At the end of November 1941,
Fritz Todt, the head of the German armaments ministry demanded
a meeting with Adolf Hitler.
Todt said to Hitler, the war would cost something
like $150 billion, which is more than Germany's gross domestic
product before the war.
Put bluntly, Nazi Germany's failure to knock Russia out the war
in the summer of 1941 meant that she could basically no longer
afford the war.
As Todt said, this war can no longer be won militarily.
Now just think about that for a moment.
In the winter of 1941 -
this is even before Hitler had failed to take Moscow,
years before the end of the war -
Hitler is actually being told that he can't win the war.
Yet Hitler chooses to fight Hitler on.
Hitler does more than that because on December 11th he then declares
war on the United States after Pearl Harbor.
Just think about that.
He is declaring war on the richest nation on Earth when he's got no
money to do so.
It's surely total lunacy.
On the face of it, it's crazy.
But what you've really got to do is to try and see the world
from Hitler's perspective.
One of the factors still influencing Hitler's decision
to continue to fight the war to the desperate end
is his conviction that he's really fighting two wars.
He's fighting the standard war between great powers
but he was also fighting a war
against the international Jewish conspiracy.
This is his chance to attack what he regards as the biggest enemy,
the Jewish bankers in America.
Unless you see Hitler's vision of war in that way,
it's quite hard to work out why he continues to fight the way he does.
For Hitler, this is a war of numbers and there's only one number
that counts.
It's not dollars.
It's not Reichsmarks.
It's the number of Jews he can kill.
Right from the very beginning, Hitler's war was never
just about conquest.
It was about extermination.
Hitler's plan was always to take over vast swathes of land
and basically to get rid of its population to make room
for Germans - Lebensraum.
And just as he did in Poland, Hitler sends squads of merciless
killers to Russia.
Their sole purpose is the ethnic cleansing of Germany's Lebensraum.
In preparing the Operation Barbarossa, four Einsatzgruppen
units were created.
In the summer of 1941, they were expanded, initially
from 3,000, to maybe around 30,000
people involved in direct atrocities.
And the Einsatzgruppen became the primary forces behind the
mass shootings of Jews
in Ukraine, in Belorussia, the Baltic states,
and in southern Russia.
But death squads form only part of the Nazi killing machine.
It's also important to remember the cost which was built
into the plan.
It wasn't incidental of allowing millions of people,
millions of Russians and Ukrainians to starve to death.
The sheer callousness of Nazi strategy is thrown into full focus
as the panzers of Army Group North reach Leningrad in September 1941.
This is the city of the revolution named after Lenin.
The German army no longer had the strength to take both
Leningrad and Moscow.
So, Hitler decided to starve the city.
But he didn't intend to starve Leningrad into submission.
He wanted to starve it to death.
Hitler had absolutely no concern for the welfare of the civilians.
He said, "We have no interest in saving a single civilian."
A cordon would be placed around the city.
So, not only couldn't the city be relieved but also the citizens
couldn't come out.
This is a brutal process in which, at the very beginning
of it, the Nazis bomb a food depot.
The four-acre site is engulfed in flames incinerating 3,000 tonnes
of valuable bread-making flour,
enough for six months.
This begins the longest siege in history.
Almost 3.5 million people were trapped by the siege of Leningrad.
In the end, they held out for 872 days -
that's almost two and a half years - against constant bombardment
by the Germans.
A daily minimum of 1,000 tonnes
of supplies is needed to keep
the population of Leningrad alive.
Most of these are ferried across Lake Ladoga to the east
of the city along a hard-won corridor carved out
of the German lines.
When winter set in, that lake froze, and that meant that the Soviets
were able to build a highway across the ice.
So, food and supplies could be brought in
and people could be brought out.
But the ice was not always reliable.
One woman was travelling across the ice as part of a convoy.
She was in the second lorry.
Her children were in the first lorry, and she recalls watching
that lorry with her children just sink down into the ice.
Her lorry didn't stop.
It just simply went round the first lorry and she watched her children
going under as her lorry simply carried on.
Despite the highway, supplies often fall far short of the 1,000 tonnes
per day the city needs.
By November 1941, the food ration is 125g of bread a day,
which is not enough calorific intake to sustain human life.
It is a fraction of the rations received in other countries,
even under wartime conditions.
Imagine this loaf of bread is the daily caloric intake required
for somebody in the Second World War.
In Britain, even with rationing, you actually get more than
a loaf per person per day.
In Nazi Germany,
well, it starts off at a loaf per person per day but it drops
as the war goes on.
But that has to be better than occupied Europe.
Here you're on half a loaf per person per day.
That's just enough to stop you from starving.
But even that's better than if you found yourself in Leningrad
besieged by the Nazis.
That's just two slices per person per day.
In 1944, in the Warsaw Ghetto, a single slice of bread.
And if you were in a concentration camp, it drops to just that.
And that's murder - pure and simple.
Things get so bad in Leningrad that people
resort to all kinds of desperate measures to stay alive.
People were eating household pets and rats, anything
even if it was poisonous.
They had no heating.
They had no transportation.
They had to go and fetch water from a hole in the River Neva.
The effort required even to go and do that was enormous.
Grabbing bread from the hands of strangers, and there was
an expression which was quite simply, "Don't go to bed."
Because, very often if you lay down you were in such a physically
weak state that you simply wouldn't wake up again.
But dying in your sleep could be the least of your problems.
A housing administrator visited a woman whose children had died,
and there was a pot boiling on the stove and the woman said,
"Oh, that's mutton."
So the housing administrator took out the lid and started ladling
through it and there was a human hand inside the pot.
Over the course of the siege,
something like 2,000 people
were arrested for cannibalism.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
More than 1.1 million soldiers and civilians die in Leningrad,
at a rate of around 1,000 a day.
All part of the Nazi plan to starve Russia to death.
More Russian people were killed at Leningrad
than British and American soldiers were killed throughout
the entirety of the war.
But Leningrad refuses to surrender and the siege drags on for years.
872 days starting in September 1941 ending in January 1944.
In the end, it would have made far more sense for Hitler either
to bring his troops away from Leningrad or to devote enough
troops to actually take the city.
Yet for Hitler, Leningrad is a symptom of a much, much darker
malaise, because by January 1942,
the Nazis had decided to fulfil their racial destiny.
They must turn murder into an industry.
On January 20th 1942,
15 middle-ranking functionaries of the Nazi administration
met in a lakeside country house at Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin.
It was a number of bureaucrats meeting to decide precisely
how to best exterminate the Jewish people...
..before relaxing over Cognac and cigars.
It is not a moment when key decisions are made.
But actually just collating and coordinating.
The Wannsee conference marks that switch from mass shootings
mostly in the former Soviet territories to mass extermination,
which means the construction of dedicated killing facilities.
It is quite significant in some ways.
For one thing, it was actually trying to implicate people
from different areas, different backgrounds so that more people
would feel some responsibility, both for carrying this forwards
and maintaining secrecy as best they could.
By the end of the war, as many as
800,000 people had become
implicated, either directly
or indirectly, in what would become
chillingly known as the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
Their murderous intent was driven by Hitler's growing conviction
that he must kill as many Jews as he can.
This is a war which has accelerated during this period because Hitler
thinks the Jews really are responsible for what's happening.
