[narrator] May, 1945.
Nazi Germany is defeated.
[music continues]
The Allied Powers: Britain, the United States of America
and the Soviet Union have won victory in Europe.
[music continues]
In London, crowds gather outside Buckingham Palace.
Jubilant revellers fill the streets of New York.
And in Moscow plans are drawn up for a massive victory parade.
[vibrant music intensifies]
But this joy will soon dissipate.
A new and very different sort of war is coming.
One which will pit the former allies
against one another.
[Churchill] From Stettin in the Baltic
to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
[music gains momentum]
However, recent attacks by rebel forces...
[music stops]
[narrator] But despite their alliance against Hitler,
this partnership between Britain,
America and the Soviet Union
was from the very beginning
marked by deception, suspicion and mistrust.
The war has been fought and won not only on the battlefield.
It has been shaped, behind the scenes,
by the secret decisions and disagreements
of just a few men.
[sombre music with drum beats]
Men of conflicting ideologies and personalities.
Men who could have been enemies as easily as they were allies.
Winston Churchill:
the tenacious Prime Minister of Great Britain,
the British bulldog,
whose sheer force of personality defined his wartime leadership.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
the President of the United States,
the only man to hold that office for four terms,
the leader who overcame the country's isolationism
to take his people into a second world war.
And Joseph Stalin,
the brutal Soviet dictator
whose long rule was characterized
by his distrust of others
and maintained by ruthless purges and terror.
This is the story of the personal battles
that shaped the military conflict;
the war behind the war.
[explosion sound fades]
[vibrant introductory theme]
[slides clicking]
‐[explosions] ‐[troops marching]
[music continues]
[falling bombs hiss]
[music continues]
[music stops]
[narrator] May, 1940.
The Nazi Blitzkrieg had devastated Europe,
as country after country fell to the German army.
The Wehrmacht stormed through Denmark,
Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
France was faltering and already partly occupied.
And the British Expeditionary Force
was having to retreat towards the French coast.
Britain's pleas for America to support them and join the war
were falling on deaf ears.
In London,
the new Prime Minister met with his War Cabinet.
Despite the disaster unfolding on the continent,
Winston Churchill was adamant: Britain had to fight on.
But senior ministers disagreed.
The British Army in France was facing complete defeat.
‐[tense music, drum beats] ‐[rumbling sounds]
To the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax,
there was a way to save the army and the country:
a peace deal with Nazi Germany.
Britain's position was precarious;
decisive leadership was needed.
Churchill had the character and the drive,
but to win over his divided cabinet
he would have to rely on the supporters of the man
he had ousted from Number 10 and railed against
in public and private:
the leader of Churchill's party, Neville Chamberlain.
Chamberlain had become Britain's Prime Minister
in 1937.
His time in Downing Street
was dominated by the growing aggression
of Nazi Germany
and his desperate attempts to avoid another war.
I suspect that for Chamberlain
the shadow of the First World War
loomed large.
The awful loss of life, the destruction.
And I don't think he could contemplate
starting another European war
which had every danger of extending beyond that.
I don't see Chamberlain
as an appeaser... well I know many do,
but he was an honourable man
who did what he thought was his best, I suspect.
But it meant he had to sup with the Devil.
[narrator] In Germany,
Adolf Hitler had made no secret of his territorial ambitions
since coming to power in 1933.
In strident nationalistic and anti‐Semitic rhetoric,
he had demanded the creation of a Greater Germany:
a Third Reich.
[crowd cheering]
By 1938, Hitler was ready.
[music in faster tempo]
The first country in his sights was Austria,
the land of his birth.
German troops crossed the border on the 12th of March, 1938.
[music stops]
There was no obvious resistance
and little more from the rest of the world.
Britain was re‐arming itself.
But the hopes in London
were that war could still be avoided.
Hitler, however, was not satisfied
with the annexation of Austria alone.
Within weeks,
he claimed the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia,
where there was a small German‐speaking population,
should be under German control.
Still, Britain and the rest of the world
did nothing.
It's easy to forget that there was a lot of support for
the idea that these were things that were happening,
as Chamberlain famously said of the invasion of Czechoslovakia,
"in a faraway country."
So, the invasion of places like Czechoslovakia,
the Anschluss with Austria in 1938,
were seen as almost someone else's problem.
These European countries and their leaderships
are doing their best
to articulate and raise the alarm
for leaders in Washington, Moscow and London,
and elsewhere,
that this will lead to further invasions
and further conquests.
