Hitler's Downfall: How The World's Worst War Ended | WWII In Numbers | War Stories

on the 19th of march 1945 adolf hitler issues one of the most chilling orders of his entire regime demolitions on right territory authorized all german units to destroy everything that could provide any assistance to the approaching enemy bridges roads all industrial and factory infrastructure thankfully most german commanders ignored that order uh or else it would have condemned germany to total devastation and that appears to have been the point the day before the order hitler told albert speer that if the war is lost the the german people are lost the idea of the folk story was lost by being defeated the german volck had shown itself to be the weaker nation it actually deserved to be destroyed you could say that hitler was lost in his own personal vagnerian opera he was plunging germany into the twilight of the gods it's a total act of narcissism if hitler fails then the nation the people they have failed him and they must fall with him this was one last conflagration one last act that results in the destruction of everything and hitler is not alone meanwhile on the other side of the world the japanese high command is absolutely intent on fighting to the bitter end no matter what the cost might be it would take an act of wagnerian proportions to get them to snap out of that line of thinking even in defeat the men who caused this war are preparing to sacrifice their own people in apocalyptic numbers between the 24th of july and the third of august 1943 more than 2 300 allied bombers turn the german industrial city of hamburg into an inferno in every way operation gamora brings the totality of modern strategic bombing to the city of hamburg mainly because of the use of incendiary weapons in just four raids the allies dropped only like 9 000 tons of bombs 45 000 people were killed three quarters of the city was destroyed something like a million people were left homeless 45 000 people dead that's more than were killed during the entire blitz after operation gamora albert speer turned to adolf hitler and told him if there are six more of these we're done fortunately for the nazis the british didn't have the capacity to mount many more of these raids in 1943. what turned the tide was a new kind of plane introduced by the allies in 1944 this wasn't a bomber it was a fighter the p-51 mustang i think the most important contribution made by the ally bomber offensive was the long-range mustang escort fighter which proved able to out-fight any german fighter in the air over germany it's powered by the rolls-royce merlin engine which makes it a superior performer it's armed with six an m2 50 caliber machine guns which provides a lot of muscle for the aircraft for strafing missions and then also for aerial intercept but crucially it can be equipped with long-range fuel tanks it could be jettisoned when empty and these increased its range to something like 1600 miles this meant that they could escort allied bombers all the way to germany and back more than 15 000 p-51 mustangs were produced by the end of the war allied bomber losses fell from almost 10 to a mere 3.5 the allied bombing campaign could now rain down hell on german cities in the last 12 months of the war the allies dropped something like 30 to 40 times as many bombs on german targets as the total tonnage of bombs dropped by the germans in the blitz cities like dresden essen cologne bremen and berlin are targeted again and again by up to a thousand bombers with a terrible toll on civilian life they realized that what they had to find was a series of vulnerable targets and they chose communications they chose chemicals each other chose synthetic oil and they focused all their effort on those targets these are important strategic centers for bombing but at the same time they're also areas where enormous numbers of civilians live so by attacking these areas and in some cases obliterating these areas is it right to kill enormous numbers of civilians when you are also targeting germany's ability to fight the war in 1945 an allied post-war study of the bombing campaign concludes that less than 17 percent of germany's industrial capacity had been affected by the bombs albert speer would not have agreed he concludes that as a result of allied bombing there are 35 fewer tanks 31 fewer airplanes and 42 fewer trucks available to the german military perhaps most importantly a third of all artillery production had to be given over to anti-aircraft guns three-quarters of the flack 88-millimeter guns that germany had had been pulled back into germany to defend the airspace so they weren't able to participate in the fighting in the east they weren't able to oppose allied forces in normandy and that was the most effective general purpose weapon that germany had the critical thing came in 1944 was the switch in eighth air force american aids air force strategy where they focused all their effort to starve the young armed forces of oil and disrupt communications to such an extent that it was no longer possible for the general economy to function effectively from that point on the bombing campaign had a profound effect on the german war effort as albert speer grimly confirmed to his fuhrer this is a man who had increased production threefold between 1941 when he took over in 1943. and he has concluded that germany has lost the war of industry as a result of allied bombing they did so at a cost of over 600 000 civilian lives whether that terrible civilian death toll made it all worthwhile that's something everybody must judge for themselves this is the last thing adolf hitler wants to hear in january 1945 because just one month earlier he'd staked everything