerp in Belgium, adding to the devastation and to the civilian casualties.
The Allies' greatest fear was that the V2 might one day carry a nuclear warhead.
The eminent scientist Albert Einstein had warned Roosevelt about the urgency of getting ahead of the Germans.
Huge funds were provided and a team of scientists secretly went to work on the first atomic bomb.
This bomb used a metal, uranium, that made it possible to split the atom.
It was expected to have the power of 20,000 tons of conventional explosives, in addition to a lethal radioactive fall-out.
The designated target was Berlin.
But this first atomic bomb was not finished in time for Germany.
There were no factories left standing in Germany that were capable of producing such a weapon.
The carpet bombing carried out day and night by the Allies continued to devastate German cities.
In February 1945, Allied bombers attacked Dresden, an important communications hub for the German armies on the Eastern Front, and the fifth biggest industrial city in the Reich.
Dresden, known as the Florence of the North, was one of Europe's finest medieval cities.
Phosphorous bombs created a fire typhoon in which 40,000 people were burned to death.
The city continued to blaze for seven days.
Their cities were dying, and now Goebbels and the Nazis wanted to send all Germans from 16 to 60 years old to their deaths.
A new unit, the Volkssturm, the People's Militia, was formed.
Its members declared, "Anything is better than the unconditional surrender "that the Judaeo-Communists want to impose in Germany.
"Swear to die for Adolf Hitler.
" Hitler insisted there must not be any weakening of Germany.
His generals, those who had survived the massive purge following the July bomb plot, no longer dared to oppose the Fuhrer.
They obeyed his order to launch an attack in the West, in the Ardennes, during winter.
They would have preferred to devote all their efforts to fighting the Russians, but Hitler told them, "We have to annihilate the British Army, "then the Americans will sign a separate peace with me "because the capitalists fear the advance of the Marxists.
" Hitler hoped to recapture the port of Antwerp, to stop the Allies from unloading the equipment that would enable them to move into Germany.
But the German offensive in the Ardennes failed due to the extraordinary defence put up by American paratroopers in Bastogne, and to the intervention of General Patton's tanks, and due to the overwhelming power of the Allied air forces.
And the Russians in the east now crossed the German border and entered the Third Reich itself.
Millions of Germans fled in panic from the approaching Soviet troops, especially the German women, who feared the mass rapes that were being carried out.
Hitler's thinking turned out to be completely wrong.
There was little disagreement between the Western Allies and the Russians, and in Churchill's mind, the problem with Germany was practically over.
He was now thinking more about how to divide up Germany into occupation zones.
He and Roosevelt met at Yalta in the Crimea for a conference with Stalin.
Concerned about the increasing losses being suffered in the Pacific, Roosevelt had come to press Stalin to join the war effort against Japan.
Stalin made Roosevelt travel all the way to the Crimea, which took a severe toll on the ailing President's health.
Drawn and emaciated, he barely had the strength to hold out his arm.
Roosevelt was very frail.
His main priority was Japan.
He didn't have the strength to oppose Stalin.
The Red Army was liberating, but also occupying, the Baltic states, then Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Silesia and Prussia.
There was no way to make Stalin leave.
The only one who tried to push Stalin was Churchill.
Finally he got Stalin to promise to hold free elections in Poland, a promise that would never be kept, and to give up Greece, which led to a civil war.
The big achievement at Yalta was the founding of the organisation of the United Nations, the UN.
Its mission would be to seek a peaceful settlement for all disputes, and to protect human rights.
After the Yalta Agreements would come the final assault upon Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
In February 1945, the war in the Pacific still raged.
US Marines raised the American flag on top of Mount Suribachi, the volcano dominating the island of Iwo Jima.
The battle took the lives of 7,000 Americans and 20,000 Japanese.
US Marine Lieutenant John Ritch recalled - "We all thought, if that's how it is here, "what will it be like when we get to Japan? "For all of it was clear - we were going to die there.
" It was now possible for Boeing B29 Super Fortress bombers taking off from Iwo Jima and other islands in the Pacific to reach Japan.
The scientists had invented something even deadlier than the phosphorous used in Dresden.