So it was not just a European episode,
it was one, as they quite rightly articulated,
would lead to a grand
and more difficult and violent and long war.
[narrator] In late September 1938,
Chamberlain travelled to Munich.
He met with his French counterpart,
Edouard Daladier,
with the Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini,
and with Adolf Hitler.
The Czechoslovakians were not present
when the fate of their country was decided
and Hitler got what he wanted.
The deal agreed to the annexation
of the Sudetenland.
The settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem,
which has now been achieved,
is, in my view, only the prelude
to a larger settlement
in which all Europe may find peace.
[narrator] Chamberlain returned to Britain
and a hero's welcome on the streets.
But although some in government
were completely against such appeasement,
we now know,
there was also considerable appreciation
behind the scenes for what he had done.
Chamberlain's traditionally been the bad guy in all of this.
He comes back from Munich having signed the peace,
the peace in our time, the appeasement,
but actually, behind the scenes,
the head of the secret intelligence service MI6
had actually said to the government,
"We are not ready for war.
And if Chamberlain doesn't sign that piece of paper,
we are at war immediately with Nazi Germany,
and we aren't ready."
[narrator] A large country house in Buckinghamshire,
Bletchley Park,
was secretly purchased to become the centre
of Britain's wartime intelligence operation.
We now know from a study of intelligence files
that British intelligence was preparing for war
in 1938.
We knew that war was inevitable; it was just a matter of when.
[narrator] But in the tearooms of Westminster,
other meetings were being held
that would change the course of history.
A small gang of Conservative MPs,
led by Winston Churchill,
was utterly opposed to the appeasement of Hitler.
They discussed how Britain's foreign policy
could be changed
and how the Prime Minister could be removed to allow this.
Winston Churchill was certainly not willing to do
any kind of deal with Hitler
and this was a great difference between him and Halifax
and Chamberlain.
[narrator] As another world war loomed,
Churchill was already in his mid‐sixties.
His career had seemed set to end in disappointment,
a politician remembered chiefly for his failures
in the First World War
and his mistakes as Chancellor in the 1920s.
When we think of Churchill during these years,
he was seen as an outcast
on many of the great issues of British politics at the time.
Churchill's career up to 1939,
it was a study in failure.
[narrator] Churchill's opposition to appeasement
had given him a new political and moral purpose.
He warned that Hitler's demands
would not end with Czechoslovakia.
He would soon be proved right.
On September the 1st, 1939,
the peace Chamberlain thought he had guaranteed,
was shattered.
Germany invaded Poland. Appeasement had failed.
Two days later, on September the 3rd, 1939,
Britain declared war.
While across the Atlantic, just a few hours afterwards,
United States President, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
declared his country's neutrality.
This nation will remain a neutral nation.
[narrator] For now, this would be Europe's war.
His immediate concern really
is how he balances approaching the situation in Europe
with the fact that he is trying to keep the United States,
at least for the time being, out of the war.
[narrator] Over the next eight months,
German troops and tanks
advanced rapidly across the continent.
[suspenseful music]
Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg
were now under Nazi occupation.
As country after country fell,
so did the popularity of Britain's Prime Minister,
Neville Chamberlain.
In London, moves were afoot to remove him from office.
But how would they succeed?
[vibrant introductory theme]
Britain declared war on Nazi Germany.
The appeasement of Hitler by PM Neville Chamberlain
had failed.
A war cabinet was assembled
and Chamberlain invited one of his fiercest critics
to become First Lord of the Admiralty.
Winston Churchill was no stranger to the role.
He had been in charge of the admiralty
in the First World War,
when his record was marred
by the disastrous amphibious landing
of Allied troops at Gallipoli, in Turkey, in 1915.
[Dockter] This is something that his political opponents
used to say he was a risk taker,
and a sort of... politically unreliable
or strategically unreliable,
and it even haunts him into the Second World War.
[narrator] Churchill would not fare much better
in the early months of the Second World War.
He'd returned to the Admiralty
determined to rebuild his reputation
as a military strategist.
In an effort to try and slow Hitler's advance,
he championed a plan to move allied troops
into Norway and Sweden,
to cut the supply lines of iron ore
to the Nazi War Machine.
Unfortunately for the British, the Germans got there first.
They invaded Norway on the 9th April, 1940.
Britain attempted a counterattack,
but it was unsuccessful.