He thinks that for every German killed o the Eastern Front,
you know, a Jew has got to pay.
Then, on December 7th 1941,
Hitler's war against international Jewry takes on a whole new urgency
after Japan bombs Pearl Harbor.
At the end of 1941, the beginning of 1942, there was no doubt that
the programme against the Jews becomes radicalised.
Partly because the United States has entered the war -
it's now a global war against the Jews and international Jewry,
and that if he doesn't fight that war to the end,
they will destroy Germany.
And so this is where the focal point of the war for Hitler,
the fight against the Jews really came to a head.
He felt that even if he was going to suffer military defeat,
he would have gone a long way towards accomplishing
his central war aim by exterminating the Jews.
His time was limited and he would have to find more expeditious ways
to eliminate the Jewish people.
Yet while the war with America may have accelerated the Holocaust,
it did not start it.
Some historians argue that actually it was the development of a European
war into a world war with the entry of America that made
all the difference.
But I think all the evidence suggests that the difference
had already been in the planning in the preceding months.
That planning was prompted by a brutally simple logistics problem.
The way in which the Nazis had murdered Jews in the former
Soviet Union through shooting couldn't be repeated infinitely
for the Jews of the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe.
The shooters having to get blind drunk,
some of the shooters having severe mental problems as a result,
so they start looking for more efficient ways of killing.
During the autumn of 1941,
experiments on Soviet prisoners of war as well as on Jews
were carried out and the idea was to find the best, the quickest
the safest means of murdering Jews.
In Chelmno, they devised specially constructed vans
where the exhaust pipe was piped back in.
People were told to get in the back of the truck and in the course
of that journey to a mass grave they'd asphyxiated those people
with carbon monoxide fumes.
So Chelmno was the first place where they really started
bringing Jews to a specific place
in order to kill them, rather than going to places
where there were lots of Jews and killing them
where they found them.
At the same time as between 150,000 and 300,000 Jews and Gypsies
were being suffocated in vans at Chelmno,
another more efficient method of killing
was being developed elsewhere.
There were six sanatoria for the mentally and physically
disabled within the Reich that were repurposed to kill
the mentally and physically disabled.
However, in August '41 there is this
public sermon by Bishop Clemens, Count von Galen,
there is a lot of public outcry and Hitler, ever worried
about his support in the population, terminates that officially.
That's at exactly the same time as reports are coming from the east
saying that the shootings are not going well.
And, so, the euthanasia experts are brought in to look at other ways
of gassing and one of these is to experiment with Zyklon B gas,
which they do on September 3rd in Auschwitz killing Soviet
prisoners of war on that particular experiment.
This proved so effective that the Nazis eventually converted
the nearby POW camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau
into a dedicated death camp,
with four gas chambers capable of killing 4,416 people a day,
almost 1.6 million people a year.
Additional killing facilities were created at Belzec,
Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka in Poland.
It took no time before the death camps were functioning
like clockwork.
The camps were heavily camouflaged so people would arrive thinking
they were being taken to a work camp.
You would be subjected to a selection process.
If you were sent one way because you were old, or you were
young, or you were unfit to work,
then you would essentially be sent to have a shower.
This was in fact not a shower but a gas chamber.
They would have to get undressed, leave their belongings,
and so on, and then they would be herded into the gas chambers.
Either a Zyklon B tablet would be put into a special hatch and would
gas everybody inside to death,
or else carbon monoxide would be pumped in.
Either way, everybody in that supposed shower would end up dead.
Their bodies would then be cleared away by the Sonderkommando.
These were inmates whose job it was to take away the gold teeth,
to take away anything else that could be used and to dispose
of the body.
Mostly, Sonderkommando gangs worked for a little while and then
they too were gassed.
But a few did survive, and the way they describe what must
have been a struggle within the gas chambers, how the strongest
the fittest were on top of the mound and the weak,
and the old, and the children were at the bottom
partly trampled to death.
Sonderkommando members were themselves victims,
and so the perpetrators again had an easier job of it not
having to do that very emotive close work with the dead bodies
of those they'd just killed.
Now, if you survived the entry procedure, that was because
you had some work left in you.
You would therefore have your head shaved, you would receive a tattoo,
you would be sent to a barracks and there your work would begin,
making munitions, or whatever it was that was being made
inside that camp.
You would live on starvation rations.
You would be liable to be killed at any moment.
And not just killed.
Women in the camps could be subjected to the most
inhumane treatment.
An SS Sergeant, a man called Erich Bauer, recalled the fact that
that he had kept two sex slaves, two Jewish actresses
called Ruth and Gisela and he had kept them,
and then other SS, NCOs officers,
people had come in on a regular basis and just basically raped them
and he had complained in his testimony
about the fact that their being raped at night in his custody
used to keep him awake.
Like so many others, the girls were used like animals, then gassed
once their usefulness was over.
This took state-sponsored mass murder to a whole new level.
There had been previous genocides, for instance, the Armenian
genocide in Turkey
during the First World War,
and others before that throughout history.
But the death camps were something unique in human history.
Hitler, and Himmler, and the SS industrialise this process.
You had the transport system.
The fact that it was not so difficult
through Germany's excellent railway system to move these people
to death centres.
This was the supreme perversion of the industrial age.
To industrialise murder, to turn it into an industrial process,
to make it into the everyday.
Between them, these five Polish death camps murdered at least
1,474,166 human beings
by the end of 1942.
And each campaign only needed a couple of hundred prison guards
to run them.
In these hellish places,
even a human kindness could inadvertently snuff out life.
Frida Weinman was the daughter of a woman with three young children.
And when they arrived at Auschwitz, Frida and her two brothers were sent
one way, while Frida's mother was handed somebody else's child
and sent the other way.
And when Frida's older brother saw this happening,
he sent his little brother over to the other queue to stand
with Frida's mother, because he felt that his little brother
would feel safer with his own mother.
But of course, what he was actually doing was condemning his brother
to death because they were in the queue to be taken straight
to the gas chamber.
A quite different example, which I think is so little written about,
is that of gay men.
There was a French homosexual, called Pierre Seel
and he had to stand and see how his young lover
called Jo, with whom he was deeply in love,
was brought into the camp, was made to stand in the middle
in the appelplatz, had a bucket put over his head,
and then dogs were unleashed on him.
Pierre Seel could never get over that experience
for the rest of his life.
That's the kind of human tragedy that multiplied by millions
was taking place every single day.
So, how did a civilised 20th century society get to the point
where it was mass murdering millions of people just because
of who they were?
We can talk about rabid anti-Semitism, we can talk
about Nazi ideology and seeing the Jews as the root of all evil.
But all of that doesn't ultimately explain the madness of deciding
you are going to physically murder all these human beings of every age
from tiny babyhood through to old age.
One of the most important things in relation to the Holocaust is not
simply to sideline it as something from history,
something that that happened a long time ago to other people.
The main thing is not to forget that this happened.
But even more importantly not to forget how it happened.
A big part of it is depriving people of their humanity.
Even in the way we talk about other people.
That it's better that they drown and arrive on our shores.
This is the kind of mind-set that is not a million miles
from where we ended up at the end of the 1930s.
You can see the initial problems being in 1933-34 when people
just fall into line.
Whether it's careerism, opportunism, bandwagon effect.