Napalm - gasoline mixed with incendiary jelly.
1,700 tons were dropped in one raid on houses made of wood and paper.
These Japanese were the victims of their fanatical military leaders who had plunged them into this inferno and who wanted to continue the war, despite 80,000 victims and the five million homeless from this single air raid over Tokyo.
Hitler's Germany was now on the verge of collapse.
Soviet forces had surrounded Berlin.
But Hitler refused to admit defeat.
He said, "It will be the opposite of Stalingrad.
" But his remaining soldiers, overwhelmed by the Soviet Red Army, surrendered en masse.
For two weeks, Berlin became a raging inferno, by day and by night.
A few fanatics held out until the end, like the 400 French SS from the Charlemagne division, a few desperate fighters and the fanatical boys of the Hitler Youth.
They fought back against one million Russians.
Beneath the ruins of the chancellery in his underground bunker, Hitler ranted and raved and manoeuvred his imaginary armies.
The last of his faithful followers took advantage of a lull to come out and celebrate his birthday on the 20th April.
Hitler was 56 years old.
He consoled these Hitler Youth who had been chosen because their parents were killed in the bombing of Dresden.
As the Americans advanced eastward, they captured thousands of these Hitler Youths sent to the front to replace the soldiers who had been killed.
The Americans could hardly believe their eyes.
These boy soldiers were afraid of nothing.
They had undergone years of brainwashing.
Hatred and racism had been indoctrinated into them.
The old men who were captured with them told them, "Children enjoy the war.
" "Peace will be even more frightful.
" The Americans met up with the Russians on the Elbe, near Torgau, on 25th April, 1945.
East meets West.
The atmosphere was friendly.
For the cameras.
General Patton called upthe Supreme Commander,General Eisenhower.
He wanted him to witness first-hand the horrors of a concentration camp discovered by his advancing troops at Buchenwald.
Eisenhower immediately had the inhabitants of the nearby city of Weimar taken there in trucks, so that they could see for themselves what crimes had been committed by the Nazis.
So that they could no longer say they did not know what had been going on.
They saw the tattoos collected from the corpses of the deported.
The lampshades made of human skin.
The shrunken-head paperweights.
Then, in line with the Yalta agreements, Eisenhower withdrew his troops from Buchenwald, which was located in the Soviet zone.
Stalin immediately put the camp back to work.
It became part of his Gulag system, where people suspected of hostility towards his regime would be imprisoned.
In Berlin, the Russians were 300 yards from the Fuhrer's bunker.
Hitler killed his pet dog, Blondie, after finally marrying Eva Braun.
She then swallowed a cyanide pill.
Hitler shot himself in the head.
Goebbels and his wife also committed suicide and the SS tried to burn their bodies.
Before that, Magda Goebbels had poisoned her six children.
In her last letter, she had written - "That we can end our lives together with the Fuhrer is a blessing "for which we never dared to hope.
" The Soviets raised the red flag over the Reichstag.
The principal Nazi leaders were captured.
In Italy, Mussolini was executed by partisans, and his body was strung up by the crowd.
Everywhere in Europe, a wave of revenge was unleashed against those who in one way or another had collaborated with the Nazis.
In Berlin, Russian soldiers now directed traffic at the Brandenburg Gate.
To defeat Nazi Germany, Russia had paid a very high price, 20 million civilians and 8 million soldiers had been killed.
Nearly 15% of the population of the Soviet Union.
General Zhukov had himself filmed in the ruins of the Grand Chancellery of the Reich, the very symbol of Hitler's delusions of grandeur, to show the world that it was the Russians and his army that had crushed the German forces.
Hitler had ordered the SS to burn his body.
The Soviets got rid of the bones in order to prevent any kind of hero-worship.
On 8th May, 1945, Wehrmacht commanderField Marshal Keitel signed the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in front of the Russian General Zhukov and Allied officers British Air Marshal Tedder, American General Spaatz, and French General de Lattre de Tassigny.
Keitel was later tried at the international Nuremberg trials.
He would be hung, like many other war criminals.
The German writer Klaus Mann addressed his fellow citizens, saying - "There is nothing shameful about this defeat.