The campaign was a military and strategic disaster.
Yet, this time,
it was the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain,
rather than the First Lord of the Admiralty,
that got the blame.
I fear Chamberlain's goose was already cooked.
In some ways, Britain hadn't really
got its head around the fact
it was a war, and not only a war,
but a war with a ruthless military power.
And mistakes were made, without a doubt, in Norway.
And the surprising thing, in some ways,
is that Churchill survived it,
but it didn't seem to be held against him.
[narrator] Behind closed doors in Westminster,
there were some who saw
the public's willingness to blame Chamberlain
as an opportunity.
As Allied troops withdrew from Norway in late April,
the Prime Minister's political opponents
made their move.
On the 7th of May, the House of Commons gathered
for one of the most momentous debates in its history.
Moving adeptly from the disasters
of the Norway campaign,
speeches soon took aim
at the government's overall conduct of the war
and at Chamberlain's position as Prime Minister.
On the second day of the debate, a vote was forced.
It transformed the debate into a vote of confidence
in Chamberlain himself.
It became a sort of de facto vote of "no confidence"
partly because Chamberlain made the mistake actually,
of standing up in the House of Commons
and saying "I hope my friends will vote with me on this."
So, if you like, challenging his Conservative Party MPs
to back him or sack him.
And, of course, he got the answer he didn't want.
[narrator] Although the Prime Minister won,
around 40 Conservative MPs voted against him.
and 60 abstained.
The blow to his authority
meant his resignation was inevitable.
Chamberlain wanted his foreign secretary,
Lord Halifax, to succeed him.
But Halifax, was seen as altogether too patrician,
too high Anglican and too much of a Chamberlain crony
to be acceptable to Labour Leader Clement Atlee
and the opposition benches.
Halifax told Chamberlain
he did not want to be Prime Minister
and pleaded ill health.
On May the 10th, 1940,
as Germany swept into the Low Countries,
Chamberlain resigned.
[music fades]
That evening, Churchill made his way
to Buckingham Palace
to meet King George VI
and become Britain's second wartime Prime Minister.
The rest of the country still had no idea
that Chamberlain had even resigned.
What had been agreed between a few men
behind the scenes in Westminster
would have repercussions across Europe.
Addressing the Commons, Churchill declared,
"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."
Churchill would be
a very different leader for Britain.
[Kumarasingham] He was seen as someone who would be able
to bring the country together,
to bring Parliament together and prosecute the war.
But it's interesting to note
that when Churchill did become Prime Minister in May 1940,
he was not the leader of the Conservative Party.
Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservative Party,
and he remained in the cabinet
effectively as the Deputy Prime Minister.
The realities of British politics
at that high elite level, where there was still
a vast majority of the Conservative Party,
supported Neville Chamberlain,
and did not want Churchill
to become leader of the Conservative Party.
[narrator] Churchill's position was precarious in the extreme.
To stay in Downing Street,
he would have to keep the party grandees on side.
And events on the continent were soon to test that support.
German forces had swept through Belgium,
the Netherlands and into France.
The British Expeditionary Force had been dispatched to Europe
at the outbreak of war.
But by late May 1940,
around 400,000 service men were encircled in Belgium
and Northern France.
We had put forward an expeditionary force
to bolster up the French and the Belgians.
Not of itself very large comparatively,
but politically most significant.
And the collapse of France and the collapse of Belgium
really left no other outcome
for the British Expeditionary Force
other than withdrawal by sea.
[narrator] Retreating to the edge
of the English Channel, at Dunkirk,
they faced annihilation
at the hands of the advancing Germans.
After just 16 days as Prime Minister,
Churchill now faced a crisis which could end his premiership
and the ability of the British to continue to fight the Nazis.
The fact that France collapsed so quickly
came as a real shock to Winston Churchill.
[narrator] On the 26th of May,
as a desperate attempt was launched
to rescue the stranded soldiers from Dunkirk,
the War Cabinet began
a two‐day‐long meeting in London.
But the politicians were starkly divided.
The new Prime Minister wanted to fight on,
while the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax,
wanted to contact Mussolini
and convince the Italian dictator
to broker peace terms with Hitler.
Churchill was completely opposed to this.
But he also recognised that in the war cabinet
that he wasn't necessarily going to win the fight
against Halifax and Chamberlain.
[narrator] The battle in Whitehall went on for days.
The future of Britain and the course of the entire war
hung in the balance.