he had on one last throw of the dice which if it succeeded would turn the war on its head 16th of december 1944 allied forces are racing across europe towards the rhine they're quite strung out but allied high command isn't particularly concerned because there isn't a great enemy presence in the area allied intelligence is wrong hiding in the forest of the ardennes are 17 german divisions including five panzer divisions something in the region of 240 000 men some of these contain the new tiger ii heavy panzer this is the tiger ii the so-called king tiger or royal tiger it's got frontal armor of 185 millimeters that's seven inches and that gun it's the long 88 and it means that if that tank can see you on the battlefield there is nothing the allies have that can resist one of those rounds hitler wants these in large numbers but they're difficult and slow to manufacture on the morning of the 16th of december this scratch force launches a surprise attack upon six weak american divisions containing 83 000 men recuperating in the ardennes gap the initial german advance creates a bulge in the allied line 40 miles deep which gives the battle its name the battle of the bulge at the outset of the battle the germans appear well on their way to antwerp but then things begin changing right around christmas the crucial weakness in the german plan is fuel this tank is a gas guzzler fully fueled up it could travel about 75 miles but to refuel took 860 liters of fuel that's 190 gallons at the time most german tanks were rationed to about 15 liters per day per tank so if these tanks didn't get through to their objective they would simply grind to a halt that objective is the town of spa on the belgian border spa was where quantities of fuel were stored literally on the sides of the road and one element of the german recon forces was dangerously close to finding this massive fuel depot when a us army captain with some belgian soldiers make the decision to dig a trench in the middle of the road pour fuel into it and set it on fire and this german recon element sees that turns around and withdraws they were painfully close to finding enough fuel that would have gotten them all the way to antwerp by now the germans are running out of time as well as fuel as the skies clear above the bulge allied fighter bombers begin hurrying the panzer colonies and general patton launches a counter-attack by the end of the campaign hitler has lost 98 024 men around 700 armored vehicles and 1600 combat aircraft for absolutely no gain at all it is a disaster for the germans in more ways than one there are german generals that don't want this attack because the troops could have been put to really good use trying to hold off the soviets approaching berlin they're screaming for those troops but they don't get them because hitler has this grand ambition of this sudden attack through the ardennes that will recapture antwerp the only concrete thing that was achieved was to slow the allies down so the ultimate result of the battle of the bulge well you could say it was to expose enormous swathes of germany to conquest by the red army on the 30th of january in 1945 the spearhead of the soviet red army commanded by marshal georgi zhukov reaches the river oda just 44 miles from berlin it is the culmination of a victorious charge into german territory yet still the germans fight on from 1943 onwards german propaganda hammered out the same themes all the time and the allies will take revenge the jews will take revenge the bolshevik menace is coming and this will be the end of germany now some germans did believe that of course and they they carried on fighting for nationally to the end where the red army was concerned the propaganda wasn't entirely exaggerating the soviets inflicted enormous uh violence against the german population the evidence is pretty overwhelming of lots of reprisals and of looting it's pure and simply revenge the germans had treated the russians with such brutality but there's also a sense that the russians are arriving in germany and they're seeing a standard of living that they don't recognize the average german peasant lives so much better than his russian equivalent and they're uh staggered by this why are they even invading us when they have all this already and so that fuels a kind of anger that snowballs into a brutal mode of behavior those who paid most were women millions of german women were raped by the waves of russians that were coming through many killed themselves rather than falling into the hands of the russians or having been mistreated by the russians it was a very real revenge across all fronts at least 400 000 german soldiers died in the last five months of the war when anything but defeat was hopeless but some nazis had darker reasons to fight on than their compatriots some had terrible secrets to hide on the 27th of january 1945 uh a unit of the red army's 107th rifle division came upon a camp hidden in the forest about 30 miles west of krakow [Music] this camp was abandoned some of the buildings were destroyed but 8 000 emaciated people remained in it who were able to tell this unit what they had stumbled upon auschwitz [Music] auschwitz birkenau has become a symbol of the terrible crimes perpetrated by the nazis in the holocaust and a byword for horror but it wasn't the only camp uncovered by the russian advance the soviets were the first to encounter death camps seeing my donut already in the summer of 44. and this was the first really and only occasion on which a nazi crematorium unit including the gas chambers have been discovered pretty much functioning the nazis had been pushed back so fast they simply hadn't had time to destroy the evidence before they fled