"On the contrary, "shame, degradation, decomposition, the decline of German life, "that's what national socialism was.
" Germany was in ruins.
Now all eyes turned to Japan.
In the Pacific, suicide pilots calledby the Japanese "kamikaze", nosedived their planes into ships of the American fleet.
For the Japanese, even the idea of surrender was unthinkable.
It was a supreme disgrace.
Clinging on to power, the military chiefs in Tokyo sacrificed what remained of their country's youth, in order to prevent the Americans from landing in Japan.
In the end, the United States decided against an invasion of Japan, which it was calculatedwould cost the country a millionlives.
Instead, it detonated the atomic bomb.
Hiroshima, the 6th August, 1945.
The first nuclear bomb ever exploded in history killed, in a few seconds, up to 100,000 people.
Then, three days later, there was a second atomic bomb, at Nagasaki.
The bombs finally enabled of Emperor Hirohito to seek peace without losing face.
The atomic bombs had to be dropped before these Japanese soldiers and officers would finally consent to give up their arms, which was so contrary to their Bushido code of honour.
The war took the lives of 50 million people, twice as many civilians as soldiers, in an outpouring of extreme violence.
Thousands of victims suffered for many years afterwards from the appalling after-effects of nuclear radiation.
Or from the terrible loss of parents or children, exterminated in the Nazi camps.
The tragedy of the Second World War must never be forgotten.
Red Bee Media Ltd
Early 1944.
The Germans had stopped the Allied advance in the area of Monte Cassino.
Perched on top of the mountain was the ancient monastery of St Benedict.
The Allies thought that the Germans had turned this 1,000-year-old edifice into a lookout post.
Allied bombers dropped 420 tons of bombs on the monastery.
In this war, nothing was sacred.
Everything was turned into an inferno.
This series is the epic story of World War Two, as it raged across countries and continents.
As millions of soldiers fought from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It is the moving story of the millions of civilians whose homes were destroyed, and lives disrupted .
.
as they were caught up in the cataclysm of war.
To tell this story, the best footage of the war has been painstakingly transformed, using digital techniques, into colour.
Along with original colour home movies, it gives a completely new perspective to one of the greatest events of the last century.
This is the powerful story of the Apocalypse, and of the people who fought the Second World War.
After the bombing of Monte Cassino, on 15th March 1944, Allied troops launched their attack.
But German paratroopers pushed them back.
The German troops were now firmly entrenched in the ruined monastery.
Nothing had been achieved by the bombing.
By advancing into Germany from the south via Italy, Churchill's aim was to take Berlin before the Russians could.
The Red Army continued to advance steadily from the East.
Kiev was liberated.
The Wehrmacht pulled out of the Ukraine, obeying Hitler's orders to systematically destroy everything.
Back in Italy, the Allies finally captured their first enemy capital, Rome.
As the Wehrmacht retreated, it again left a path of destructionbehind it.
But, together with Mussolini and his remaining fascists, the Germans retained control of northern Italy and its industries.
Frequently attacked by Italian partisans, the Germans retaliated with indiscriminate violence.
At the same time, in southern England, the Allied war machine was gearing up for the Normandy Landings.
On the evening of June 5th, American paratroopers got ready for combat, decked out in their Indian-style war paint and haircuts to make themselves feel brave.
The Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, General Eisenhower, told them, "You are about to embark on the Great Crusade.
" The plan was to land onfive beaches along a 60-mile stretch of the Normandy coast, where the German "Atlantic Wall" defences were the weakest.
The Allies carried out heavy bombing raids, not only in Normandy but everywhere north of the Loire in France, and in Belgium, to prevent the Germans from predicting where the landings would come.
Anything that could be used to bring in German reinforcements was bombed.
Railways, roads, bridges.
Late in the evening of the 5th June, gliders full of British paratroopers, and American Dakota transports, crossed the Channel to Normandy.
The paratroopers were the first to set foot in occupied France.
Their mission was to secure the flanks of the landing zone.
The Allied invasion fleet was the biggest armada ever assembled - 6,000 ships.
Yet it was never detected by the Germans.
The invasion fleet crossed the Channel despite the stormy weather.