The war cabinet was in complete disagreement
about the way forward.
If Halifax resigned, and others followed,
the government could fall.
It was Churchill's powers of persuasion
on the 28th of May that carried the day.
Nobody knows for sure
what exactly Winston Churchill said,
but they came out of that meeting
and everyone was convinced that they were going to fight on.
So it's a remarkable moment when Winston Churchill changes
the course of history personally.
What you have in a sense is this whole secret world
going on, pulling the strings of what's happening.
[narrator] Later that day, the Cabinet unanimously agreed.
Britain would fight on.
The attempted rescue of more than 300,000 troops
stranded on the shores of Dunkirk
had already begun, on the 26th of May.
And in just 12 days, a swiftly assembled fleet
of more than 700 vessels, large and small,
arrived on the French coast and carried to safety
the bulk of what Churchill called
the "root and core and brain of the British Army."
[Jackson] The extraordinary response,
the naval response, not only the Royal Navy,
but of numerous small boats owned by whomever,
civilians on whatever calling, a remarkable response.
Very brave defence of the perimeter
by those troops who had given that job
which should only end in one of two ways for them:
death or capture.
And they did that job and bought the time
for the sea evacuation to take place.
The RAF put in a great effort
to maintain over the perimeter
air superiority or least air equivalents.
And keep the German bombers off the soldier's backs.
[narrator] On the 4th of June,
Churchill made one of his most famous
and stirring speeches.
[Churchill] We shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields,
and in the streets.
We shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender!
[narrator] Churchill's brilliant words
transformed a military defeat into an act of heroic defiance.
[gloomy tune]
But Dunkirk was, at best, a glorious failure.
I don't think Churchill is ever under any illusions
that this was anything other than a catastrophic defeat
and regarded it as so, and just the prelude
to what he expected, which was a German invasion.
And he was aware, of course, that he got the soldiers off,
but they left all their artillery,
and their trucks and their tanks behind them.
[narrator] The British Army had lost almost 50,000 soldiers
as well as most of its tanks and equipment.
Churchill, remember, after Dunkirk,
warns the British people
that wars aren't won by glorious evacuations.
The Dunkirk evacuation, of course we think of it
as the heroic efforts of 330,000 men
evacuated from the beaches.
But we mustn't forget that 50,000 were left behind.
5,000 taken and, you know, went into some sort of hiding.
And so, behind the scenes
there's a new branch of military intelligence,
known as MI9,
and it's their role very swiftly to set up secret escape lines
to get those soldiers,
and later airmen if they're shot down,
back from behind enemy lines to fight again.
[narrator] Acknowledging Britain's vulnerability,
Churchill desperately reached out to Roosevelt
through a series of telegrams,
in the hope that the President might bring the United States
into the war.
But despite his best efforts,
Churchill had to settle with the US
allowing Britain to purchase much needed arms and equipment.
Roosevelt's "cash and carry" scheme
gave Britain the supplies she needed
to remain in the war.
For Churchill, he thought that the aid
that came from the US was of paramount importance
to surviving what the Germans might throw at the allies.
[narrator] Adolf Hitler had expected Britain
to seek a peace settlement
after the capitulation of France.
But he had underestimated
the kind of a man he was dealing with
and the resolve of the British people.
Churchill stuck to his word to never surrender.
[solemn tune with drum beats]
The fight for Europe moved to the skies
with the Battle of Britain.
The Royal Air Force now took on the German Luftwaffe
in a deadly battle for air supremacy.
a secret message was hand delivered
to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
by Sir Stafford Cripps, British Ambassador in Moscow.
The telegram came from Winston Churchill.
The Prime Minister had a warning for Stalin.
British intelligence had detected
massive German troop build‐ups on the Soviet border.
It could mean only one thing,
that Hitler planned to invade the Soviet Union.
[gloomy tune]
Stalin, paranoid as ever,
dismissed it as a "capitalist trick."
Roosevelt also had intelligence about the attack
and told Stalin it was as certain
as that the night followed the day
that as soon as Hitler had conquered France,
he would turn on Russia.
Both Churchill and Roosevelt warned Stalin in 1941
that an invasion was going to happen.
Stalin disregards these warnings.
Why does he do this?
It's because he doesn't trust either Roosevelt or Churchill.
Stalin was an ideological person.
He believed in a major clash
between communists and capitalists
as being inevitable.
This had informed his thinking for two decades.
Churchill, in particular, was the leader
of the world's preeminent imperial power.