at auschwitz they tried to cover their tracks they'd taken people off on these horrific marches through the snowy countryside going westwards and they're just left the sick and the dying who weren't fit to walk of the 714 000 concentration camp prisoners held by the reich in january 1945 almost half were dead by the end of may as the nazis indulged in one last great orgy of killing when the soviets were discovered auschwitz it shot them in the scale and in industrial design of this kind of killing the british and americans were very very skeptical they thought that the soviets were lying about this and so when the british americans discovered bergen-belsen one of the sentiments expressed was it turns out the russians were telling the truth about all of this now the reckoning was coming on monday the 16th of april 1945 the massed batteries of marshall zhukov's first belarusian front unleashed one million 236 000 shells against the dug-in positions of the german ninth army defending berlin it took 2450 freight cars to carry the shells that were expended in the first day a single day of attacking berlin the soviets followed this up with an assault by 2.5 million troops 6250 tanks 41 000 artillery and 7 500 aircraft on two main fronts against them were ranged around 760 thousand germans with one and a half thousand armored vehicles and nine thousand artillery in actual fact only about 85 000 soldiers are protecting the city itself half of them are old men young boys half of them are die-hard nazis some of them foreign ss the rest of the german army was actually trying to fall back from berlin and head west to surrender to the western allies but it's no wonder then that zhukov's assault only takes a week until he's parked right outside the reichstag right in the heart of berlin on the 30th of april 1945 two days after benito mussolini had been shot and hung in italy adolf hitler and ava brown committed suicide in the furore bunker [Music] that same day zhukov's forces stormed the reichstag just 400 yards from hitler's hiding place and raised the soviet flag over it the german army officially surrendered nine days later the battle for berlin cost the soviets three hundred and fifty two thousand four hundred and twenty five casualties of which seventy thousand 291 were killed but that was a drop in the ocean compared to their total losses throughout the second world war the soviet union mobilized about 34.5 million people in world war ii almost 11 and a half million soldiers died by comparisons germans lost half that many soldiers the british and the americans combined lost less than a tenth of what the soviets had to endure but it's really when you add the civilian casualties into the mix of the true cost of the water the russian strikes home it's virtually impossible to put a figure on the number of civilians who were starved or shot or simply worked to death by the nazis after operation barbarossa but the generally accepted estimate is around 16 million which means that something like 27 million russians died in what stalin dubbed the great patriotic war when you compare that with the 50 to 60 million people who are estimated to have died overall during the war you realize that the russians alone lost half the total number of people who died during the second world war but for the russians as well as for the americans chinese and japanese the war isn't over yet the war in europe may be won but the fight back in the pacific has only just begun in april 1944 the imperial japanese army mounts the largest operation it will ever undertake during the second world war but it's not targeted at the americans it's targeted at china we tend to forget that the second world war actually started in china in 1937 and it's continued unabated ever since 510 000 troops on the chinese mainland launched operation ichigo an ambitious thrust into the heart of chinese nationalist territory operation ichigo was a japanese plan to strike at american airfields that were beginning to bomb the japanese home island the japanese push forward finally conquering large swathes of central china that simply hadn't fallen to the japanese in the previous six or seven years as the guomin tang of chiang kai-shek collapses the japanese victory looks overwhelming the success of ichigo ends up being a bit of a mirage because this inadvertently sets the stage for bombing operations against the japanese home island american bombers are now within striking range of the japanese mainland and they exploit this with a vengeance the us 21st bomber command is led by a man called general curtis lemay now he draws up his big list of japanese urban and industrial targets and he starts doing so in february 1945. a series of punishing aerial attacks start off small and then begin getting larger and larger and larger in that first month his planes conduct 2 700 sorties against tokyo and yokohama alone the infamous great raid on tokyo actually kills 83 000 people and renders a further one and a half million people homeless this campaign is going to flatten 40 of buildings in 66 japanese cities and displace 8 million people as unfortunate as that is that is exactly the type of success that lemay is looking for yet despite the pounding their citizens are taking the die-hard militarists in control of the japanese government are determined to fight on having won their empire they don't want to give it up there's a cold hard calculus associated with what compels the japanese to continue fighting on in the in the face of these bombing rates and that is the belief that if they demonstrate to the united states that a potential invasion is going to be so costly the united states will have to back down from the idea of unconditional