♪ [theme song plays] ♪
[narrator] On June 22, 1940,
Britain stood alone against the Nazis.
France had surrendered, and Prime Minister
Winston Churchill could only crow defiance.
[Churchill] We'll fight on the beaches.
We'll 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] Britain still had all the resources
of its vast empire.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa,
India and a host of other territories had
all been quick to declare war on Germany.
But they were thousands of miles away,
across the oceans, and their military power
could not be brought to bear where it mattered.
Britain's situation seemed hopeless.
And Hitler had no doubt that Britain would
soon try to negotiate a peace.
But Churchill quickly showed how determined
he was prepared to be in the war against the Nazis.
[foghorn]
A powerful squadron of two French battleships
and two battle cruisers was lying in the port
of MerselKebir in French North Africa.
If the French ships fell into German hands,
the British Navy's position in the Mediterranean
would become impossible.
So on July 3, a Royal Navy task force
demanded that the French ships either join it
or sail to a neutral port to be interred.
The French refused.
So the British opened fire on their former allies.
[canon fire]
They destroyed or severely damaged
three of the battleships.
Almost 1,300 French sailors were killed.
But Churchill's ruthlessness didn't seem to impress Hitler.
On July 19, he returned in triumph to Berlin
and was greeted by more than a million people.
That day he made a speech in the Reichstag,
the German parliament, offering peace terms to Britain.
His offer seemed generous.
Britain could keep its empire.
In return, Hitler wanted a free hand in Europe.
His plan was to conquer the countries of the East in order
to win Lebensraum, room to live for the German people.
But Churchill would have none of it.
The British would fight on.
This would, as he put it, be their finest hour.
Churchill's defiance was immensely popular.
King George VI wrote in his diary,
"Personally, I feel happier now that we have no
more allies to be polite to and pamper."
[gunshot]
But it was difficult to see how Britain could turn
the tables and actually win the war.
The British army might have survived Dunkirk,
but it had lost almost all its tanks, artillery,
and transport in the evacuation.
It had just 25 divisions, armed mainly with rifles,
to resist the vast armoured columns of the world's
most fearsome war machine.
So there was little be done except dig in and wait.
Coastal defences were prepared and concrete
strongpoints build all across southern England.
Signposts on roads were removed to make it
harder for any invaders to find their way around.
Large open areas were littered with obstacles
to deter airborne troops.
The volunteer defines force, the home guard was recruited.
It was made up of men who were otherwise
ineligible to fight, often because of their age.
By the end of June 1940, almost one and a half
million volunteers had signed up.
But there were few weapons with which to arm them.
Hitler, meanwhile, was getting on with his invasion
plans, code named Operation Sea Lion.
Some 20 divisions would be landed on a broad
front along England's south coast.
Barges were gathered from all over Northwest Europe.
These were hurriedly converted into makeshift landing craft.
Troops were trained for beach landings.
But for all Hitler's bravado, those planning
Sea Lion were worried.
Hitler might dismiss the English Channel as just
another river to be crossed.
But Britain's Navy was still the largest in the world.
It might be stretched thin by its worldwide commitments,
but the Royal Navy's home fleet far outnumbered the German.
The German naval chief, Admiral Erich Raeder,
had no confidence that he could seize control of the
English Channel for long enough to get the army across.
But the Germans did have one area of
apparent massive superiority.
The Luftwaffe far outnumbered Britain's Royal Air Force.
The Luftwaffe's commander, Hermann Goering,
had little doubt that he could establish air control
over the Channel long enough for Sea Lion to take place.
On July 10, the Luftwaffe began attacking
shipping in the Channel.
[explosions]
In response, the British had two of the most
outstanding of the new breed of single engine
multi gun mono planes.
The Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane.
The Spitfire was slightly faster and more agile
than its German rival, the Messerschmitt Bf109,
which escorted the German bombers.
It would be used to intercept these.
The Hurricane would prove a lethal bomber kill.
But in July 1940, Air Vice Marshal Hugh Dowding,
the head of Fighter Command, had less than 700 fighters.
Against them were 2,600 German fighters and bombers.
The odds against the RAF were daunting.
Dowding knew that he could not take on the Luftwaffe
every time it came over the Channel.
So when the Germans began hitting British shipping,
he did nothing.
Instead he would only use the RAF to stop the
Luftwaffe from establishing the air supremacy
needed for invasion.
So he would only take on its big attacks.
