(explosion booms)
(intense music) - [Narrator] War ravaging
the East since 1937 in Japan's invasion of China reached Europe on the
1st of September, 1939 with Germany's invasion of Poland. It became global on the
7th of December, 1941, when Japanese aircraft attacked
the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. (intense music) It touched every continent, (artillery banging) and lasted for six years. (intense music) It ended with a new weapon for a new age. This is the history of the
greatest of all man-made events. These men are part of that history. They are eyewitnesses to
the triumphs and tragedies of the war, wherever it was fought. Their testimony is part of the story of how our world was made, by those who could pay, and those who could no longer meet "The Price of Empire." (artillery booming) In a world made unstable by
issues of the First World War unresolved by the peace treaty which ended that struggle, dictators rose, and their ambitions
brought Europe once more to the brink of conflict. In the second episode of
"The Price of Empire," Europe crashed over the brink when an unlikely alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union made each bold enough to move on Poland. (intense music)
(artillery booming) It is now the early spring of 1940. Six months have passed with
little action, the Phoney War. That is about to end, and
a new word is to be added to the vocabulary of warfare, Blitzkrieg. (intense music) On January the 10th, 1940, a German military aircraft
made a forced landing at Mechelen-sur-Meuse in Belgium. Aboard was Major Hellmuth
Reinberger, a staff officer of the Seventh Airborne Division. In his possession was a complete copy of Fall Gelb, Case or Plan Yellow, the German plan for the
invasion of Western Europe. The loss of this document
to the enemy was, according to the German chief
of operations, catastrophic. Hitler was forced to postpone his invasion until the spring, much to the
relief of his high command, which had been arguing for
a halt to allow for repair, rest, and re-equipment. That delay was the Phoney War. Plan Yellow being compromised now presented General Erich von Manstein with the opportunity to press
again his invasion strategy which had earlier been rejected. Plan Yellow was little
more than a rehashing of the offensive plan with which Germany had gone to war in 1914, essentially an attack
across the Belgian border, outflanking France's
defensive preparations. It was the strategy that
the Allies expected. (intense music) The dreadful losses of
the First World War, 4 1/2 million French casualties, almost 1 1/2 million
dead, had persuaded France that the future of war lay
with the entrenched soldier and the machine gun. Between the wars, France had
spent vast amounts of money on preparing a defensive posture. Most of the money, perhaps
3 billion French francs, had gone on a fortified installation named for the minister for war who had initiated it, Andre Maginot. The Maginot Line fortified the border between France and Germany. It was equipped with
an underground railway, underground cinemas, and a garrison of half a million soldiers ready to repel any direct German assault. This supposedly impregnable position would also, it was argued, oblige Germany to attack through Belgium along the lines of the 1914 offensive. (artillery booming) And so it was here from late 1939 that the French and British
concentrated their forces. Had Plan Yellow, the attack
across the Belgian border, been implemented, the
outcome is unknowable. It would surely have
been a tighter struggle than the demolition job that lay ahead. (intense music) With Plan Yellow shelved
following the plane crash in Mechelen-sur-Meuse,
the German high command was forced to consider
an alternative strategy. This was the moment
for Erich von Manstein, a professional soldier in
the Prussian tradition. By mid-February, Hitler had
accepted von Manstein's plan, which has come to be
known as the Sichelschnitt or sickle cut. Earlier German plans had proposed a right hook swinging around
against the channel ports. The sickle cut was to be a left hook, swinging up behind the Allied armies waiting for their enemy to
pour across the Belgian border. That left hook would be delivered by the new concept of massed armor. Walter Wenck, chief of operations of the First Panzer Division, coined the expression that
best explains the thinking behind German as opposed
to Allied armored tactics. "Hit with your fist," Wenck said. "Don't feel with your fingers." German armor would be the clenched fist, not the splayed fingers of Allied tactics, and it would race for territory, not stop for a set piece battle. For Manstein planned to
exploit the weak point that was the key to the
whole undoing of France, the gap between the defense
of the Belgian border and the Maginot Line. That gap was the forest of the Ardennes, the point which German military theorists called the Schwerpunkt, the focal point or center of gravity. For von Manstein, the
Schwerpunkt was the River Meuse between Sedan and Dinant. According to French planners, no attack could be pressed