surrender faced with the object refusal of japan to admit that it's beaten the american high command adopts the strategy known as island hopping all that matters is grabbing every japanese-held island on route to the japanese mainland and one island that has to be taken is the ash covered volcanic atoll of iwo jima irojima is only about a third the size of manhattan but it's an important island because it is exactly halfway between the three air bases in the mariana islands and tokyo this puts it right under the flight path of american bombers on their way to bomb japan it provides airfields from which japanese aircraft can intercept the b-29 700 miles before tokyo they've got to take out the airfields on iwo jima easier said than done iwo jima was just one big beehive a warren of fighting positions they were so well dug in that even a 79-day aerial and naval bombardment hardly does any damage at all this island imposes unspeakable casualties american gis have to winkle out the defenders with flamethrowers and grenades at murderously close quarters the fighting on iwo jima was so hellish that the marines start to call every valley every ridge names like meat grinder death ridge blood valley and then once it looks like maybe the enemy has been suppressed the army sets up the fighter base only then to have 300 japanese appear out of caves and conduct a bonsai charge into an area where ground crewmen are living [Music] the taking of iwo jima takes 45 days and costs the us marines 6821 dead and over 18 000 wounded this is the only time an american fighting force sustains more casualties than there are defenders the japanese lose over 21 000 people on that island the island hopping campaign is going to be nothing but a nasty street fight from start to finish [Music] but iwo jima is merely the warm-up to the desperate struggle for the island of okinawa which begins five days later it's important to the americans because it is basically a gateway to the home islands if they can take okinawa they've therefore got a post that's just 350 miles from the japanese mainland on sunday the 1st of april 1945 more than 1 200 u.s vessels escort 60 000 marines onto the landing beaches as the prelude to an invasion of over 170 000 men they expected a rain of steel and instead the landing craft hit the beach marines and soldiers exit them and it's silence they're completely unopposed and it's not until not available [Music] by the time that was over some 7 000 marines had been killed and around 32 to 37 000 had been wounded japanese 32nd army on the island sustained over 100 000 killed in action there are barely 7 000 prisoners taken on okinawa and that's not even considering the loss of civilian life which was staggering believed to be over a hundred thousand so okinawa is a place where in ground combat almost a quarter of a million lives were lost and off the coast of okinawa a macabre death ritual is being carried out that will drive home just how costly the invasion of japan will be to the americans one of the most unnerving experiences that american sailors had to face was the suicidal missions carried out by japanese kamikaze pilots against american shipping kamikaze refers to the divine wind which sank the fleet of the great mongol emperor kublai khan in the 13th century it's imbued with japanese heroism and folklore and myth given to these young pilots carrying out a suicide attack they were honored forever for sacrificing their lives to perpetuate the japanese empire but behind all the ritual and self-sacrifice lay cold hard numerical reality the attrition rate for the japanese pilots by this time in the war was approaching 96 what they are left with are inexperienced pilots and a dramatic fuel shortage so they can't even train the pilots that they have all a kamikaze pilot has to do is get his plane up in the air pointed at a conning tower and crash into it it was very effective during the three months of the okinawa campaign 1465 kamikaze attacks sink 29 ships and damage 120 others killing and wounding 9083 u.s naval personnel add the losses offshore to the losses among the army and marine divisions fighting onshore you have over ten thousand killed when you consider the killed wounded and missing the number increases to 53 000. add 36 000 cases of combat fatigue the number pushes toward 90 000 and all of that for an island that's 90 miles long from top to bottom and eight miles wide so when the joint chiefs of staff commission a kind of casualty estimate for what it's going to cost them to invade the japanese homeland the number comes out of 350 000 men they have to confront some uncomfortable realities you only have to look at what the japanese were doing with their unit 731 now that was developing biological weapons japanese school students are being trained for suicide tactics then you add to that a large number of one-way suicide boats were discovered the joint chiefs of staff had to confront one basic question and it was is it worth it there's got to be another way in august they find one on the morning of august 6 1945 people in hiroshima look up to see three b-29s of the city the inhabitants of hiroshima actually thought they were immune from bombing because hiroshima had been spared the onslaught of the b-29 bombing campaign [Music] the awful truth is that general curtis lemay was ordered to set aside three japanese cities for special treatment but now the time has come for the people of hiroshima to experience bombing the one single atom bomb dropped on hiroshima by the enola gay flattens half the city and immediately incinerates more than 40 000 people [Music] and more civilians will die in the months that follow people begin to die of this new thing radiation poisoning