To help him, the British had one crucial innovation.
Radar.
By the 1930s, scientists in both Britain and Germany
knew that objects well beyond human sight could
be detected by bouncing radio pulses off them and
measuring the time it took for the signals to return.
In Britain, a team of scientists led by Robert Watson-Watt
began developing radar as a means of detecting
approaching aircraft at long range.
Their work was seized upon by Dowding.
He made radar the core of the world's first
integrated air defines system.
[beeping]
Known as Chain Home, this was a string of 21
300 foot tall radar masts sited along the south
and east coasts of Britain.
These could pick up aircraft at a range of 120 miles and
give their distance, direction, height, and numbers.
The information would be passed back to RAF
Fighter Command's headquarters at Bently Priory,
just outside London.
There, it would be assessed and warning of an impending
raid passed to Fighter Command's operation room.
Moonshine one four sky blue take
target one channel "G" George.
[soldier] Roger.
[narrator] Controllers would then alert the nearest RAF
airfields and scramble the necessary number of fighters.
The question was, would radar make up for
Germany's massive superiority in numbers?
The stage was now set for what would become
known as the Battle of Britain.
Since June 10, 1940, the German Luftwaffe had
been battering British shipping in the English Channel.
[explosion]
The Luftwaffe's commander, Reichsmarshal
Hermann Goering, was determined to lure the
British air force into combat.
But Britain's Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding
refused to take the bait.
He used his fighters sparingly, knowing that
the real battle was still to come.
As this first phase of the Battle of Britain began,
the Luftwaffe had a massive superiority in numbers.
It had 1,100 single engine fighters available
to the Royal Air Force's 700.
Almost all the German fighters were the excellent
Messerschmitt Bf109E with a top speed of around
350 miles an hour.
About two thirds of the British fighters were Hawker
Hurricanes, slower than the 109s, but more agile.
The remainder were Supermarine Spitfires,
with a top speed similar to the 109s.
[engine sputtering]
For their assault, the Germans had over 1,300 medium bombers,
Dornier Do17s, Heinkel He111s, and Junkers Ju88s,
each carrying about 4,000 pounds of bombs.
Goering selected August 13 as Adlertag, Eagle Day,
for the start of his main assault.
His aim was to destroy RAF fighters in the air,
and the RAF's airfields and Britain's aircraft factories.
Softening up attacks were made the day before.
These concentrated on the airfields and the
radar towers along the south coast.
One station on the Isle of Wight was put out of action,
and several were damaged, but these were
working again within hours.
Goering did not believe that radar had a significant
role to play in the battle, and so
these attacks were not repeated.
It was a big mistake.
Adlertag dawned cloudy, so the main assault
was postponed until the afternoon.
When it came, radar gave ample warning.
Calling, planes heard three miles southwest.
[narrator] None the less, most of the RAF airfields
in the south were hammered.
[gunshots]
But by the end of the day, none had been put out of action.
The Luftwaffe lost 46 aircraft. Britain, just 13.
The Luftwaffe mounted its largest attack of the
whole battle on August 15.
Waves of heavily escorted German bombers
forced their way through to the RAF airfields.
The RAF was so overstretched that some pilots
flew seven sorties that day.
By the time the raids died away, some 90 German aircraft
had been shot down for the loss of 42 British fighters.
The battle continued with equal ferocity
over the next few days.
Both sides became increasingly exhausted.
Dowding tried to rotate his pilots to rest them,
but he simply did not have enough of them.
Many were being sent into battle with just
ten-hour flying experience.
The Luftwaffe was suffering too.
Its pilots were shocked and increasingly
demoralised by the resilience of the British.
The RAF fighters always seemed to be waiting for them.
As the fighting wore on for 12 solid days,
the British losses began to creep up to match
those of the Germans.
The Royal Air Force was close to breaking.
To turn the screw, Goering began using
his bombers to attack at night as well.
But this decision had an unexpected outcome.
On the night of August 24, a flight of Heinkel
bombers lost its way and bombed the city of London.
It was the first attack on a non-military target.
The next night 81 British bombers
responded by raiding Berlin.
[explosions]
Hitler was infuriated and demanded massive retaliation.
This came on the evening of September 7.
German bombers attacked the London docks
and surrounding areas.
More than 450 people died and thousands
of homes were destroyed.
But in fact, this was Goering's second crucial mistake.
By switching from the RAF's airfields just
at the moment when it seemed about to break,
he gave it the respite it needed.