through the thick forest of the Ardennes, but according
to the Manstein plan, armor could move through the forest and then, undetected, burst into the rear of the Allied lines as they
faced the frontal attack being pressed, not just through Belgium, but also the Netherlands,
whose sovereignty the Kaiser had respected 25 years earlier. - Belgium and France were
involved in the First World War, but the Netherlands was neutral, and I suppose it will be all right. Everybody was hoping that things would not turn for the worse. - [Narrator] Hitler gambled. He ordered that all of
the stockpiled materials and munitions of war be expended. The idea was that they
would be replenished from the conquered lands. At the commencement of the invasion, the Luftwaffe, for example, had enough bombs for
only 14 days of combat. (tanks rumbling)
(intense music) The Germans were in every
particular seriously outnumbered. (footsteps marching)
(martial piccolo music) They had three Army Groups
comprising 133 divisions. The Allies facing them had 145 divisions, 3.7 million men to Germany's 2.7 million. And on paper at least, France on her own was superior
in tanks and aircraft. Speaking in August, 1941, Hitler is reported to have said, "I never use the word Blitzkrieg, because it is a very silly word," but it is a word meaning
literally "lightning war," which has become stuck, limpet-like, to the idea of Germany's
mechanized offensives, the most devastating of
which began at 0545 hours on the morning of May the 10th, 1940. In less than six weeks in as
catastrophic and humiliating a military defeat as can be imagined, the battle would be over, and all the countries
of continental Europe that had neither allied with Germany nor managed to preserve their neutrality would be under Nazi control. (intense music) The plan that the German high command, the Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH, had for the invasion of Western Europe forecast the defeat of
France and the Low Countries and the isolation of Great Britain. Now, that was the extent of
German planning in the West. There was no plan for the exploitation of conquered territory. For that sort of vision, we must turn our eyes as
Hitler did to the East, where German plans were very different. It was only to secure the German rear, preparatory to initiating
the plan for the East, the Generalplan Ost, that Hitler bothered with countries on his western borders. Once Western Europe was under his heel, Hitler would turn to
realize his great vision of an empire in the East. (intense music) So it was to secure the German rear that Hitler launched the Manstein Plan, a fearful demonstration
of what war had become. General George Marshall, US president Franklin D.
Roosevelt's chief of staff, saw as early as 1940
that the flag-waving days of warfare are gone. Nikolai Voznesensky,
chief of the Soviet State Planning Commission,
warned of a war of engines, a war that is won not on the battlefield but in the factories. (intense music)
(tools clunking) It would not be flag-waving
or glinting sabers or scarlet tunics, but bombs and shells and advancing armor
that decided the issue, and most critically, not their possession, but their replenishment. (hammer clanking) The strength of a German
Panzer division by March, 1945 would amount to 54 tanks. (tank rumbling) But in May, 1940, a Panzer
division comprised 328 tanks, and there was everything to play for. (intense music) The German onslaught began with bombs as the Luftwaffe attacked
Allied airfields. German airborne troops
parachuted into the Netherlands to seize vital bridges. In Belgium, the supposedly
impregnable fortress of Eben-Emael, key to Liege, fell to glider-borne troops
who overcame its defenses by the simple strategem
of landing on its roof. Units of von Bock's Army Group B crossed the Dutch and Belgian borders, luring the Allies into taking the bait. The Allied commander, French
general Guderain, obliged, moving three French armies and the entire British
expeditionary force, 40 divisions in total, north to face the anticipated invasion through Belgium. (intense music) But the real threat was from
Army Group A in the center. Its seven Panzer
divisions with 1,800 tanks smashed through the Ardennes. (artillery booming) A part of German military
philosophy was Auftragstaktik, or mission tactics, which
encouraged and expected initiative from commanders flexibly
meeting local conditions. When the Blitzkrieg burst onto the French and British defenses,
it was the initiative of generals like Heinz
Guderain and Erwin Rommel, whose growing reputation
would be later confirmed in the desert battles of North Africa, that drove their forces across country as they defied the
attempts of their superiors to rein them in. (artillery booming) In the evening of what was
day one of the invasion, the British prime minister
Neville Chamberlain resigned from office. Cabinet minister Leo
Amery said of Chamberlain that he loathed war so passionately that he was determined to wage
as little of it as possible. (intense music) Chamberlain was replaced
by Winston Churchill, who did not loathe war, having served in the First World War and taken part in the last