I think that capitulation by people who should have known better
and should have done otherwise in the first 18 months is the first
step where it really goes badly wrong.
It's partly because of the endless propaganda that presents a Jew
as the enemy, and so on.
And then you increase that with little acts by saying
that these people are different.
These people are not good.
They're not healthy to society as a whole.
And soon, people are taking this for granted,
that that is the way things are.
Well, perhaps they deserve to be treated
like this because, you know, there's no smoke without fire.
And then it gets more extreme and more extreme.
And by that time, you, as the bystander,
are somehow implicated in this.
There's an increasing radicalisation
and once it's in wartime it's a quite different situation
because there you can say, your country is endangered,
your country is at war.
If you're a good patriotic German, you don't want to risk endangering
your country at war.
Step by step, you cross all those thresholds
until it is actually possible to kill Jews in huge numbers
without really questioning why you're doing it.
Words are so important.
That's where it all starts.
Phrases like, "They're not people, they're animals."
Easy enough to overlook.
But my goodness me, do they lead places.
Because, before you know it,
terrible things could be happening again.
By discounting the Jews and Slavs as animals,
Hitler and his henchmen could justify
all that they had done so far.
But to cling on long enough to kill all the Jews it can find,
Hitler's tottering state needs more resources to fight the war.
And in spring 1942,
the Nazis come up with a plan to do just that.
It will thrust one Russian town into the cauldron of history.
Its name...
..is Stalingrad.
On 8th May 1942, more than 1.5 million German troops
backed up by almost 2,000 tanks and over 2,000 aircraft
roll into the northern Caucasus.
They find themselves facing 1.7 million Russians
with almost 4,000 tanks and 1,600 planes.
But despite their numbers,
the Russians aren't ready for what hits them.
Stalin was so convinced
that a German attack was still coming in Moscow
that he refused to believe any intelligence to suggest otherwise.
Hitler is absolutely elated because now that spring's here,
those Panzers can really punch through,
just as they did in the blitzkrieg of the early days of Barbarossa.
But after their initial surprise,
the Soviet fallback becomes more organised.
These armies are withdrawing strategically,
so the forces that end up withdrawing to Stalingrad
have not been crushed in the way that some of those forces were
in June, July and August of 1941.
This enables the Soviets to strengthen the city
that bears their leader's name.
The Battle of Stalingrad is often presented
as a battle between the two dictators.
Stalin wanted to defend the city that bore his name.
Hitler wanted to capture Stalingrad because it had Stalin's name.
But there was more to Stalingrad than just a name.
It was also an immensely important industrial hub.
Strategically, it was one of
the lowest crossing places of the River Volga.
And if the Germans could hold it, they would prevent the Soviets
from retaking the Caucasus.
Capture Stalingrad, cut the Volga and seize the oil.
But symbolically, if Stalin loses his named city,
it's as though he's conceding the fight to Hitler.
Determined that his name city must not fall,
Stalin issues a not-one-step-back order
to the armies dedicated to its defence.
When one of its generals ignores the order
and starts to withdraw across the Volga,
he is summarily dismissed.
Stalin was incandescent.
This isn't just because it's a city with his name on it.
As he tells his generals, "It's got these factories."
You know, "It's got our main waterway.
"If we lose the Volga, then the war is over."
Bear in mind, this is the area from which
Russia gets 90% of its oil.
If he can deny that oil to Russia and take it to himself,
he's effectively knocked the Soviet Union out of the war.
Hitler's under no illusions about this,
and he even goes on to admit,
"If I don't seize the Caucasus by the autumn,
"then there's no way that I can win this war."
Stalin places an iron-willed veteran
of the Russian Revolution in command.
His name is Vasily Chuikov.
When he takes over at Stalingrad on the 13th of September 1942,
the Soviet defence force has shrunk to a mere 20,000 men and 60 tanks,
and the tanks have so little fuel,
they have to be towed into position.
By contrast, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus's Sixth Army
has something like 280,000 men.
The Soviets have dug into the industrial heart of the city,
anchored upon a 300ft-high artificial hill
known as the Mamayev Kurgan.
This high ground dominates three giant industrial factories,
the most famous of which is the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Works.
These factories are vast.
Think of Battersea Power Station in London
or Grand Central Station in New York.
These huge brick and concrete structures
were built for industry, but they had another purpose now.
They became a kind of fortress in the battle for Stalingrad.
They were able to stand up to shelling, to bombing, to assaults.
They were able to protect the people holding them against the attackers.
So, yes, they may have been built to produce
all manner of industrial goods,
but my goodness me, they now served a new purpose.
The terrain around these factory fortresses
is a pockmarked hellhole
of blown-out craters and collapsed buildings
bombed to rubble by German artillery and aircraft.
But Chuikov realises that
the very nature of the German assault
can be turned to his advantage.
Cities are hell to fight in.
Once you've blown half of them apart,
defenders can hide themselves in rubble.
The rubble was perfect cover
for small units with Molotov cocktails
or individual snipers.
Incredibly difficult for tanks to winkle out the Russian snipers
hiding in every building and fighting from every building.
Chuikov's locals have got a huge advantage
because they know the city.
He orders them to get within grenade-throwing distance.
That's just a few metres, essentially.
And it means that the Germans can't counterattack
with their Stuka dive-bombers.
Because a Stuka wouldn't risk attacking
very close to German armour or German troops.
And to throw the German Sixth Army
into a battle against these desperate people,
this was something nobody had taught in the German staff colleges -
how you deal with this.
Even so, just one day into his command,
Chuikov finds himself with his back pinned against the Volga.
General Paulus launches a massive assault on the city centre,
driving really hard for the Mamayev Kurgan.
This hill was so important that it was to be the site
of continuous fighting for 112 days.
And that's despite the fact that the average life expectancy
of somebody fighting over it was about 76 hours.
Chuikov finds himself pushed so far back,
the rear wheels of his rocket launchers
are actually hanging over the harbour walls
so he can get the elevation he needs to fire his rockets.
By the evening of September the 14th,
the situation is desperate.
The Russians have no choice but to throw in
the only reserve division they have for Stalingrad -
10,000 members of the 13th Guards
led by General Alexander Rodimtsev.
The Guards have just been force-marched 450 miles,
so it's no wonder they're exhausted.
And worse still - about 1,000 of them don't even have any rifles.
They ferry across the Volga
and they're thrown straight into the fight on the other side.
The ferry across the Volga is under constant bombardment.
The Germans whole strategy was,
if they could take the embarkation point,
they could stop reinforcements
coming across the Volga
to keep the city fighting.
Just 15 tanks are holding the jetty when the Guards arrive,
and they charge straight at the attacking Germans,
who are only about 200 yards away.
The Guards managed to push their way up the hill
and regain the riverfront.
They suffered enormous casualties,
but they managed to stop the German advance.
By the end of the battle, of the 10,000 Guards who arrived,
about 320 are still alive.
Such acts of suicidal heroism become two a penny in Stalingrad.
It was an epic fight for survival.
Pitting two of the most vile dictators
and their equally ruthless armies against each other,
and the stories that come out of it are just extraordinary.
You've got this story of a marine called Mikhail Panikakha
who tries to throw a Molotov cocktail,
but it explodes in his hand.