Had Goering continued to attack the airfields,
the RAF could not have continued to defend the skies.
Instead, on September 15, British radars picked up
another massive assault on London.
The first wave of 100 bombers and
four hundred fighters was intercepted.
Fighting raged all the way from the coast.
In the afternoon, another fleet of 150 bombers
renewed the attack.
Winston Churchill was at the Fighter Command
headquarters that day.
After he heard controllers calling in reinforcements
from neighbouring groups, he asked,
"What other reserves have we got?"
The reply was, "There are none."
[explosion]
But it was obvious that the Luftwaffe had failed
to gain control of the air, and on September 17,
Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion.
The Battle of Britain did not really end.
It died away.
Hitler now tried a new tactic.
By October 5, the daylight raids stopped and the
Germans concentrated on bombing Britain's cities by night.
This was the so called Blitz.
London was attacked every night but one up to November 12.
On November 10, the centre of the
city of Coventry was obliterated.
The Blitz continued into 1941, with the last major raid
being made on London on the night of May 10.
More than 50,000 civilians were killed in the Blitz,
but there was never any question of Britain cracking.
Victory in the Battle of Britain was
a moment of huge national relief.
Pilots had come from all over the empire to join the RAF,
and from countries occupied by the Nazis,
like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Churchill summed up the nation's gratitude.
[Churchill] Never in the field of human conflict was
so much owed by so many to so few.
[narrator] But for Hitler, this was no more
than an irritating setback.
Britain, he was convinced, could never be a serious threat.
So he now turned to Eastern Europe.
For Britain, there was now a chance to rebuild
with a view, one day, to taking the fight to the enemy.
But to do that, Churchill would need help.
[applause]
Britain may have won the Battle of Britain,
but it was still immensely vulnerable.
Night after night, its cities were
hammered by the Nazis' Blitz.
Its supply lifelines at sea were under constant assault.
Churchill needed more help.
And there was only one country that could provide it.
The United States.
By 1940, the U.S. had recovered from the Great Depression
and the economy was booming again.
It had immense reserves of manpower
and unrivalled industrial strength.
But the people of the United States were utterly
opposed to becoming involved yet again in Europe's wars.
In July 1940, a poll showed that only 8% of them
were willing to enter the war.
Undeterred, Churchill lobbied the U.S. president,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Roosevelt had long admired Churchill for his
outspokenly anti-Nazi views, and the two men shared
an interest in naval affairs.
Roosevelt had been Under Secretary for
the U.S. Navy in 1917.
After he became president, Roosevelt kept
in touch with Churchill.
The two began a correspondence, Churchill
signing himself, "former Naval person."
For all his avuncular image, Roosevelt had no
illusions that German aggression would one day
suck America into the war.
So he began the long job of preparing
American public opinion.
I am a Pacifist,
but I believe you and I will act
together to protect and to defend our science,
our culture, our American freedom
and our civilization.
[narrator] In July 1940, he got approval for a massive
expansion of the U.S. Navy, including the building of
six large battleships and a new class of aircraft carriers.
The following month, Congress agreed that the
National Guard and other reserves should be
called up for one year's active duty.
And in September, a large expansion of the
150,000 strong U.S. Army was agreed, with a limited
number of conscripts being chosen by lottery.
The first number, drawn by the Secretary of War,
is serial number 158.
[narrator] That same month, Roosevelt
announced a deal under which the U.S. would supply
Britain with 50 World War I destroyers, in return
for 99-year leases on bases in Newfoundland
and the Caribbean.
The British Navy, desperate for more escorts
to fight the U-boats, began taking them over
within days of the deal being signed.
The clearest sign that Roosevelt was slowly winning
the argument came in the November 1940 presidential
election, when he convincingly defeated the isolationist
Wendell Wilkie with 27 million votes to 22 million.
[applause]
At the end of the year, Roosevelt spoke to the
American people, setting out the four essential freedoms
which he believed were at stake, and which
Britain was fighting to uphold.
Freedom of speech and religion and freedom
from want and from fear.
To save these, the United States must become
the arsenal of the democracies.
In other words, it must arm Britain.
We shall send you in ever increasing numbers,
ships, planes, tanks, guns.
That is our purpose and our pledge.
[narrator] But some Americans remained
implacably opposed to helping Britain.
One of the most outspoken was the American
ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy,
father of the future president John F. Kennedy.