great British cavalry charge at Omdurman in the Sudan
late in the 19th century. In May, 1940, Winston
Churchill was 65 years old, only five years younger
than the man he replaced. - [Announcer] The man to beat
Hitler is Winston Churchill. Among his colleagues, Mr. Chamberlain, whose vacation of office
was accomplished in a manner worthy of his great sincerity, remains at Churchill's right hand. - [Narrator] Two days
after Churchill took office on May 12th, the leading German
units crossed into France, securing the north bank of the Meuse. On the 13th, the Dutch army
was ordered to fall back for a last stand on the line
Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Utrecht, but the war was lost in the Netherlands, and on the same day, Queen Wilhemina and her
government evacuated to London. (artillery booming) - On the 10th of May, Germany attacked Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France, all on the same day. On the fifth day, the German
air force bombed Rotterdam. (artillery booming) A lot of damage was done. I'm not aware of how many people died, but I'm sure people died. And on that day, the Dutch
high command surrendered. So now we were occupied. The first couple of
days in the occupation, quite a few huge families
committed suicide. How many, I don't know. The rumor came through Amsterdam. This family, that family. (intense music) - [Narrator] The relentless German assault was now pressing the
Allies all along the front. The Netherlands was out of the war, armor from Army Groups A and B was moving against the French Ninth
Army, which disintegrated. The German 12th and 16th Armies, having crossed the Meuse, were threatening the rear
of the Allied position. (intense music) In Paris, they tried an
appeal to the almighty. - [Announcer] In their hour
of anxiety, French people hear the summons to prayer. At Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, the solemn service of
intercession is held. The prime minister
Monsieur Reynaud attends, and Monsieur Daladier with
the American ambassador. - [Narrator] On the day that
the Netherlands surrendered, the French prime minister had telephoned his British counterpart. "We have been defeated,"
Paul Reynaud said. "We are beaten, we have lost the battle." Churchill could only answer, "Surely it can't have happened so soon." (intense music) But it had. (solemn music) In his telephone call to Churchill, Reynaud was reacting to
news from the battlefield that if any one action can be said to have been responsible, sealed the fate of France,
the battlefield at Sedan. On September the 1st, 1870, a Prussian force had destroyed
the French army at Sedan, forcing the abdication of the emperor and advancing the cause
of German unification under Prussian stewardship. This historical resonance added something to the significance of a
battle now being fought over the same ground. On the 16th of May, the Allies began to withdraw from Belgium. On the 17th, the fighting at Sedan ended with a German victory. In seven days, the Germans
had advanced 320 kilometers, crossed the Meuse, and broken into the undefended Allied rear. On the seventh day of the invasion, Brussels, the Belgian capital, fell. German tanks were reported to be refueling at local petrol stations. German troops were seen milking cows abandoned in the fields. In close support of the tanks
and the following infantry were the artillery and the Luftwaffe. The German air force had been designed to support action on the ground. Its later shortcomings can
be traced to this priority, but in the invasion of France, they were not shortcomings. German fighters dominated the skies, and both military and civilians
feared nothing so much as the shrieking approach of
the Junkers 87, the Stuka, short for Sturzkampfflugzeug, dive bomber, equipped with a mischievously
terrifying device that the Germans called
the Jericho-Trompeten, the Jericho Trumpet, a
propeller-driven siren tube that made the approaching
aircraft with its banshee howl as menacing as some fantastical beast. (bomber wailing)
(intense music) - We got off at Calais, and I thought, "Oh, what's going on here?" And the restaurant on the quayside, the windows are all broken,
and I was rather puzzled. You know, still didn't click. All of a sudden the planes came over. They came screaming down. The screaming bombs coming down, and these Stukas driving made
a horrible screaming noise. We ditched amongst the sand dunes, clawed at the earth,
trying to get underground. The fear was just overpowering. And I knew then, that was war. (intense music)
(artillery booming) - [Narrator] On May the
19th, Gamelin was replaced as Allied commander by General
Weygand, but it was too late. The Seventh Panzer Division under Rommel had reached Cambrai on the 18th, and on the 20th, German armor
reached the English Channel and the mouth of the River Somme, where so much blood had been
spilled in the First World War. (intense music) This thrust effectively split
the Allied armies in two. The Allies attempted a counterattack, but where the Germans