And they'd been portrayed in Soviet propaganda
as the main enemy throughout the 1920s, going into the 1930s.
So, it's not surprising
that Stalin disregarded their warnings in 1941,
and he decided to go with his gut instinct,
which was to do nothing about the invasion.
And that proved to be a catastrophic mistake.
[narrator] But Stalin continued to ignore the allies' warnings.
He even ordered his men not to fire
on Nazi surveillance planes that crossed the border,
preferring to believe Hitler's ludicrous explanation
that the pilots had simply got lost,
rather than entertain Churchill and Roosevelt's warnings
that Hitler was about to turn on him.
[Folly] It's interesting that before the German invasion,
about a week before, Churchill and Roosevelt
had exchanged correspondence about the possibilities
of a German attack,
which they both had been receiving intelligence,
was going to happen.
And Churchill at that point had assured Roosevelt
that he wasn't thinking of alliance
with the Soviet Union,
and he knew that that would be very difficult
in the United States too.
But Roosevelt, like Churchill,
appreciated the addition, to the Allied cause,
of Soviet power.
And he too, like Churchill,
was prepared to provide support for the Soviet Union.
[narrator] Two years earlier, in the summer of 1939,
Britain, France and the Soviet Union
had been deep in talks over the growing aggression
of Nazi Germany.
A shared response was called for,
a united front against a common enemy.
What they didn't know was that the Soviet Union
was also holding talks with Nazi Germany.
As far as Stalin was concerned,
the arrangement with the British and French
was much more risky, because the risk was
that Germany would attack Poland,
and the Soviet Union would now be in the front line
in a war against the Germans,
without any guarantee
that the British and French would do anything at all.
He saw Hitler on a march across Europe
and, initially, Stalin's plan
was to make a pact with the Western powers,
but Western powers ultimately did not trust Stalin.
Stalin loses patience
and sees a deal can be made with Hitler.
And he manages to spread soviet influence
into Eastern Europe.
[narrator] On the 23rd of August, 1939,
German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop,
arrived in Moscow to complete a stunning deal
with his Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov.
The Molotov‐Ribbentrop pact
agreed that neither Germany nor the Soviet Union
would attack the other for a decade.
Nor would they support any other country doing so.
Hitler had suggested the deal last a century,
but Stalin said ten years would do.
It was hardly a marriage made in heaven.
For years, each side had demonised the other.
The Soviet film industry constantly pumped out
anti‐Nazi propaganda.
And Hitler had called the Russian people
a "mass of born slaves"
and had declared it Germany's mission
to rid the world of Bolshevism.
Equally, the Soviet dictator didn't trust Britain or France.
And he did not share their belief
that war was avoidable.
So, if a conflict was coming, he wanted to make sure
that Germans were bogged down in Western Europe
for as long as possible.
[sombre tune]
The Russians were completely unprepared for war.
In his rampant paranoia,
Stalin had purged thousands of officers from the Red Army.
It was typical Stalin behaviour.
And so, the Red Army,
at the point of their invasion by the Nazis,
were very much decimated in their senior command.
[Whitewood] 30,000 military personnel
were affected by this purge.
There were thousands of arrests,
there were hundreds of executions.
The main reason why Stalin did this
is because he mistrusted his military.
He believed there was a spy scare
and espionage agents within officer corps in 1937.
[narrator] Stalin hoped this pact with Germany
would give him more time.
But there was another part of the deal
that was kept secret.
One which made the pact even more attractive
to the Soviet dictator.
A private agreement between them which would seal the fates
of millions of innocent civilians.
[sombre tune]
Following the victory he confidently predicted,
Hitler had promised Stalin that Eastern Europe
would be divided between Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence.
They would rule the continent together.
Hitler, of course,
never had any intention of honouring the promise
but Stalin allowed himself to be flattered and beguiled.
And initially, he saw his faith rewarded.
they seized the west of the country.
Sixteen days later,
the Soviet Union invaded from the east.
Poland was divided and wiped off the map,
just as agreed.
[sombre tune]
The division of Poland and the creation of a buffer
to protect the Soviet Union
was critical to Stalin's sense of security.
For many years, Stalin had been interested in acquiring
what we know as buffer zones.
He was interested, of course,
in spreading Communism worldwide,
but the two things were not mutually exclusive.
Stalin could look to push Communism
further across Europe and also secure the Soviet state
with this ring of countries against the invasion.