A Boston Irish businessman who had made
his fortune booze smuggling during Prohibition,
Kennedy hated the British and seized every
opportunity to claim that they would shortly
be forced to surrender.
However, Kennedy's virulence was counterbalanced
by the growing admiration many Americans felt for
the bravery shown by the British people
during the Blitz.
In particular, the broadcasts by the CBS London
correspondent Ed Murrow helped to change public opinion.
[Murrow] This is London.
I remember the evening of Sunday, December 29.
It was just like any other winter evening.
The first bombers were over London at about 6:30.
Soon the fires hissed from the top story windows.
Hitler once boasted, "I will rub out their cities."
This is what he meant.
[narrator] Encouraged by his electoral success,
in January 1941 Roosevelt introduced his
so called Lend Lease Bill.
The United States would supply weapons and
war material to Britain and China, which was
still struggling desperately against the invading Japanese.
Payment would be delayed.
Roosevelt likened Lend Lease to lending a neighbour
a hose to put out a fire.
You would worry about the payback later.
Roosevelt was also being canny.
It also meant that unlike in 1917, if America
had to enter the war, it already would have
a substantial weapons industry.
American war preparations didn't end there.
Roosevelt secretly authorised U.S. military staffs
to discuss a common strategy with the British
should America enter the war.
By April 1941, he felt confident enough to take
another step to help Britain at sea.
He greatly extended the Pan American security zone,
the area within which U.S. warships would protect
U.S. merchant vessels.
In May, U.S. troops set up bases in Greenland,
and in July, U.S. Marines were sent to replace the
British garrison in Iceland, which was there
to deprive the Germans of its harbours.
The U.S. Navy also began providing limited
convoy escorts, particularly for
U.S. ships carrying Lend Lease materials.
Hitler now gave his submariners strict instructions
not to sink American ships, as he didn't want to
provoke the United States into war.
But inevitably, there were clashes.
On September 4, 1941, a British aircraft attacked
a German submarine.
Thinking that the strike had come from the nearby
U.S. destroyer Greer, the U-Boat fired a torpedo at it.
The Greer responded with depth charges and there
was a running battle which lasted three hours.
[explosion]
Neither vessel was sunk, but the tension was mounting.
On November 17, the destroyer USS Kearney
was hit by a torpedo while on convoy duty off Iceland.
The U-Boat commander claimed it was an accident.
He had been firing at a British ship and the
Kearney had got in the way.
But 11 U.S. sailors were dead and the destroyer
only just made it back to port in Rekyavik.
Roosevelt protested and the U.S. press was outraged.
However, the American public remained resolutely
opposed to going to war.
Within weeks, at the end of 1941, the situation
was reversed in a single day.
But in the meantime, Britain would have to fight on alone.
And luckily, it had an astonishing weapon to hand.
It looks like just another mansion in the English
countryside, a bit run down.
But Bletchley Park once contained a secret that
fundamentally affected the course of World War II.
Because it was at Bletchley that Britain worked out
how to read Germany's most secret codes.
Since the mid-1930s, all the German armed forces
and intelligence departments had adopted
a standard machine for encoding their messages.
The Cypher Machine E, better known as Enigma.
It was developed in the early 1920s as a handy tool
for businessmen to keep commercial messages secret.
It was powered by a battery, and its encoded messages
were transmitted in Morse code to be decoded on
a second Enigma machine at the receiving end.
The critical element of the machine was three rotors
which could be set to scramble the message in a way
which could only be unscrambled by
another machine with the same settings.
The rotors could be replaced and set differently.
As a result, each letter typed could come up in
any one of 150 million ways.
Given the almost infinite number of settings,
it was not surprising that the Germans remained
convinced throughout the war that
Enigma was uncrackable.
It was the Poles who took the first steps
in solving this baffling puzzle.
They knew of the existence of the Enigma machine
and assembled a team of top mathematicians to crack it.
Marian Rejewski,
Jerzy Roszickzi
and Henry Zigalski.
But the team could not decipher messages without
knowing the internal wiring of the rotors.
The solution was supplied by French intelligence,
which sent its Polish allies material gathered by
a spy in the German army's cipher department.
Amongst this was an Enigma manual.
The Poles were able to reconstruct an Enigma machine
and began laboriously decoding messages.
By July 1939, Hitler was sounding increasingly
threatening towards Poland.
Britain and France had promised to come to its aid.
It was clear that war was coming.