massed their 2,700 tanks, the Allies still thought of the tank as an infantry support weapon and had their 3,000
machines widely dispersed along the entire front. Britain and French counteroffensives were also poorly coordinated, and the disruption to the
German advance was momentary. Following the blunted
Allied counterattack, the Germans turned north,
pressing for the prize that had evaded the Kaiser's
troops 25 years earlier, the channel ports. Boulogne fell on the 25th, and Calais, bitterly defended by the
British, on the 27th. Before then, an order which
has puzzled many ever since changed the character of the battle. On May the 24th, Army
Groups A and B linked up, and group von Kleist stopped less than 25 kilometers from Dunkirk, where it was opposed by a
single low grade French division and a weak British infantry force. And then, in one of the war's regular and somewhat inexplicable turning points, it was ordered to halt. The day following the halt order, Hitler visited Army
Group A's headquarters, and he confirmed von Rundstedt's decision. "We question the decision
because with hindsight, we can see how feeble
French resistance was beyond this point, and how cheaply French capitulation was sold." For Hitler and his generals, the bulk of France's armed
forces was yet to be conquered, and after two hard weeks of fighting, many of Germany's armored
units had been reduced to 30% of their tank strength. Surely a pause to reform and
re-equip would be prudent. They could not have known that
prudence was not required. (intense music) On May the 25th, the day after Hitler's visit to the front, Lord Gort, commanding the
British expeditionary force, was advised by the Belgians
commanded by King Leopold that their situation was desperate. Gort decided that his duty
lay in saving his army to fight another day, rather
than seeing it sacrificed for a lost cause. He began to withdraw
his forces on Dunkirk, and the following day, May
the 26th, almost 28,000 men not central to the BEF's
fighting capacity were evacuated. - The road from Boulogne was
just full of moving bodies. That's all I could call them, because they didn't look like people. They were men, women, and children, with bags, dragging little trucks. The children weren't talking or playing. All with vacant, vacant expressions, just looking straight
ahead, going nowhere. - [Narrator] Reichsmarschall
Hermann Goring, commanding the German air force, rejoiced that the kill of
the troops trapped at Dunkirk would be left to his Luftwaffe, but the Luftwaffe could not do the job. The bombers could not find
their targets at night, and the fighters could
not operate effectively. (intense music) It took one more miracle
for the troops at Dunkirk to be saved. The notorious English Channel was, for the duration of the
operation, a calm sea. On the 26th of May, the
halt order was rescinded, but it was too late. An armada had been organized, an effective defense perimeter
had been established, and 330,000 Allied troops
were assembled at Dunkirk to be evacuated. There were 222 Royal Navy and approximately 860
civilian vessels at Dunkirk. Instead of the 45,000 hoped for, the fleet took off 338,000 Allied troops. (intense music) - On the way down to the harbor, they were shelling us, and
I dropped into the gutter a couple of times. The harbor was full of sunken ships. At the quayside, I could see somebody running in front of me. I see him running, and he was running, and I thought, "Ooh, that ship's got smoke coming out of the funnel," so I ran like mad as well, and it was just pulling
away from the quayside, and I managed to get aboard. (intense music) - [Narrator] 40% Of those
evacuated from Dunkirk, 170,000 men, were French troops. They were returned to their own shores in southwestern France
to carry on the fight. Following France's capitulation,
they were out of the war. Dunkirk had saved the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force, but that army had been
effectively disarmed. It left behind 64,000
vehicles and 2,500 guns. Those evacuated were to all
intents and purposes beaten, but they were not defeated,
and they were not pursued. - When I first joined up, my training was pretty
much the same as that of the 1914-18 war. The infantry's rifles were
a big 18-inch-long bayonet. And jumping in and out of trenches, charging at bundles of
twigs or sacks of straw and stabbing them. Of course it wasn't until
Dunkirk, at the time of Dunkirk, where we learned that there's
another way of fighting, which was the Blitzkrieg. And that's been taught
to us by the Germans. (intense music) - [Narrator] The evacuation
continued until June the 4th, when the Germans entered Dunkirk. The following day, they
resumed their offensive, pushing south into France. By the 9th, the French had been driven from the Somme, the outcome
was hardly in doubt, and on the 10th, scenting victory, Mussolini declared war
on Britain and France, and the French government
removed itself from Paris. (intense music) Mussolini's caution is understandable. His army was both smaller
and less well-equipped than it had been in 1915. (intense music)