The Russians and the Poles had fought a war in 1920‐1921,
which the Soviets had lost,
and so Stalin was quite keen for a bit of revenge.
[narrator] In Stalin's mind,
the Molotov‐Ribbentrop pact was working.
Trade between the USSR and Germany increased.
Soviet grain, oil and other raw materials
were exchanged for German industrial goods
and military equipment, including even a naval cruiser.
The trade agreement in the Nazi‐Soviet Pact
carried on.
So as the Nazis and their troops
were massing at the Soviet border,
the Soviet Union was still sending them goods,
and still trading with them and actually giving them
resources they needed to later invade.
[narrator] But Hitler had not changed his beliefs.
His hatred for what he called "Jewish Bolshevism" remained.
As did his contempt for Stalin.
Once the pact had been signed,
it made war more or less inevitable.
[narrator] But why was Stalin,
a man who had built a totalitarian state
based on suspicion and paranoia,
so easily seduced by Hitler?
His calculation was that Hitler would not fight a war
against the Soviet Union
while he was still engaged with Britain.
He believed that he saw Hitler's motivations,
believed that Hitler wanted to avoid a war on two fronts,
that Hitler would appreciate the economic aid
that he was getting from the Soviet Union,
and that Hitler would be prepared
to allow that relationship to continue
while it was benefiting him, and most particularly,
while he was still fighting the war in the West.
He was also somewhat deluded by German deception plans,
which were calibrated to convince him
that German build up in Poland
was all part of their build up to attack Britain.
[narrator] By mid‐1940, the Soviet Union
had control of the territories bordering the Balkans.
They were now within striking distance
of the Romania oil fields Germany depended on.
Even while waging war against France and Britain,
Hitler had one eye on the East.
But the Soviet Union, even when taken by surprise,
would be a formidable enemy.
German commanders knew they would have to move fast
and secure victory before Stalin could mobilise
his own massive, if inexperienced, forces.
Germany planned to attack the Soviet Union
along an 1,800‐mile front,
from occupied East Prussia, Romania and Poland.
It would be the largest invasion force ever assembled.
148 divisions, and 3.5 million troops,
equipped with 3,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces
and 2,500 aircraft.
One army group would strike north,
towards Leningrad.
A second group would strike south
into Ukraine and down towards the Black Sea.
A third group would head for Moscow.
Their aim was to take the city within just four months.
[thrilling tune]
But the Nazi plans were discovered.
The German government and military
communicated through a cipher known as Enigma.
They thought it was impenetrable.
But they were wrong...
With the help of Polish cryptanalysts
based at Bletchley Park,
British intelligence had broken its first wartime Enigma message
in January 1940.
The messages they intercepted in 1941
revealed three Panzer tank divisions
on the move in Poland
and movements of more German troops
towards other parts of the Soviet border.
[thrilling tune intensifies]
The German invasion of the Soviet Union
was imminent.
[Folly] Churchill had sent a message to Stalin
at the beginning of April, based on some of the material
coming from the Bletchley Park operation.
The problem was that they couldn't reveal
the source of that material because it was ultra‐secret.
So it rather reduced
the credibility of the information
when it got to Stalin,
who's getting a lot of information
from his own agents and from other people.
He thinks it's disinformation being spread by Churchill,
because if he was Churchill, he'd try and persuade
the Soviet Union to come into the war.
So he just chuckles to himself and thinks,
"I know what you're trying to do, Churchill,
and I'm not going to be fooled."
[narrator] More warnings followed,
giving detailed information
on the German units massing on the Soviet border.
Still, Stalin did not believe them.
He was about to pay a devastating price.
‐[vibrant, driving brass music] ‐[cannon balls firing]
[music stops]
On June the 22nd, 1941,
Nazi Germany and its Axis allies launched Operation Barbarossa.
The invasion along an 1,800‐mile wide front
took the Soviets completely by surprise.
I think the Germans invaded about 3:00 in the morning,
then at about 8:00 that morning
the orders to the Red Army were given
to take up defensive positions.
So, they were on the back foot.
The Germans battle hardened in France,
Belgium knew what they were doing.
Well‐equipped at this point and a very large force indeed.
[narrator] Stalin was at his country estate
when news of the invasion came.
He did not emerge for a week, hiding away in his dacha,
drunkenly despairing that his government
had ruined "Lenin's legacy".
The Soviet dictator
had been privately warned by Churchill
that Hitler's betrayal was coming.