Bombardment and shelling from the battleships pounded the coast, but missed their targets on the beach code-named Omaha.
The German defences remained intact.
The German lookouts were stunned by the sight of thousands of approaching boats.
The alert was given, but the chain of command, up to Hitler himself, remained sceptical.
Everyone was convinced that the real invasion would take place further north, along the Pas de Calais coast, nearer to England.
6th June 1944.
6.
30am.
D-Day.
The first assault wave of American troops was getting ready to go ashore on Omaha Beach.
Among them was the famous American writer, Ernest Hemingway, who was a war correspondent.
He wrote: "As we moved in toward land, "in the grey, early light, "the coffin-shaped steel boats took solid green sheets of water "that fell on the helmeted heads of the troops, "packed shoulder to shoulder in the stiff, awkward, uncomfortable, "lonely companionship of men going to battle.
" Over 1,000 American soldiers lost their lives here.
As the tide rolled in, the soldiers were trapped between the sea and the gunfire from the German blockhouses.
Eisenhower had prepared a communique in case the landing failed.
In a hand-written letter, he wrote: "My decision to attack at this place "was based on the best information available.
"If there is any blame or fault attached to the attempt, "it is mine alone.
" But a small group succeeded in heroically climbing up the cliff under enemy fire, and with air support, neutralised the German guns.
Further east, the Canadian troops landed on their beach, codenamed Juno.
19-year-old sailor Alfred Turnball piloted a barge.
He said: "By what miracle are we still alive? "We made it through three mine barrages.
"The landing craft on our right is just blown up.
"Our soldiers are landing.
Oddly enough, no-one is firing on us.
"Even the villas along the sea wall look intact.
It's unreal.
" Here,there was very little resistance.
And on the next beach, named Gold, there were only a few shots at the British troops, whose landing was a success.
The few German defenders who had survived the bombardment rapidly surrendered.
As soon as they pushed inland, the Allies came up against a more determined German resistance.
The German paratroopers, the toughest of the tough, nicknamed the "Green Devils", often got the better of the Allied soldiers.
But Field Marshal Rommel, in command of the German forces in Normandy, was pessimistic.
Hitler's orders were to push the Allies back into the sea, just like at Dunkirk four years earlier.
For Hitler, victory in the West depended on victory in Normandy.
Rommel replied to Hitler: "The stubborn defence put up by our troops "has slowed down the enemy's progress.
"But the Allies have total command of the air, "making our movements impossible during the day.
"The air superiority of the Allies is devastating.
" Rommel himself was severely wounded when his car was gunned down by the RAF.
He was evacuated back to Germany.
Every day, 30,000 soldiers and 40,000 tons of supplies had to be brought ashore.
To accomplish this, a harbour was needed.
But the Allies had decided to stay away from the big ports, which were too well-defended, and to land on the beaches of Normandy.
So,they brought two harbours with them.
Like gigantic Meccano sets, 200 concrete caissons, each one as big as a five-storey building, and weighing 6,000 tons, were assembled to create breakwaters and piers where the cargo ships could unload their supplies.
American shipyards were now turning out one of these Liberty ships, as they were called, every day.
In less than three years, the war industry had turned the United States into a superpower.
11 million men were mobilised.
Its armies were now in France, Italy, North Africa and Asia.
The power of the United States was such that just a few days after the Normandy Landings in Europe, it was able to assemble a second fleet, as big as the one in Normandy, but on the otherside of the world, in the Pacific, in order to launch the invasion of Saipan.
June 1944.
The Americans prepared to launch an invasion of the Pacific island of Saipan.
15 aircraft carriers and 800 aircraft destroyed the Japanese air force in a battle which came to be known as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.
A fatal blow was also dealt to the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Then, Japan's defences in Saipan were battered.
But when the Marines landed on this tiny island, which was only six miles wide, one of the bloodiest battles of the war began.
20,000 Americans and 30,000 Japanese were killed or wounded.
The Japanese commander on the island, General Saito, told his soldiers - "There is only one way out - death.
"We will show those American devils what courage is.
" But it was civilians, the women and children, who paid the highest price, on every front.