(footsteps marching) On the 11th of June, Paris
was declared an open city, in the hope that this would save it from bombing and destruction. On June the 14th, General
Bogislav von Studnitz led the 87th Infantry
Division of the Wehrmacht through the almost deserted
streets of the French capital. The next day, June the 15th, 400,000 Frenchmen of the
surrounded Third, Fifth, and Eighth Armies surrendered en masse. Whilst on the other side of
Europe in an opportunistic move, the Soviet Union expanded its
empire by liquidating Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia
as independent nations. (intense music) On June the 17th, the 86-year-old Marshal
Petain, the hero of Verdun in the First World War, whose
recall to Paris from his post as ambassador to Spain had been
greeted by cheering crowds, announced that he had
taken over as head of state and was seeking an armistice. (intense music) The panic in his country
that this announcement must have been calculated to quell is best illustrated by the
eight million French people who had abandoned their homes
since the invasion began. It was seeing some of
these civilians on the road being strafed by a German fighter aircraft that led a British airman to say, "So they are shits after all." (plane rumbling) The Dutch and Belgian governments, though the Belgian king
remained in his country, went into exile, and many urged
the French to do the same, perhaps relocating to French
colonies in North Africa and continuing the fight from there. But the government of Marshal Petain chose instead to surrender. An editorial in "O Comercio do Porto," a newspaper in the Portugal of dictator Antonio Salazar, declared that "the war is a sorry
advertisement for democracy." As the military disaster was unfolding, there was talk in England of relocating the British royal family to Canada. A faction in the British
cabinet, led by Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary,
who had been favored by both Chamberlain and the
king to become prime minister, proposed putting out peace feelers, using Mussolini as an intermediary. But Halifax had declined the top job, and the man who had been handed what many thought was a poisoned chalice was having none of it. Winston Churchill began at
once to mobilize the weapon that he would use to such great
effect throughout the war, the English language. - [Announcer] That heartening broadcast of Mr. Winston Churchill's was
a tonic to all who heard it. - We tried again and
again to prevent this war, and for the sake of peace, we put up with a lot of things happening which ought not to have happened. But now we are at war, and we are going to make war, and persevere in making
war until the other side have had enough. - [Narrator] If Churchill sounds different to the voice familiar from
this stirring speeches delivered as prime minister, it is because the prime
minister did not have time to travel to broadcasting
house and record for the nation the speeches he made in
the House of Commons, which was not wired for sound. So an actor named Norman Shelley, the voice of Larry the Lamb on
the BBC's "Children's Hour," was the voice of Winston Churchill for several radio broadcasts. On the 18th of June, Marshal Petain replaced Reynaud as prime minister. It was the day that
Churchill made the speech in the Commons in which he swore that "If the British empire
and its commonwealth last a thousand years, men will say, 'This was their finest hour.'" It was not France's finest hour. That same day, Charles de
Gaulle broadcast from London. He told the French people, "This war has not been settled
by the Battle of France. This is a world war. We believe that the honor of the French depends on continuing the war
at the side of our allies." - Well, at that point, she was
getting on board a big ship. We left France in June 1940, when France collapsed. I went to England. And then I read that de Gaulle was carrying on the
war beside the British. We worked hard to find
out why it was de Gaulle, because nobody knew who he was. After a few days of inquiry, we decided to rendezvous. That rendezvous on the 13 of July, 1940. - [Narrator] On the day that
de Gaulle made his appeal, Churchill said in his finest hour speech, "The Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of
Britain is about to begin." In one of history's strange ironies, these speeches were made
on the day that marked the 125th anniversary of
the Battle of Waterloo, when Britain with her German allies had defeated the French under Napoleon. (explosion booming) On June the 17th, Britain had suffered its worst ever maritime disaster, about three times worse than the Titanic. The Cunarder Lancastria, carrying between six and
9,000 evacuees, troops, and civilians, who had been left in France after the Dunkirk operation, had been sunk by German aircraft. Only 2,500 were saved. Churchill imposed a news
blackout on the event. He felt that the British people were receiving quite enough bad news. On June the 20th, Leon fell, and a general ceasefire
was declared in France. More than 1 1/2 million French troops became German prisoners. When Charles de Gaulle called