Drenched him in fire, but that wasn't enough to deter him.
He picked up another.
He carried on charging at a tank that was approaching him,
and he managed to destroy the tank.
And that story is so representative
of how Soviets wanted to remember the battle.
And, actually, you can see him on this huge frieze -
the Volga frieze - which commemorates the battle.
Then you've got the extraordinary story
of a signaller called Titaev
who's sent to reconnect some severed communication wires
on the Mamayev Kurgan.
He was later found dead...
..but between his teeth, on one side, he had one wire,
and on the other side, he had the other wire.
He's actually used his skull as a conductor.
Do we take these stories at face value?
Clearly, some are going to raise eyebrows.
The whole myth of Stalingrad and the sort of smaller stories,
fictionalised or not, are all part of
a very powerful narrative that inspires the Soviets to fight back.
This is what it means to defend Mother Russia.
The mythology is so compelling
that Hitler himself is sucked into the saga.
He becomes obsessed with taking Stalingrad.
On the 9th of November, he orders Paulus
to strip every German unit he can find
from the Axis armies defending the flanks of Stalingrad
and hurl them against the anvil of the factories in the centre.
That same day, when Paulus is launching this great offensive,
Hitler stands up in front of the party faithful
at a huge gathering in Munich and he says to the crowd,
"I will soon be the master of Stalingrad."
But Hitler has reckoned without Marshal Zhukov.
What Hitler doesn't know
is that this is exactly what Zhukov wants him to do.
Because Stalingrad, in truth, was a trap.
Hitler has become so obsessed with Stalingrad
that he decides to throw everything at it.
This is what Zhukov has been waiting for.
A lot of Germans were moving
more and more of their troops and resources into Stalingrad.
Unknown to them, of course, the Soviet high command,
and particularly Marshal Zhukov, had looked at the situation
and realised this was a potential trap.
What they needed to do was to build up large forces
on the flanks of the long and very extended German line.
Unbeknownst to Hitler,
the Soviets have been preparing for a moment like this
ever since the Nazi tanks first rolled into Russia.
I think it's fair to say that the German high command -
Hitler, too, of course - really had no idea
what was going to be involved in the war in the Soviet Union.
They thought the Red Army was,
you know, a primitive army, badly led,
and they seemed to have no sense, really, of the sheer space
they were going to have to occupy.
It's also got countless numbers of troops in reserve.
And for every factory that Hitler manages to overrun,
there are another ten like it beyond the Urals.
As German Panzers roll into Russia,
more than 2,500 Soviet industrial plants were uprooted
and carried in 1.5 million railway wagons
beyond the River Volga...
..the Ural Mountains and as far east as Siberia,
more than 2,000 miles east of Moscow.
The sheer scale of Stalin's mobilisation beggars belief.
He has stripped and taken apart
tens of thousands of factories and moved them to the east.
And these factories weren't just moved a few miles.
They were moved further than the Germans ever managed to reach
during Operation Barbarossa.
These are distances that the Nazis can only dream about.
The communists had no qualms forcibly uprooting
a massive army of factory workers
to operate their relocated production lines.
16.5 million men and women were forced to leave their homes
to work 18-hour days, six days a week,
in appalling conditions.
Here are these people uprooted from their factories
around Moscow, let's say,
put on trains with all the machine tools,
and they're taken to these god-awful places in the middle of nowhere.
These places sprung up so quickly that one new town on the Volga
was known as Bezimeni,
which, translated, means "the town with no name".
This industrial mobilisation
was dedicated to one thing - rearmament.
Every factory has a quota,
and if you don't make your quota, the penalties are really severe.
And, of course, that's one of the ironies of the Second World War,
is that the Soviet Union - you know, one of the allies
against Hitler's assault on freedom and democracy -
has effectively enslaved its own people
in order to fight this war.
By the time the Germans have forced their way
through Stalingrad's abandoned tractor works,
Marshal Zhukov's trap is in place.
This was something that Zhukov was incredibly good at -
getting a plan and methodically working towards it
in order to ensure that it worked out optimally.
Over the preceding months,
he had gradually built up a formidable force.
More than 1 million men,
almost 1,000 tanks,
14,000 guns and 1,350 aircraft
were ready to spring his trap.
The more and more Germans get sucked into the Stalingrad battle,
their long line of communications becomes weaker and weaker.
Zhukov knows that, at some point, it's going to be possible
to cut that line
and to encircle Stalingrad and trap all the German forces inside.
He waited very patiently, and only when Hitler
stripped his flanks of the last German units,
to leave only Italian and Romanian troops,
did he make his move.
At 7.30 that morning,
3,500 Russian guns
fired the opening salvos of Operation Uranus.
The attack is spearheaded by T-34 and KV-1 tanks
supported by aircraft.
This is a Russian blitzkrieg.
This was Zhukov playing them at their own game,
this enormous encircling movement, which had been characteristic
of how the Germans had conquered France and so forth.
Within five days, Soviet advance columns
have completely encircled Stalingrad.
Now, it's at this point when any sensible general
will want to mount a tactical withdrawal,
and Paulus wants permission to do so.
Hitler orders Paulus to stand firm, assuring him that the Luftwaffe
will airdrop all the supplies he needs until relief arrives.
Paulus tells Hitler that he needs 750 tonnes of supplies a day.
Air Chief Marshal Goering claims he can airlift 500 tonnes a day.
In reality, the Luftwaffe manages less than 100 tonnes a day.
Why Hitler is listening to Goering
after the failure of the Battle of Britain
is frankly anybody's guess.
There's no way the Luftwaffe is going to supply
the volume of airdrops needed to help out Paulus.
At its lowest ebb,
the Luftwaffe was dropping less than 60 tonnes a day,
and for some inexplicable reason, they weren't just dropping food.
Imagine what it's like to be one of these German troops
trapped in Stalingrad.
You're actually starving to death. That's your biggest enemy now.
And you see a plane that's got through the cordon,
and it drops a package.
Do you run out into the open to pick up this package?
Because there's every chance you can be picked off by a sniper.
So, you run out, but at the same time,
a comrade who has also seen it runs out.
He gets shot.
You manage to get to the package and you run back under cover.
Praying it's going to be food.
My God, you need food. You just want food.
And with trembling hands, fumbling hands... You open it up.
And it goes through your mind,
"What if this isn't food? What if this is ammunition?"
Frankly, to hell with ammunition. You need something to eat.
You rip this package open.
And there inside is a load of condoms.
Goering has dropped you a packet of condoms.
You have no bloody use for condoms at this particular moment,
whereas a piece of bread - yeah, that would come in handy.
Trapped in Stalingrad, Paulus has no option
but to offer a humiliating surrender.
Of around 280,000 Germans
who had been thrown into that cauldron,
only 91,000 survive to shuffle off to captivity.
Of the 90,000 Germans who are captured at Stalingrad,
only 9,626 make it back home alive.
The rest are basically worked to death in the gulags.
Stalingrad is a disaster for the Nazis.
Of the 51 divisions that began the campaign,
32 are lost completely
and another 16 are so shattered, they will never be the same again.
Including the reinforcements poured into the region
to support the stalling campaign,
12,000 guns, 3,500 tanks,
and something like 3,000 aircraft have been lost with them.
People are too quick to talk about turning points
in relation to war.