So intelligence officers from the three allies
met in Warsaw.
There, the British and French were astonished at
how much the Poles had done in decoding
Enigma. And the Poles agreed to send two of their
reconstructed machines to London.
Just two weeks after they were handed over,
Poland was invaded.
By the time Poland fell to the Germans, the Polish
cryptographers had destroyed all evidence
of their work on Enigma.
Some were captured and tortured, but none
revealed what they had been up to.
The task was now taken up by the British at their
Government Code and Cypher School,
at Bletchley Park, near London.
Its head was Commander Alistair Denniston.
Denniston recruited a strange collection of
mathematicians, chess masters and crossword
puzzle experts to continue the decoding.
Among these experts was Alan Turing, a Cambridge don.
In 1936, Turing had described the idea of a
universal computing machine, a machine that he
believed would one day be able to solve all
mathematical problems.
He used his ideas to design decryption machines
known as "Bronze Goddesses."
The raw material for Bletchley came from the
British Y service, a chain of radio listening stations
which monitored and recorded German transmissions.
The messages were fed into Beltchley's
Bronze Goddesses and permutations run
until at last the key was found.
Once a message had been decrypted, it was translated,
analysed and passed on to the appropriate authority.
From the moment he became Prime Minister
and learned of Bletchley's work, Winston Churchill
understood its extraordinary importance.
He referred to Bletchley's output as his ultra
secret information, and Ultra became its codename.
The distribution of Ultra was tightly controlled.
Senior commanders were shown only that information
which directly concerned their operations.
The need to keep the source of intelligence secret
was so great that Churchill insisted that no action could
be taken on the basis of Ultra material unless a
cover plan had been developed to convince the Germans
that the intelligence must have come from another source.
The third critical element of the Bletchley operation,
after decoding and assessing the material,
was keeping control of it.
Often Ultra revealed vital information about
German plans and actions.
News of forthcoming attacks and other intelligence
was filed away in a massive card index system.
This was constantly mined for answers
to questions great and small.
By the end of the war, Bletchley was decoding
much of the German traffic almost as fast as
it was being sent.
It was jokingly said that it would have been quicker
for a German commander to ring Bletchley to get his orders.
It was at sea that the Allies first became aware
of how vital information from Ultra could be.
An early example of its potential came on June 8, 1940.
The British aircraft carrier Glorious was covering
the convoys withdrawing Allied troops from Norway,
when Bletchley decoded signals showing the German
battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau
were approaching its position.
A warning was passed to Royal Navy headquarters,
but unaware of how accurate the information was
likely to be, this chose not to pass it on.
[explosions]
The Glorious was intercepted and sunk.
The British Navy had learned the hard way just
how important the new source of intelligence could be.
It was not a mistake it would make again.
Bletchley also performed a critical role in the
build up to the Battle of Britain.
It had provided a clear picture of the Luftwaffe's
order of battle, and the overall strategy being
adopted by its leader, Hermann Goering.
This information convinced the head of British
Fighter Command, Air Vice Marshal Hugh Dowding that
his tactic of committing his fighters bit by bit
rather than in large numbers was the correct one,
a tactic that played a crucial part in preserving
the RAF's narrow winning margin.
As Britain continued its lonely fight into 1941,
it had at last found a way of fighting back.
Bletchley Park was ready for action.
The major breakthroughs had been made.
The systems for exploiting them
put in place and well tested.
In the coming years, Ultra and the work of
Bletchley Park would prove vital to the Allied successes.
But as the Battle of Britain and the Blitz ground on,
these were still a long way off.
Churchill still needed more immediate results.
And by early 1941 he thought that he had
at last found a way to get them.
Nazi Germany might now control most of
western Europe, but Britain's prime minister,
Winston Churchill, now decided to take
the war to the Germans.
We shall not flinch from the supreme child.
All will come right.
[narrator] Even before France had surrendered
he was looking for ways of striking back, and of
keeping resistance alive in the countries
which had been overrun.
Just as the last troops were being taken off
the beaches of Dunkirk, Churchill was
already planning ahead.
He wrote to his chiefs of staff, demanding the
formation of raiding forces which could attack
the coasts of occupied Europe.
Within a few days, a call for volunteers had been
circulated to create a force of 5,000 men.
They were to be called Commandos, after the
highly mobile Boer units which had fought the
British for three years in South Africa
at the turn of the century.
Ten commando units each of 500 men were set up.