20,000 civilians were killed in Normandy from the Allied bombing missions, whose aim had been to destroy the German defences.
Normandy was in ruins.
But it had been waiting for four years for its liberation.
The Americans advanced with difficulty through the farmlands of Normandy, a labyrinth of hedgerows and sunken paths, ideal terrain for enemy ambushes.
The British were stuck in the plain around Caen.
German reinforcements, arriving from southern France, were held up by the French Resistance.
In retaliation, the SS hung, shot, and slaughtered Resistancefighters as well as civilians.
In Oradour sur Glane they killed all the men, then locked the women and children in the church and set it on fire.
A month-and-a-half after D-Day, the fighting was still fierce.
The Allies were advancing, but very slowly.
Eisenhower wrote - "For each yard gained, we have lost a man.
"This damned war could go on for ten years.
" Hitler wasabsolutely determined to contain the Allies in Normandy in order to protect the launch ramps for his "vengeance weapon", the V1, which he started tofire at London from northern France.
The first ever cruise missile, the V1 was a flying bomb with a pulse jet engine and a one-ton explosive warhead.
The small, swift, pilotless aircraft was difficult to intercept and shoot down.
They were called "buzz bombs" because they made a motorcycle noise that alerted Londoners when they were overhead.
By the time the V1s reached the capital, their fuel was used up and their engines cut out.
No-one knew where they would fall.
Nearly 10,000 of these missiles killed 25,000 people.
But even under these conditions, Londoners retained their pluck and their composure.
But if the V1s failed to demoralise the British, We thought we might as well I'm not interested in your thoughts.
For two years, they had had to live in underground shelters.
American bombers by day and British bombers by night hammered Germany's cities with a carpet of bombs.
Two million tons of bombs were dropped.
There were 600,000 deaths, a million wounded, seven million were homeless.
This was the outcome of the strategic bombing offensive carried out by the Allies, with the purpose of destroying the industrial and human potential of Germany's wartime effort.
In the Fuhrer's headquarters, the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, beneath the obligatory smiles, many of Hitler's officers were deeply troubled, especially those from the old Prussian military aristocracy.
Many of them conspired in a plot to get rid of Hitler.
One of these officers, Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, placed a bomb under Hitler's desk during a conference in the Wolf's Lair.
But this heavy table saved Hitler - it deflected the blast that killed two generals and wounded 20 people.
Hitler, who had now escaped five assassination attempts, was convinced once again that he was protected by divine providence.
That very same evening he met with Mussolini, who was still the leaderof the fascist regime in northern Italy, but was now looking for a way to end the war, a compromise.
Hitler consoled him by telling him about his secret weapons and the failed assassination attempt.
Hitler was only slightly injured in the arm, but the July Bomb Plot had deeply traumatized him, affecting his mental state, intensifying his cruelty and his paranoia.
After the Bomb Plot, he unleashed his revenge.
The main conspirators were tried.
5,000 suspects were executed and their families deported.
Hitler had no second thoughts about executing his generals.
Because he had agreed to replace Hitler at the head of the army, Rommel was forced to commit suicide.
Hypocritically, Hitler gave him a state funeral.
From now on, real power in Nazi Germany was in the hands of the SS.
The Russians continued to advance in the East.
The Great Patriotic War, as they now called it, had a new impetus.
The Red Army was able to strike with a strength that amazed all sides.
There seemed to be an endless supply of men, even after the costly battles of Moscow and Stalingrad.
The offensive in Belarus in the summer of 1944 was the biggest battle of the Second World War.
The front was 600 miles wide, and the Russians were able to push forward 400 miles in two months and destroy three German Army groups.
The Wehrmacht retreated towards East Prussia, leaving behind 200,000 casualties and 200,000 prisoners.
In the West, the Allies also slowly gained the upper hand.
50,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner in the Falaise pocket, or, as the Germans called it, Stalingrad in Normandy.
It was a great victory for the Canadians, the Poles, and all the Allied armies.
In Paris, the Resistance movement came out of the shadows and openly fought to liberate the city.
Barricades were erected across Paris.
Most of the German army had retreated to the east, but 20,000 men remained behind, under the command of General von Choltitz, who had received orders from Hitler to destroy the city.