But I think what we have here is a true turning point
because Hitler said at the time, "If we abandon this attack,
"then we abandon the whole purpose of the campaign."
"We can't replace what we've got there," he says.
"If we leave there, we can never return."
In other words, he was saying, "If we abandon Stalingrad,
"we lose the Caucasus."
And with that, I think you can say he lost the war.
More than 1.1 million Russian soldiers and civilians
fell in the Stalingrad campaign,
but behind them stand tens of millions more,
and now the Soviets have the guns, the tanks, the generals
to turn the tide of the war.
Before Stalingrad, there was still a chance
that the Germans might have won in the east.
After Stalingrad, they might somehow be able to hang on
and keep fighting the war, but victory was gone.
No prospect of victory after Stalingrad for the Germans.
They don't have the actual numbers with which to win the war.
Hitler's words will now come back to haunt him.
And on the other side of the world, another mighty conflict
is about to turn the tide in the Pacific.
December the 7th, 1941.
Admiral Yamamoto's Japanese Imperial Navy
destroys the US battleship fleet based at Pearl Harbor.
Even though he helped to plan and direct the Pearl Harbor attack,
Admiral Yamamoto actually didn't support it.
He felt it was probably the most dangerous thing
that Japan could do.
In the famous film "Tora! Tora! Tora!",
Yamamoto is shown as saying,
"I fear that all we have done is to have awakened a sleeping giant
"and filled him with terrible resolve."
In fact, he doesn't say quite those words,
but he does say something pretty similar.
Unlike Japanese high command,
Yamamoto has lived in the United States
and has unrivalled insight into Uncle Sam's potential.
When asked how his Navy would fare if Japan attacked the US,
Yamamoto said, "For the first six months,
"I will have victory after victory."
"But then, if the war continues, I have no expectation of success."
So, Yamamoto was aware of America's potential
and he was aware of the numbers involved.
In other words, he exhibited a reticence to going to war
with the United States for the long term.
Yamamoto's prediction proved spookily accurate.
179 days after the Pearl Harbor attack,
a battle unfolds that conclusively and decisively
ends the Japanese campaign of expansion...
..almost exactly to the date as Admiral Yamamoto had predicted.
Very soon, the US built up
from having about the 18th largest army in the world
to the second after the Soviet Union.
And what's more, it built up its Navy from 1,000 ships to 5,500.
How America achieved such a remarkable and speedy turnaround
is a tale of ingenuity, enterprise,
and unimaginably high, war-winning numbers.
December the 11th, 1940.
Just four days after Japan's surprise air raid
on the Americans in Hawaii,
Nazi Germany makes clear its intentions toward Uncle Sam.
The United States was not at war
with either Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany.
However, in a long and rambling speech before the Reichstag,
Adolf Hitler concluded the speech by declaring war on the USA.
That was playing right into President Roosevelt's hands.
He had been having great difficulty in focusing the minds
of the American people on the war in Europe.
Well, now he was given the perfect excuse to do so.
From here on, American rearmament will follow a policy
of Germany first.
It must confront not just the direct aggressor -
the Empire of Japan -
but also the indirect aggressor - Nazi Germany.
What America's going to do
is to fight a containment war in the Pacific.
But what it wants to spend more of its resources on
is feeding its allies - Britain and Russia -
and then defeating Hitler and Germany in Europe,
and only then will it turn its full attention to Japan.
Even a limited war of containment still requires troops...
..but at the start of the war, America has precious few.
When General George C Marshall, the US army's chief of staff,
took over in 1939,
the American army was just 174,000 strong.
Now, that is really small.
That was smaller than the size of Portugal's army.
By 1941, that had gone up to 1.8 million.
That sounds big, but in comparison to other countries,
it's still really pathetically small.
By contrast, the USA's Pacific Fleet almost matches Japan's.
11 battleships versus 11 Japanese battleships.
34 light and heavy cruisers versus 41.
100 destroyers versus 129.
But the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor
shifts the numbers in Japan's favour,
putting 19 US vessels out of action.
Still, there are three crumbs of comfort.
America had three aircraft carriers in the Pacific in 1941.
These were the Lexington, the Enterprise and the Saratoga,
and they were defending Midway Island
when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
So, after that, they then retreat
to the safety of the Californian coast.
To contain the Japanese,
the USA needs numbers in the Pacific.
What the United States needed to do, and to do fast,
was to build up its military.
Just weeks later,
President Roosevelt presents a budget to Congress
which diverts enormous resources to war production.
Of $59 billion, 52 billion is devoted to rearmament.
He follows this up with one of the most punitive
tax regimes in history.
The number of Americans who were required
to pay tax in 1941 was 7 million.
The number required to pay tax a year later, in 1942?
42 million.
And that money was ploughed straight into rearmament.
Roosevelt then deploys his most powerful weapon -
capitalism.
While the Soviet command economy
used patriotic coercion to build its weapons,
America paid private enterprise to churn out thousands of planes,
millions of rifles and billions of bombs and bullets.
Once the tap is turned on, its an extraordinary stream
of entrepreneurial initiative.
As Roosevelt's War Secretary Henry Stimson said,
"In a capitalist country, if you are going to war,
"you have to let business make money out of it,
"or business will not work."
In this war, American business not only works,
it underwrites one of the most incredible turns of fortune
in all of military history.
January 1942.
At war with Japan and Germany, America must arm itself.
In Washington,
head of the Federal Government's Production Management Office,
William Knudsen, calls together many of the USA's
most powerful industrialists.
Before they arrived, he had all of the different contracts
spread out on a table, so that, when they walked in,
he simply told them, "Have a look and take your pick."
Quickly, four-fifths of US government contracts
have been distributed to the 100 biggest companies
in the United States.
And America has the workforce to handle this.
One of the reasons why it's possible to get going so fast
is that America has a lot of unemployed resources.
US unemployment quickly falls by 9 million.
Wages rise an incredible 70%.
The Great Depression is finally over.
It's often said that the Second World War
was good for America.
Americans are better off - quite a lot better off - in 1945
than they were in 1941, which is not true of anywhere else.
The secret of their success can be found
in the engine of America's car industry - mass production.
One of the big advantages the United States has
is a long experience of mass production.
The car industry in America is bigger than any other car industry.
Each worker had one job. It meant that the worker didn't need to be particularly skilled.
They just had to be able to do one thing,
which they perfected and did very quickly,
before it moved on to the next person, who did their job.
Manufacture of the American Jeep is so simplified
that, over the entire war,
more than 600,000 facsimiles with interchangeable spare parts
are built at several factories
belonging to both the Willys and Ford motor companies.
This is the Willys Jeep,
this one made by Ford under licence from the Willys company.
These vehicles were produced in enormous numbers.
We're talking about building, altogether,
640,000 of them during the war,
a third of them going to the Soviet army and to Britain.
And this vehicle could carry 800 pounds of equipment
or could pull an anti-tank gun and five crew members
and go almost anywhere.
By the end of the war, every American regiment
has 149 of these vehicles.
Some US companies have a surprising head start on others.
Automobile giants General Motors and Ford
have been building armaments for years...for Germany.
Now, it may come as a surprise,
but Adolf Hitler had a life-sized portrait of Henry Ford,
the father of mass production, hanging in his office.