for continued resistance, General Weygand, his commander
in chief, said, "Nonsense." He said, "In three weeks, England will have her neck
wrung like a chicken." "Some chicken," Churchill
was later famously to remark. "Some neck." France's formal surrender
was signed on June the 22nd. France, if not quite all of
the French, was out of the war. The Kaiser, who had abdicated at the very end of the First World War, telegrammed Hitler from his
exile in the Netherlands. "My fuhrer," he wrote,
"I congratulate you, and hope that under your
marvelous leadership, the German monarchy will
be restored completely." Hitler turned to his valet. "What an idiot," he said. (intense music) The Blitzkrieg was a military disaster, but not a military defeat. The French armed forces
were still in the field when the government capitulated, and after the armistice, 1,700 of France's front line
aircraft were found distributed amongst airfields in the unoccupied zone. They had never flown against the Germans. (intense music) The fall of France was the
result not of her defeat, but of her surrender. The Vichy regime that became
the government of France, Vichy is the small spar town
in which it was located, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the most controversial
topics of the Second World War. Was Marshall Phillipe
Petain the shield of France, who had saved his country
from the humiliation of total defeat, or was he happy to reach an
early accommodation with, was he sympathetic
with, Hitler's ideology? In 1934, as the dictators
were starting to rise, the French newspaper "Le
Petit Journal" ran a poll. France endured 42 weaker
governments between the wars and the poll asked, "Who
should take over as dictator?" Phillipe Petain the popular
pick, with 200,000 votes. Second was Pierre Laval, who would become Vichy's prime minister. He received 31,000. When Petain formed his government, he effectively abolished the Republic. He got rid of the motto that had served since the Revolution, "Liberty,
equality, brotherhood," and replaced it with
"Travail, famille, patrie," "Work, family, fatherland." France would now, Petain
said, be a new society, rejecting the false idea
of the equality of men. (men shouting) The armistice that Petain agreed to accepted German occupation
of 3/5 of France, the industrial heartland, the border region with Germany, and the whole of the Atlantic
and Channel coastline. The Vichy government nominally
ruled over the country but in reality exercised
complete sovereignty only over the so-called
Zone Libre, the Free Zone. Petain also agreed to pay the
full costs of the occupation, which were grossly
overstated by the Germans. France overall is estimated
to have contributed 42% of the Reich's external
aid through the war. Supply from French farms and factories, supply of French labor
to German factories, acquisition of French military hardware, and the continued detention in Germany of 1 1/2 million French prisoners of war were all part of a very
one-sided armistice. France was allowed to keep her
overseas empire and her navy, and it was the French fleet that caused the greatest immediate concern
to the British government. It sought reassurance that the fleet would not be allowed to
fall into Axis hands. Receiving no such assurance, the Royal Navy blockaded the fleet at its North African bases
in Mers-el-Kebir and Oran. On July the 3rd, Admiral James Somerville communicated his terms to the French admiral
Marcel-Bruno Gensoul. "It is impossible for us,
your comrades up to now, to allow your fine ships
to fall into the power of the German enemy," he wrote. "His Majesty's government
have instructed me to demand that the French
fleet shall act in accordance with one of the following alternatives." And he listed, "Joining him, scuttling the fleet, or
sailing away with reduced crews to some French port in the West Indies, where they can be demilitarized
to our satisfaction, or perhaps be entrusted
to the United States. Failing the above, I have orders from His Majesty's government
to use whatever force may be necessary to prevent your ships from falling into German hands." But Admiral Gensoul would not comply. Somerville opened fire. (artillery booming)
(intense music) The first engagement between
British and French forces since Waterloo resulted in the deaths of 1,297 French servicemen, the sinking of a battleship, damage to five other ships and to the Anglo-French relationship. (intense music) Britain was now alone, but
at least thanks to Dunkirk, she still had some sort of an army. Importantly, in terms of recognizing that the war was far from over, it should be remembered that
the British Expeditionary Force represented a small
proportion of the forces available to Britain from within a reasonably unified empire, an empire that was mobilizing to her aid as it had done a generation earlier. Those in the dominions
would again demonstrate their readiness to pay
the price of empire. - It wasn't till May and June 1940, where you learned that
Britain really had her back to the wall. It looked like being invaded by the Nazis, so there was an outpouring