Violent fighting broke out.
On the fourth day of the insurrection, a French unit, General Leclerc's Second Armoured Division, arrived from Normandy, and Paris was finally liberated.
The Germans surrendered, and General von Choltitz was taken to the French army's headquarters.
Just before being arrested, Choltitz had received a call from Hitler, who asked the question, "Is Paris burning?" But Choltitz preferred to turn himself in.
For the first time, this highly disciplined officer from an airborne regiment disobeyed an order.
He would not appear on the list of war criminals.
Then de Gaulle arrived, with eloquent words for history.
With France and Belgium liberated, and the Red Army waiting outside Warsaw, on the other side of the globe, Douglas MacArthur, the American general, landed back in the Philippines.
After escaping from the Japanese siege three years earlier, MacArthur had said, "I shall return.
" His return was well staged by his public relations staff.
He proclaimed, "People of the Philippines, I have returned.
"The hour of your redemption is here.
" But it took four more months to liberate the Philippines.
Manila, the capital, became the second most devastated city of the war, after Warsaw.
Everywhere in the Pacific, the war was marked by a form of savagery.
Everywhere there was the same story of Marines trapped on the beaches of one island after another, and everywhere there was the same suicidal obstinacy of the Japanese.
For them, surrender was the ultimate disgrace.
If they were captured, they committed suicide with a grenade.
Like this Japanese pilot, who was shot down over the Philippine Sea and whom the Americans were trying to fish out of the ocean.
The man pulled the pin out of a grenade with his teeth.
The Americans stopped taking any risks.
Whenever they saw a Japanese soldier, their instinct was to kill him.
Both sides were locked into a vicious cycle of hatred.
Along with imperialism, the underlying cause of World War II was racism.
Racism had given birth to Auschwitz, the killing factory in Poland, liberated by the Russian offensive on 27th January 1945.
Exterminating the Jews was, as Hitler had written in Mein Kampf, his mission.
He sent more than one million Jews to their death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
6 million died of starvation, brutal treatment, or were shot and burned in the crematoria in Majdanak, in Sobibor, in Treblinka.
The Russians found a few hundred survivors, tattooed for life.
They also intercepted the trains full of deportees.
The Nazis continued to give priority to these death trains, even over the munitions convoys.
They continued making their journeys to the 100 concentration camps that were still operating at the beginning of 1945.
20 million partisans, political opponents, homosexuals and gypsies were deported to these camps, and five million of them died of hunger, abuse or exhaustion.
Like the slaves working in the underground factory where the Nazis were building another secret weapon - the V2.
This was the first ballistic missile.
With a one-ton explosive warhead, it had a range of 180 miles.
1,500 of them were launched against London, and 2,000 against Antwerp in Belgium, adding to the devastation and to the civilian casualties.
The Allies' greatest fear was that the V2 might one day carry a nuclear warhead.
The eminent scientist Albert Einstein had warned Roosevelt about the urgency of getting ahead of the Germans.
Huge funds were provided and a team of scientists secretly went to work on the first atomic bomb.
This bomb used a metal, uranium, that made it possible to split the atom.
It was expected to have the power of 20,000 tons of conventional explosives, in addition to a lethal radioactive fall-out.
The designated target was Berlin.
But this first atomic bomb was not finished in time for Germany.
There were no factories left standing in Germany that were capable of producing such a weapon.
The carpet bombing carried out day and night by the Allies continued to devastate German cities.
In February 1945, Allied bombers attacked Dresden, an important communications hub for the German armies on the Eastern Front, and the fifth biggest industrial city in the Reich.
Dresden, known as the Florence of the North, was one of Europe's finest medieval cities.
Phosphorous bombs created a fire typhoon in which 40,000 people were burned to death.
The city continued to blaze for seven days.
Their cities were dying, and now Goebbels and the Nazis wanted to send all Germans from 16 to 60 years old to their deaths.
A new unit, the Volkssturm, the People's Militia, was formed.
Its members declared, "Anything is better than the unconditional surrender "that the Judaeo-Communists want to impose in Germany.
"Swear to die for Adolf Hitler.