He idolised him for two reasons.
First, his anti-Semitism, which Ford had outlined
in a series of newspaper articles throughout the 1920s.
And secondly, he admired Ford's vision of capitalism.
So, it's no surprise that Ford wins
an enormous amount of contracts in Germany to help Germany rearm.
In July 1938, Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle,
which was the highest honour
that he could bestow on a foreign national.
The following month, you see an executive at General Motors,
a man called James Mooney, also receiving this selfsame medal.
So, you know, again, you see this reward
going across the Atlantic for helping Hitler rearm.
Both companies will now cash in on American demand
for their mass production know-how.
Henry Ford's son, Edsel,
proffers a plan to mass-produce the Liberator heavy bomber
for the US Army Air Force.
It is an enormous challenge.
A car had 15,000 parts
that had to be put together on an assembly line.
Well, a B-24 four-engine bomber
had precisely 488,193 parts.
So, this was something else altogether.
Could it actually be done?
The Ford Motor Company is awarded the contract
to produce the B-24 Liberator bomber.
Edsel creates a gigantic plant to construct the planes
at Willow Run, south of Detroit.
Willow Run is awe-inspiring.
It's a room a mile long by a quarter of a mile wide.
It was called the largest room in the history of mankind.
You started with these four parallel conveyors,
production lines, and at a certain point,
it becomes two, and then just one.
The whole thing really is quite incredible.
But it almost didn't happen.
The building was so long that it actually poked out
from the Republican-controlled county that most of it was in
into a Democratic county that was bordering.
Now, that Democratic county charged higher taxes.
Henry Ford wasn't going to have any of that,
so what he did was to have the building rebuilt at a right angle,
so it actually obeyed the border of the Republican county.
They had a turntable inside the building
so that the aircraft would come along the production line
and then be turned at right angles
and carry on being built inside the Republican county.
The number of aircraft built at Willow Run is extraordinary.
They were rolling them off at about one every 63 minutes,
so almost one B-24 an hour at peak production.
That's a staggering 650 planes a month.
A total of one-fifth of America's military equipment
will roll off assembly lines operated by car manufacturers...
..but to keep those lines moving requires workers.
The only problem is able-bodied men are signing up for military service.
There's a famous recruiting station
right in Times Square, in New York City,
and there were apparently 5,000 people waiting in line
in front of it on the morning of Monday, December the 8th, 1941.
By war's end, more than 16 million Americans will serve.
The subsequent gap in the labour market needs to be filled.
As the size of the American military begins to expand,
it leaves a void in the industrial workplace,
and it's probably best known
the way that we filled that void - with women.
Even as early as January 1942,
something like 2.8 million women were involved in war work.
That figure will rise to fully 19 million in 1945.
The most iconic woman war worker
is a propaganda poster girl named Rosie the Riveter.
Rosie the Riveter was a striking character
who embodied strength and self-sufficiency,
but she was also feminine, she was alluring.
The idea was to make her attractive, to make her into an icon
to encourage women to work in war production.
Rosie the Riveter was a fictional character,
but she does seem to have been based on a woman called Rose Monroe,
who was actually a riveter and who was working at Willow Run.
By 1943, Axis factories are also working at full tilt.
Their most crucial shortage is not labour,
but something which has spurred the Japanese
to conquer half of Southeast Asia...
..and forced Hitler to lose an entire army at Stalingrad.
Oil - the lifeblood of World War II's killing machines.
Without the oil, you can't fight modern war.
Oil was at the heart of the national strategies
of every country involved in the conflict.
In the early stages of the war, nearly every major offensive
carried out by the Axis powers is because of oil.
The reason for this is simple -
a tiny number of countries control almost all the world's oil.
Over 90% of it is in the hands of the Allies.
Germany and Japan control just 3%.
For the Japanese, it was a big problem
because they imported almost all the oil for the Germans, too.
The situation is so bad that Hitler even signed a four-year deal
with the petrochemical giant IG Farben
to produce synthetic oil from coal
at six times the cost of normal oil.
German petrochemical giant IG Farben agrees to expand
synthetic oil production at its plant at Leuna, East Germany,
to 350,000 tonnes per annum.
But that's only a fraction of what's required.
So, this is why the Russian Caucasus are so vital to Hitler.
The oilfields at Baku alone
produce more than three times
what Germany consumes
in oil every year.
But the only key oilfield Hitler's Panzers capture
is called Maikop,
which produces a useful 2 million barrels of oil per year.
But the Germans fail to exploit their bounty.
When the Germans arrive at Maikop, they find that the Russians
have destroyed all the drilling equipment.
The Germans haven't brought along any of their own.
The most the Germans ever got out of Maikop was 70 barrels a day.
In the Pacific, the Japanese fare better.
By April 1942, the Japanese have captured the Philippines, Burma
and the Dutch East Indies.
It has 70% of the world's tin.
It has vast rubber resources at its disposal.
And then, most importantly, it has oil.
The Japanese recognised that there would be
a sabotaging of equipment that would delay or keep production levels low,
and so the Japanese compensated for that.
The Japanese came fully tooled to repair their captured oilfields.
Some people thought that it was going to take about two years
and, in fact, it only took the Japanese a few days.
Getting the oil out of the ground is simple,
but Japan's Navy lacks the numbers to protect its tankers.
For the most part, Japanese merchant vessels
are sailing unarmed and unescorted
in their return voyages to the Japanese home islands.
Now, what can the Americans do?
They can attack these ships with submarines and planes.
In fact, despite gaining the means to produce more oil
than Iran and California combined,
Japan's oil imports actually sink
to barely 15% of their pre-war level.
The situation got so dire by the end of the war
that Japan was having to convert its ships to run on coal,
and the small boats and planes that ran on oil
only had enough for one-way tickets - suicide missions.
By contrast, America, which produces its own oil,
has massive reserves.
America supplied 90% of the high-octane aviation fuel
used to keep Allied aircraft in the skies.
But for the Axis powers, fuel was so scarce
that, often, the first time a German pilot flew
would be in combat.
That's a real handicap,
and as a result, the Allies ruled the air.
But in summer 1942, nothing seems predictable.
If Japan wants to complete its stranglehold on the Pacific,
it needs to sever Australia's lifeline to the USA...
..and to do that, it must first destroy the US Navy.
April 1942.
In just four months, Japan has conquered much of Southeast Asia,
and they're not done yet.
They also want to get hold of India,
but they can't because of the monsoon rains,
so Yamamoto gets approval for a plan that sees him looking south
directly towards Australia.
To cement Japan's dominance in the Pacific,
Yamamoto wants to cut Australia off
as the last springboard for an Allied strike back.
Australia takes the threat seriously
and readies itself for a full invasion.
61 heavy gun emplacements are placed around her coast...
..and 34,000 troops are brought back
from North Africa.
But before it can threaten Australia,
Yamamoto's fleet must first clear the US Navy from the Pacific.
Part of this thrust toward Australia would include
a decisive naval engagement on the high seas
that would sweep the US Navy
once and for all from the field of battle,
so that it would no longer represent a threat
to continuing Japanese expansion.
To put this plan into action,
Japan aims to capture the strategic strong point
of Port Moresby, New Guinea.
The American fleet steams into the Coral Sea to defend it.
What follows will be a new kind of sea battle.