of patriotic fervors up and down Australia, and
fellas by the thousand, literally by the thousand,
are rushing to join up, so to go and help Britain. - [Narrator] But the price of
empire is not evenly shared. Amongst French troops left
to fall into German hands were thousands from France's
African possessions. About 10,000 were killed in the fighting, and among those taken prisoner, it is estimated that as many
as 3,000 were shot out-of-hand in a racially motivated crime. Following the evacuation from Dunkirk and the fall of France, orders were given in Britain
that the church bells, which pealed every Sunday,
were not to be rung again, except to signal an invasion. And an invasion of the British
Isles by a rampant Germany was everyone's expectation. After all, considered numerically, the troops restored to British soil meant that if the Wehrmacht invaded, they would face weaker opposition than they had a brushed aside in Belgium and the Netherlands. Instead of an invasion, in mid-July, the Luftwaffe dropped
leaflets over England. They were titled, "A
Last Appeal to Reason." On July the 19th, Hitler said, "I feel it is my duty
before my own conscience to appeal once more to
reason and common sense in Great Britain. The controversy over
whether the peace overtures to Britain were sincere, whether peace would have
been possible, persists." To the moment of his death, Adolf Hitler would talk about the war that was "forced on me," and described Winston
Churchill as "a warmonger." - Hello, good luck to you all! Keep it up! It's going well. You're
all playing a part. - [Narrator] When Churchill
became prime minister, his country was already at war, and the evidence of the cruel
and destructive ambitions of Hitler was overwhelming. Peace may have been possible, but it strains credibility to suppose that it could have been a
lasting peace or a peace which the United Kingdom
would have been better treated than France, obliged to allow occupation stripped of her military strength and forced to pay a sum
equivalent to 50 times the actual cost of the occupation. Churchill wanted no part of it. He told the British people in the first of his landmark speeches, "We shall go on to the end." He told them, "We shall
fight on the sea and oceans." He said, "We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be." He promised, "We shall never surrender." (intense music) And he meant it, which is why at this exact
time on July the 18th, the day before Hitler's
conciliatory statement, Churchill closed the Burma road. Although the conflicts of East
and west were yet to merge into one great affair, this was already a world war. Burma was part of the British Empire. It had been made so by Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, and the road, which was never more than
a precarious single track along which trucks lumbered slowly, carried up to 30,000
tons of supplies a day to support China's fight against Japan. On the 18th of July, 1940, Churchill, the great enemy of appeasement, yielded to Japanese pressure
and closed the Burma road. He later defended his action by saying that leaving the road open would have meant something
dangerous might have happened. Something dangerous would
have been Japan taking matters into its own hands, moving against Burma and forcing Britain into
a war on two fronts. But appeasing Japan
did not prevent danger. From the day that Churchill
closed the Burma road, the military party in Japan triumphed, and General Hideki Tojo, who
would later achieve notoriety as wartime prime minister,
became minister for war. A few days later, Japan announced its aim of creating a greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere. In September, 1940,
Japan occupied Indochina and signed a tripartite
pact with Rome and Berlin. (crowds cheering) The threat to Britain's empire in the East was becoming palpably real. The price of empire was going up. (intense music)
(crowd cheering) Hitler was a great admirer
of the British Empire. In "Mein Kampf," he made
clear his admiration for the British Empire, and
"Lives of a Bengal Lancer" was his favorite film. "What India was for England,"
Adolf Hitler would say before launching the
invasion of the Soviet Union, "the territories of
Russia will be for us." (troops chanting) He believed that the two
empires could co-exist, and on August the 14th, the day after the Battle of Britain began, told the 12 generals that he
had raised to field marshal that Germany would not benefit
from defeating Great Britain. The beneficiaries of that, Hitler said, would be Japan in Asia, Russia in India, Italy in the Mediterranean, and the United States in world trade. "That," Hitler said, "is why peace is possible with Britain." But it was not. (intense music) In the next episode of
"The Price of Empire," the only opposition to
Hitler and the Third Reich is the United Kingdom and her empire. Germany begins assembling a fleet for the cross-channel invasion
and launches an air war, the Battle of Britain, to
gain aerial superiority and to weaken civilian morale. It was the time when the darkest hour became the finest hour. (intense music)