" Hitler insisted there must not be any weakening of Germany.
His generals, those who had survived the massive purge following the July bomb plot, no longer dared to oppose the Fuhrer.
They obeyed his order to launch an attack in the West, in the Ardennes, during winter.
They would have preferred to devote all their efforts to fighting the Russians, but Hitler told them, "We have to annihilate the British Army, "then the Americans will sign a separate peace with me "because the capitalists fear the advance of the Marxists.
" Hitler hoped to recapture the port of Antwerp, to stop the Allies from unloading the equipment that would enable them to move into Germany.
But the German offensive in the Ardennes failed due to the extraordinary defence put up by American paratroopers in Bastogne, and to the intervention of General Patton's tanks, and due to the overwhelming power of the Allied air forces.
And the Russians in the east now crossed the German border and entered the Third Reich itself.
Millions of Germans fled in panic from the approaching Soviet troops, especially the German women, who feared the mass rapes that were being carried out.
Hitler's thinking turned out to be completely wrong.
There was little disagreement between the Western Allies and the Russians, and in Churchill's mind, the problem with Germany was practically over.
He was now thinking more about how to divide up Germany into occupation zones.
He and Roosevelt met at Yalta in the Crimea for a conference with Stalin.
Concerned about the increasing losses being suffered in the Pacific, Roosevelt had come to press Stalin to join the war effort against Japan.
Stalin made Roosevelt travel all the way to the Crimea, which took a severe toll on the ailing President's health.
Drawn and emaciated, he barely had the strength to hold out his arm.
Roosevelt was very frail.
His main priority was Japan.
He didn't have the strength to oppose Stalin.
The Red Army was liberating, but also occupying, the Baltic states, then Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Silesia and Prussia.
There was no way to make Stalin leave.
The only one who tried to push Stalin was Churchill.
Finally he got Stalin to promise to hold free elections in Poland, a promise that would never be kept, and to give up Greece, which led to a civil war.
The big achievement at Yalta was the founding of the organisation of the United Nations, the UN.
Its mission would be to seek a peaceful settlement for all disputes, and to protect human rights.
After the Yalta Agreements would come the final assault upon Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
In February 1945, the war in the Pacific still raged.
US Marines raised the American flag on top of Mount Suribachi, the volcano dominating the island of Iwo Jima.
The battle took the lives of 7,000 Americans and 20,000 Japanese.
US Marine Lieutenant John Ritch recalled - "We all thought, if that's how it is here, "what will it be like when we get to Japan? "For all of it was clear - we were going to die there.
" It was now possible for Boeing B29 Super Fortress bombers taking off from Iwo Jima and other islands in the Pacific to reach Japan.
The scientists had invented something even deadlier than the phosphorous used in Dresden.
Napalm - gasoline mixed with incendiary jelly.
1,700 tons were dropped in one raid on houses made of wood and paper.
These Japanese were the victims of their fanatical military leaders who had plunged them into this inferno and who wanted to continue the war, despite 80,000 victims and the five million homeless from this single air raid over Tokyo.
Hitler's Germany was now on the verge of collapse.
Soviet forces had surrounded Berlin.
But Hitler refused to admit defeat.
He said, "It will be the opposite of Stalingrad.
" But his remaining soldiers, overwhelmed by the Soviet Red Army, surrendered en masse.
For two weeks, Berlin became a raging inferno, by day and by night.
A few fanatics held out until the end, like the 400 French SS from the Charlemagne division, a few desperate fighters and the fanatical boys of the Hitler Youth.
They fought back against one million Russians.
Beneath the ruins of the chancellery in his underground bunker, Hitler ranted and raved and manoeuvred his imaginary armies.
The last of his faithful followers took advantage of a lull to come out and celebrate his birthday on the 20th April.
Hitler was 56 years old.
He consoled these Hitler Youth who had been chosen because their parents were killed in the bombing of Dresden.
As the Americans advanced eastward, they captured thousands of these Hitler Youths sent to the front to replace the soldiers who had been killed.
The Americans could hardly believe their eyes.
These boy soldiers were afraid of nothing.
They had undergone years of brainwashing.