It was the first naval battle in history where the opposing ships
never came within sight of one another.
Naval warfare is now being projected by air power,
not being protected by the big guns.
The gathered forces look fairly evenly matched.
Both sides have two heavy aircraft carriers
containing just under 130 battle-ready aircraft.
Both have nine battle cruisers protecting their carriers.
The US has 13 destroyers, Japan 15.
But Japan does have the advantage of an extra light carrier.
Japan's fleet heads to a chain of islands north of the Coral Sea...
..but before hostilities even begin, America has an ace up its sleeve -
a crack team of code breakers
named HYPO Station.
The somewhat aptly named HYPO Station
was a team of code breakers run out of Hawaii
by a somewhat eccentric figure called Joseph Rochefort.
Now, he was a very celebrated cryptanalyst
who would famously work day and night,
just ran on coffee,
and he actually wore a dressing gown and slippers over his uniform.
HYPO is attempting to decipher Japanese naval code JN25.
This is a seriously difficult task
because that is ciphered
using 100,000 five-digit numbers
in order to scramble any messages.
It's really hard to break.
But Rochefort and his team were able to crack about a third of the code,
and that was just enough for them to learn
that the Japanese were preparing something very big in the Coral Sea.
Thanks to HYPO, US Admiral Nimitz knows the Japanese are coming,
and dispatches a force including the two aircraft carriers
Lexington and Yorktown.
On May the 7th, 1942,
it blunders into the Japanese task force.
The Battle of the Coral Sea was a complete mess.
For starters, both sides misidentified
their advance ships for the main force
and therefore launched their carrier planes against them.
They only found their opponent's carriers
on the second day of the battle.
Neither side had adequate fighter screens
to protect their ships.
The battle takes its toll on both sides.
Japanese light aircraft carrier Shoho
and US carrier Lexington are both lost.
Aircraft losses are almost even, too,
but Japanese personnel losses
are practically twice that of America...
..so the overall result is an Allied victory.
The United States comes out of the battle
and it can declare itself the winner
because it prevented the invasion of Port Moresby.
Japan puts its plans for Australia on hold...
..but the Imperial Navy has not finished taking on the Americans.
Yamamoto decides to, once and for all,
seek that final decisive battle,
and that it will be done at Midway Atoll.
The island of Midway is a tiny archipelago
and US staging post.
It's about 1,500 miles west of Hawaii,
and it's just basically three lumps of rock,
each of which is about two miles across,
and one of which has got an airstrip.
By sending a diversionary flotilla toward the Aleutian Islands,
Yamamoto plans to trick the American fleet
into exposing itself north of Midway
and in range of Japanese battleships.
The Japanese imagined that this battle would be a trap
for what was left of the United States Navy,
and that they would quickly sort that out.
But that's not going to happen,
and that's because the United States knows that Midway's the target.
Nimitz even knows the very date they want to attack -
he 4th of June 1942.
Yamamoto's bluff is about to be called.
In fact, he is the one being duped.
The US also seeds disinformation
that two of its Pacific aircraft carriers are absent
patrolling the Australian coast,
while another, USS Yorktown, was lost at Coral Sea,
none of which is true.
The Japanese believe that
the American aircraft carrier USS Yorktown
has been sunk in the Coral Sea, but it has not.
Yorktown was damaged and limped back to Hawaii for repairs.
The initial estimate says that 90 days will be needed
to get the ship back in fighting shape.
But 1,400 dockyard engineers pull off a minor miracle.
In just 48 hours, the Yorktown is back up and running,
and it's steaming into the fight.
Admiral Yamamoto doesn't know it, but at Midway, US Admiral Nimitz
will have three aircraft carriers at his disposal...
..and the American senses an opportunity.
I'm a huge admirer of Admiral Nimitz,
the American Commander in Chief, because Nimitz, again and again,
made brilliant judgments.
And his brilliant judgment for Midway, of course,
was when the code breakers tell Nimitz that
the Japanese are going for Midway, he decides to bet the ranch
and to send his carriers to take them on
and to launch a decisive counterthrust against Midway,
and it required huge courage to do this.
When Admiral Nagumo launches 108 planes
against the US air base at Midway,
he is completely surprised when one of his spotter planes
sights an American carrier force steaming in his direction,
just as his returning aircraft are being refitted on deck.
The American carrier force timed its attack perfectly.
It came in three waves.
41 Devastator torpedo bombers go in,
but only six come out.
They were shot to pieces by the Japanese fighter cover.
But the Devastators had done their job
because coming out of the sun were 37 dauntless dive-bombers,
and they're able to drop their loads on three aircraft carriers.
Aircraft carriers Akagi, Kaga and Soryu take ten direct hits.
The flight decks of every single one of those aircraft carriers
was covered with petrol tankers, bombs, aircraft being refuelled.
I mean, this is going to go up like a barbecue with the gas left on.
You drop a match and whoomph, and that's exactly what happens.
And in a matter of minutes, Akagi, Kaga and Soryu
are reduced to funeral pyres.
Hiryu narrowly escapes, but not for long,
because we come back and get Hiryu later.
And in addition to losing four aircraft carriers,
600 of Japan's best pilots are knocked out of the war.
But at Midway alone, Japan lost 70% of its most experienced pilots -
either killed or injured.
She would never be able to recover.
It really boils down to this one magic moment
where ten bombs in ten minutes
decide the outcome of the war in the Pacific.
Japanese losses at Midway vastly outnumber America's...
..and Nippon cannot keep up with the pace
of America's industrial output.
In the next two years,
Japan will build just seven new aircraft carriers.
In the same time period, America builds 90.
Midway puts Japan on the defensive for the rest of the war.
Midway was a genuine turning point in the Second World War,
and certainly THE turning point of the war in the Pacific.
It was assuredly the last moment of which any realistic possibility
of the Japanese winning the war in the Pacific was ended -
that those Japanese hopes were at the bottom of the sea
and every Japanese admiral with half a brain understood that.
But in this global war,
before they can finally push Nippon out of Southeast Asia,
the Americans must first push the Nazis out of Africa.
North Africa, summer 1942.
The sending home of 34,000 Australian troops
to defend their country against a possible Japanese invasion
weakens British General Auchinleck's desert army.
Germany's Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps
will take full advantage.
Rommel launches this absolutely ferocious
counterattack in the desert.
He's got the Italians. He's got the full weight of the Afrika Korps.
He's got nearly 100,000 men, 500 tanks, 500 aircraft.
This is a seriously big force.
One of Rommel's victories
will be particularly damaging to the British.
A year and a half earlier,
the British Eighth Army captured the Libyan port of Tobruk.
Now Rommel retakes it.
In a war in which the British have already taken
a seriously heavy pounding, the fall of Tobruk
has a really bad effect on Britain's morale.
15,000 Allied troops are killed or wounded.
33,000 more are taken prisoner.
800,000 artillery rounds, 13 million bullets
and almost 1,200 Allied tanks are left behind.
Churchill, actually speaking about it,
said that, "Defeat is one thing. Disgrace is another."
He talked about this as the lowest points
he experienced during the war.
Rommel's counterattack was so effective,
it not only captured Tobruk, but also pushed Auchinleck back
to a small town on the North African coast
called El Alamein.