But Stalin had not believed it.
He's isolated, it seems like
he's been totally overwhelmed by events
and he leaves it to his deputies and his allies
to actually take it upon themselves
to respond to the invasion.
It's telling that it's Molotov
who gives the first address to the Soviet people
announcing the war.
[narrator] Now the Nazi Blitzkrieg,
which had conquered Western Europe,
was unleashed on the Soviet Union.
[sombre tune]
While Stalin wallowed in drunken self‐pity,
millions of his people were forced to flee their homes.
His armies were fighting for their lives.
The Red Army's inexperienced commanders
were no match for the battle‐hardened Germans.
Stalin ordered that his men stand their ground,
rather than retreat and regroup.
The result was encirclement and surrender.
[sombre, tense tune]
Huge numbers of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner.
Stalin sent desperate messages to London.
He pleaded with Churchill
to open a second front in the West,
so that Hitler would have to fight on two sides.
Britain had been quick to strike
an alliance with the Soviets after the invasion.
It was sending what supplies it could spare.
But it was in no position
to mount an invasion of Nazi‐occupied Europe.
I think what Churchill saw was an opportunity.
And that is that he recognised
that this was a moment to bring Joseph Stalin in
on his own side.
And as he famously said,
even if Hitler decided to invade hell,
he would at least make a favourable statement
about the Devil in the House of Commons.
He decided, pretty much instantly,
that Britain would align itself
with the cause of the Soviet Union.
There were many misgivings
about lining up with the Bolsheviks,
but he, on the very day,
decided that he would make a public broadcast
pledging British support for the Soviet Union,
and he does so in one of his greatest speeches,
it was actually a TV broadcast, he says that nobody's been
as big an opponent of communism as him,
but this isn't about communism,
it's about Russian people defending their heartland,
defending their women and their children,
and Britain will march alongside them.
[narrator] By mid‐July, the Wehrmacht had advanced
500 miles into Soviet territory,
had captured nearly 600,000 Red Army soldiers.
But this rapid advance came at a cost to the Germans.
The vast distances were stretching their supply lines
to breaking point.
And the scorched earth policy of Soviet defenders
left little behind that the invaders could use
in terms of food or shelter.
Already, time was running short
for the Germans to achieve victory
before the extreme Russian weather set in.
[tense tune]
By autumn 1941,
the Nazis had Moscow in their sights.
Taking the capital would not just be a symbolic victory.
The city was a major hub of industry and transportation.
But Hitler had other ideas.
To the despair of his generals, he changed his strategy
and redirected forces south, towards Kiev,
and north to Leningrad,
where the Red Army was putting up stubborn resistance.
Moscow could wait.
[Boff] In the autumn of 1941, he knew
that he had... only had the resources to do one thing.
I think from a military standpoint
actually he was probably right.
The important thing was to destroy the Red Army.
The important thing was not necessarily to get to Moscow.
The problem that he experienced, however,
of course was just that Russia's so big.
[narrator] The Germans who were heading towards Moscow,
slowed their advance as the Red Army dug in.
Autumn rains turned roads to mud.
And then the Russian winter set in.
It was one of the coldest of the twentieth century.
Temperatures plummeted.
And little winter equipment was reaching German soldiers
at the front.
Their coats were too thin.
They could not use their guns or vehicles.
Frostbite affected thousands.
The Germans were not ready
for the harshness of the Russian winter.
[narrator] Hitler had underestimated
not just the depths of the Russian winter,
but the depths of Russian determination.
[machine gun firing]
The snow would not last forever.
The fight on the Eastern Front was far from over.
‐[vibrant music] ‐[aircraft dropping bombs]
[vibrant introductory theme]
Next time, on Race to Victory:
The Soviet Union's desperate fight for survival.
This was now a fight for Mother Russia,
for the soul of Mother Russia.
And so they tackle too with a will
and accepted horrific casualties.
Many people think they know Stalin very well indeed
because in many ways he is obvious,
a vicious brutal dictator,
who cared little about sacrificing
huge numbers of human lives in the cause.
He is the man of course who said
"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is statistic."
[narrator] Whilst in Washington,
FDR continues to sit on his hands,
until a new foe
makes a devastating entrance to the field of battle,
in a totally unexpected location.
[Roosevelt] A date which will live in infamy,
the United States of America
was suddenly and deliberately attacked.
[narrator] The European war is about to become a World War.
[explosion]