Hatred and racism had been indoctrinated into them.
The old men who were captured with them told them, "Children enjoy the war.
" "Peace will be even more frightful.
" The Americans met up with the Russians on the Elbe, near Torgau, on 25th April, 1945.
East meets West.
The atmosphere was friendly.
For the cameras.
General Patton called upthe Supreme Commander,General Eisenhower.
He wanted him to witness first-hand the horrors of a concentration camp discovered by his advancing troops at Buchenwald.
Eisenhower immediately had the inhabitants of the nearby city of Weimar taken there in trucks, so that they could see for themselves what crimes had been committed by the Nazis.
So that they could no longer say they did not know what had been going on.
They saw the tattoos collected from the corpses of the deported.
The lampshades made of human skin.
The shrunken-head paperweights.
Then, in line with the Yalta agreements, Eisenhower withdrew his troops from Buchenwald, which was located in the Soviet zone.
Stalin immediately put the camp back to work.
It became part of his Gulag system, where people suspected of hostility towards his regime would be imprisoned.
In Berlin, the Russians were 300 yards from the Fuhrer's bunker.
Hitler killed his pet dog, Blondie, after finally marrying Eva Braun.
She then swallowed a cyanide pill.
Hitler shot himself in the head.
Goebbels and his wife also committed suicide and the SS tried to burn their bodies.
Before that, Magda Goebbels had poisoned her six children.
In her last letter, she had written - "That we can end our lives together with the Fuhrer is a blessing "for which we never dared to hope.
" The Soviets raised the red flag over the Reichstag.
The principal Nazi leaders were captured.
In Italy, Mussolini was executed by partisans, and his body was strung up by the crowd.
Everywhere in Europe, a wave of revenge was unleashed against those who in one way or another had collaborated with the Nazis.
In Berlin, Russian soldiers now directed traffic at the Brandenburg Gate.
To defeat Nazi Germany, Russia had paid a very high price, 20 million civilians and 8 million soldiers had been killed.
Nearly 15% of the population of the Soviet Union.
General Zhukov had himself filmed in the ruins of the Grand Chancellery of the Reich, the very symbol of Hitler's delusions of grandeur, to show the world that it was the Russians and his army that had crushed the German forces.
Hitler had ordered the SS to burn his body.
The Soviets got rid of the bones in order to prevent any kind of hero-worship.
On 8th May, 1945, Wehrmacht commanderField Marshal Keitel signed the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in front of the Russian General Zhukov and Allied officers British Air Marshal Tedder, American General Spaatz, and French General de Lattre de Tassigny.
Keitel was later tried at the international Nuremberg trials.
He would be hung, like many other war criminals.
The German writer Klaus Mann addressed his fellow citizens, saying - "There is nothing shameful about this defeat.
"On the contrary, "shame, degradation, decomposition, the decline of German life, "that's what national socialism was.
" Germany was in ruins.
Now all eyes turned to Japan.
In the Pacific, suicide pilots calledby the Japanese "kamikaze", nosedived their planes into ships of the American fleet.
For the Japanese, even the idea of surrender was unthinkable.
It was a supreme disgrace.
Clinging on to power, the military chiefs in Tokyo sacrificed what remained of their country's youth, in order to prevent the Americans from landing in Japan.
In the end, the United States decided against an invasion of Japan, which it was calculatedwould cost the country a millionlives.
Instead, it detonated the atomic bomb.
Hiroshima, the 6th August, 1945.
The first nuclear bomb ever exploded in history killed, in a few seconds, up to 100,000 people.
Then, three days later, there was a second atomic bomb, at Nagasaki.
The bombs finally enabled of Emperor Hirohito to seek peace without losing face.
The atomic bombs had to be dropped before these Japanese soldiers and officers would finally consent to give up their arms, which was so contrary to their Bushido code of honour.
The war took the lives of 50 million people, twice as many civilians as soldiers, in an outpouring of extreme violence.
Thousands of victims suffered for many years afterwards from the appalling after-effects of nuclear radiation.
Or from the terrible loss of parents or children, exterminated in the Nazi camps.
The tragedy of the Second World War must never be forgotten.
Red Bee Media Ltd