The British force positions itself
on the edge of the infamous Qattara Depression.
The Qattara Depression is a huge, sunken wilderness
right in the middle of the desert.
It's got marshes and salt lakes and quicksands.
This is not a place you can just drive your tank through,
blitzkrieg-style.
And that's why this was a good spot for the British to retreat to.
Unable to break through, Rommel digs in and waits.
It will prove to be a bad decision.
The defeat of the Japanese at Midway
has freed American troops for use on the Western Front,
but no-one can agree where they should strike.
General Marshall, who is the US Army Chief of Staff,
wants to mount an immediate invasion of Europe.
Churchill does not like this idea.
Churchill's plan is to fight Rommel, hopefully win,
and then use North Africa as a springboard to attack Italy.
Churchill prevails,
but has to concede overall military command
to American General Dwight D Eisenhower
because the Americans have no faith in Britain's failed generals.
Operation Torch, the American-led invasion of North Africa,
is scheduled for November 1942.
Now, this gives Churchill just five months to succeed
before the Americans join in,
and Churchill's really desperate to prove a point that the British,
and her empire, can fight this on their own.
The man charged with delivering Churchill a victory
is the new commander of the British Eighth Army
Bernard Montgomery.
Bernard Montgomery, or Monty, as he became known to his troops,
was a very interesting character.
He was very confident to the point of arrogance.
Some people couldn't abide him,
yet at the same time, he was deeply loved by his own men.
He had served well in the First World War
and he had also acquitted himself well at Dunkirk.
Those were the pluses. The big minus was the fact that
he had taken part in the planning of the disastrous raid on Dieppe,
which had cost 4,000 Canadians and British commandos.
Despite intense pressure for quick results,
Montgomery refuses to be hurried.
Monty's got a plan,
and it's a plan that requires a lot of meticulous build-up of forces,
which is slow and takes time.
America sends Montgomery 300 Sherman tanks...
..mass-produced at pre-war locomotive and car factories.
This is the Sherman M4 tank,
manufactured by the American car industry.
It's reliable. It's fast at 30mph.
If there's a problem with the Sherman, it's the armour.
It's very thin, and with its slab sides,
almost any German anti-tank gun can penetrate it.
And with the hull and turret full of ammunition,
it's almost inevitable it'll burst into flame, it'll brew up.
Rather horrifically, they are known as Tommy cookers.
But in terms of numbers,
if the Germans can produce 2,600 Tigers,
the Allies, by 1946,
have produced 49,000 of these Shermans.
It's simply a numbers game,
and the Allies can out-manufacture the Germans.
October 1942.
At El Alamein, 94,000 German and Italian troops
will face 195,000 Commonwealth.
It sounds like a sizable advantage, but it's not.
Conventional wisdom says that you need
a three-to-one advantage against entrenched enemy.
Monty's only got a two-to-one advantage.
That's not great.
But Montgomery also has four times as many tanks as Rommel...
..and a crucial tactical advantage.
What Monty has access to is all the German radio traffic...
..because the British have managed to decrypt
the famous German Enigma machine.
This is dynamite for Monty.
Insecure communication is one thing,
tanks running on empty - quite another.
One of Rommel's big problems is that he's running short on fuel,
and his supply lines, at that point, stretched almost 2,000 miles.
To keep his tanks running, he has to bring 5,776 tonnes of fuel
along that narrow roadway every single month.
But a combination of that distance,
Allied air superiority in the Mediterranean,
naval superiority in the Mediterranean
means that that much fuel simply isn't getting through.
Rommel had a sufficient amount of fuel on hand
to reposition his armour two times,
but if he tried to do it a third time, he'd run out of gas.
The battle for El Alamein begins like something out of the Great War.
At 21.40 on the 23rd of October 1942,
882 guns, manned by 6,000 artillerymen,
bombard the enemy lines for more than five hours.
The Allies will fire an estimated 1 million shells during the battle.
Then Montgomery sends in his first wave.
This was known as Operation Lightfoot.
The infantry had to be light of foot
not to set off the large tank mines that were in their path.
This actually took longer than was hoped for,
and what Montgomery called the dogfight,
the war of attrition, then started to take place.
Back in London, Churchill is absolutely incandescent.
"How can I find a general who's going to win a battle?"
he rages at the general staff.
Luckily, Montgomery's superiors stood by him.
They trusted that he knew what he was doing.
Under pressure to advance,
Montgomery launches Operation Supercharge.
Operation Supercharge is a suicide mission
for its leading troops.
So, when the commander of this spearhead
tells Monty of the dangers, Monty says, "Yes, I know,
"but I'm willing to accept a 100% casualty rate."
13,500 British and Commonwealth troops
perish at El Alamein, but they enable Monty's armour
to break through Rommel's defensive line.
Despite Hitler's usual stand-or-die orders,
Rommel is running low on fuel.
He cannot mount a Panzer counterattack,
so he retreats,
abandoning 450 tanks and 1,000 guns.
Rommel also leaves behind 20,000 Axis troops killed or wounded
and a further 30,000 taken prisoner.
By the end of the day,
Rommel lost almost a third of his army at El Alamein.
He lost huge numbers of tanks.
By the end, he only actually had 35 working tanks left.
Churchill has his victory.
It's almost impossible to overstate
the moral importance of El Alamein to Britain,
which remained the only major victory of the war
that was won by Britain alone without any Allies.
It led Winston Churchill ultimately to say that,
"Before El Alamein, we had nothing but defeats.
"After El Alamein, we had nothing but victories."
Just four days later, a great Anglo-American fleet
consisting of 350 warships,
carrying over 100,000 troops,
assembles off the coast of North Africa.
When a joint American and British force
launched Operation Torch -
that was the invasion of North Africa
on the 8th of November -
well, by that time, Rommel's situation seemed hopeless.
But in February 1943, at Tunisia's Kasserine Pass,
the Americans discover that Rommel has a painful sting in his tail.
The Americans had arrived into North Africa
pretty firm in the belief that they were going to turn things round.
They were going to show the British how it was done.
But, actually, Rommel, who, bear in mind,
was on the run from Montgomery, was still able
to teach the Americans a lesson at Kasserine Pass.
Rommel's shock counterattack at Kasserine Pass
inflicts 10,000 casualties.
It vindicates Churchill's call to delay a liberation of France
until the Allies have sufficient numbers and experience
to take on and beat battle-hardened German troops.
To this day, some American historians argue
that the Mediterranean was a great snare and delusion
which Churchill set for Roosevelt,
and Roosevelt was foolish enough to fall into.
But I think American participation in North Africa, and later Italy,
was absolutely vital to teach the Americans
what it was really like making war against the Germans.
North Africa is where the Americans grew up,
it was where the British were able to consolidate their power,
and it was very much a springboard for the Allies to win the war.
In March 1943, Rommel leaves Africa.
Two months later,
a quarter of a million Axis troops have surrendered.
Most of them are Italians,
but that also includes the better part of the Afrika Korps.
Thanks to Hitler's uncompromising orders,
Hitler's desire always to fight on,
the Germans lost close to half a million men
for absolutely no gain,
which, of course, was a total disaster.
Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Montgomery -
each of these generals cuts their teeth
in the deserts of North Africa.
In the years to come,
that experience will help them turn the tide of the war
in the Allies' favour.