They began practising attacks from the sea.
[gunshots]
One unit was ordered to specialise in parachuting
and using assault gliders.
This soon became the basis of the separate
Parachute Regiment.
Admiral Sir Roger Keyes was appointed
Director of Combined Operations.
Churchill instructed him to prepare to mount three
major raids as soon as the threat of an invasion
of Britain had passed.
One of Keyes' first tasks was to develop ships
which could land his new troops.
Three cross Channel ferries were converted
so as to carry landing craft.
On March 4, 1941, two Commando units and a
demolition squad were landed on the
Lofoten Islands off Northern Norway.
Their main objective was to destroy factories
which converted fish oil into glycerine for explosives.
The Commandos achieved total surprise and
landed without a shot being fired.
A German armed trawler in the harbour was seized.
They quickly destroyed the factories and fish oil tanks.
[explosions]
One officer could not resist using the local
post office to send a telegram to A. Hitler, Berlin.
It read, "Reference your last speech, I thought
you said that wherever British troops land on the
continent of Europe, German soldiers will face them.
Well, where are they?"
The Commandos then rounded up 60 Norwegian
collaborators and 225 German prisoners
before returning without any losses.
With them, they also took 115 Norwegian volunteers.
These would then join the Free Norwegian
forces in Britain.
The Lofoten raid was an enormous public relations
success and a huge boost for British morale.
But its most important result was one which
could not be publicised, the capture of a set of
rotors for an Enigma machine.
Although the machine had been thrown overboard
from the armed trawler, its crew forgot the spares.
They were to give invaluable help to the cryptographers
of Bletchley Park in breaking the German naval codes.
Then in December 1941, four Commando units
landed at the Norwegian port of Vaagso
and were immediately involved in heavy fighting.
The approach to Vaagso was covered by the
small island of Maaloy, on which the Germans
had placed artillery.
This was quickly overrun, but across the water
in Vaagso, the fighting was intense.
It took several hours for the main German
garrison to be subdued.
The Commandos then blew up several factories
and sank eight ships before withdrawing.
These raids convinced Hitler that sooner or later
the British would attempt to retake Norway.
So for the remaining four years of the war,
he kept some 250,000 troops there.
Troops which might have proved vital on other fronts.
But effective as they were, Commando raids
were not enough to stop the Nazis.
Churchill needed other ways to hurt them,
so he focused on the resistance movements
in the occupied countries.
In July 1940, a Special Operations Executive, SOE,
was formed, as Churchill put it, to set Europe ablaze.
[explosion]
Its objectives were to encourage sabotage of
the enemy war effort, gather intelligence and
prepare clandestine forces to disrupt German defences.
The bulk of SOE's activities centred on France.
Soon agents were recruited in Britain to build up
and coordinate the French resistance networks.
Radio operators and couriers were
also trained to support them.
One problem was how to get these teams into the country.
Submarines, high speed launches, and
fishing vessels were all tried out.
But the German coastal defences
proved difficult to penetrate.
The answer was aircraft. And in August 1940,
a special RAF unit was set up with Whitley bombers
and short take-off and landing Westland Lysanders.
Agents and equipment were either parachuted in
from the bombers or flown in and
brought out by the Lysanders.
On moonlit nights, a growing number of reception
committees would be waiting, as an increasingly
widespread network of resistance groups was built up.
But all the while, they were hunted by an increasingly
sophisticated German counter espionage system.
This used direction finding equipment to locate hidden
radios and double agents to infiltrate networks.
The work of SOE agents was desperately perilous
and their life expectancy short.
The slightest lapse in concentration
might betray them to the Gestapo.
Many suffered torture and death.
But Churchill was sure it was worth it.
Keeping resistance alive in the occupied countries gave
hope to millions that liberation would eventually come.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC,
was also enlisted to raise the hopes of those
living under German rule.
It broadcast the news in all the languages
of the occupied countries.
[speaking in French]
The German penalty for listening to
these bulletins was death.
But people tuned in regardless.
The BBC also played a crucial role in transmitting
coded messages to resistance groups.
These always came after the nine o'clock news.
[speaking in French]
For the peoples of occupied Europe, the prospect
of liberation might only be a distant dream,
but in the middle of 1941, it suddenly became more likely.
For by then Britain was no longer alone in fighting Nazism.
It had gained a massive ally.
But it wasn't America, which Churchill
had been assiduously been courting.
It was the Soviet Union.
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