and as time goes by it elevates the total loss of life at hiroshima and brings that number all the way up to about 140 000. but the japanese failed to surrender so three days later the u.s drops fat man on nagasaki killing almost 30 000 instantly and condemning more than seventy three thousand to a lingering death in the early hours of the same day almost two million soviet troops supported by 5500 tanks surge into manchuria and overwhelmed the japanese garrison there emperor hirohito insisted then that his civilian representatives open up communications with the government of the united states toward a negotiated settlement hirohito is inclinations when he comes to the phone of the 1920s of course is to be a pacifist an internationalist and a democrat and so on and he finds himself hostage increasingly to a militarized society which is engaging in violent imperial conquest and he never really manages to square that circle until finally the very end of the war then the set of russian invasion and starvation the atomic bomb puts in the position where you can say to the military well you were wrong along and i was right you know it's time to end the war now he's going to make a radio broadcast on the 14th of august that's going to announce japan's surrender even now the die hard militarists refuse to accept defeat you still got this hardcore clique of militaristic officers who try to get into the imperial palace locate the recording that's going to announce the surrender and destroy it their belief is that the emperor's wisdom has been tarnished by defeatists people who did not believe that victory was still possible because to them it still was the emperor and his chamberlain actually have to hide from these rebels there was even gun play on the grounds of the imperial palace as the mutineers sought to find the discs upon which the imperial reef script was recorded and it's not until troops loyal to the emperor actually managed to fight off the rebels and the rebels end up committing suicide that actually the broadcast is finally safe whether the emperor could have prevailed over these fanatical hawks without the impetus of the atom bomb is something historians still argue over today if i've been in the sewers of the american leadership in 1945 would i have dropped the atom bombs and i'm afraid my answer to that is probably yes the japanese were still fighting the idea that they were ready to surrender i don't buy that at all this hard core clique in the japanese high command still want to fight on it was nagasaki that really is what got through to the emperor and made him intervene from the american perspective the atomic bomb was dropped because they really didn't think they might bring the water and then quickly and save lots of american lives but i think they were also impelled very much by a kind of technological imperative that they were desperate to see if it worked very few people in 1945 understood the unspeakable shocking horror of atomic weapons they hadn't been demonstrated and for roosevelt's successor president truman the atom bomb must have seemed like a perfect solution the japanese began the war from the air at pearl harbor they have been repaved many fold do remember the fire bombing by conventional bombs that kill far more japanese than did hiroshima and nagasaki and i'm afraid it is true of all wars that people will do things when they are sick of the killing and sick of the dying and they want it to be over and the japanese refuse to quit to me it doesn't look like an issue of atomic weapons versus conventional weapons it looks to me like an issue of whether or not it's right to bomb civilians at all at the start of september 1945 general douglas macarthur accepts the japanese surrender on board the uss missouri in tokyo bay the second world war is officially over even before the dust begins to settle the western allies are faced with two problems to solve one is how they're going to deal with the russians the other is what to do about the nazis in july 1945 two months before the japanese surrender the allied leaders churchill truman and stalin meet at potsdam germany to hammer out the post-war settlement of europe germany is divided into four occupation zones in november the allies agree to try the nazis for crimes against humanity at a military tribunal in nuremberg but the number they can put on trial is severely limited the international military tribunal only puts in the dock the number that can sit on the bench and they figured out that there was room for 24. even before the trials begin one of the 24 was deemed mentally unfit and another committed suicide the classic defense trotted out by many of the senior nazis at nuremberg was one of only following orders but allied intelligence had proof that the atrocities were widely known in nazi military circles trent park is a stately home in north london and during the second world war british intelligence held hitler's captured generals and they lived a life of relative luxury but of course what they didn't realize was that everything in the house was bugged from the transcripts we can see that the veer marks the german army was complicit in war crimes that it was involved in the killing machine and in the holocaust other criminals of course such as goring were utterly unapologetic about what they'd done then you had people like albert spare who decided the best way to save his life was to apologize for it he distanced himself very much from hitler of the 22 nazis who stood trial at nuremberg three were acquitted seven were imprisoned and the other twelve were sentenced to death though nuremberg was not the only trial of nazi perpetrators only a handful actually paid for their crimes historians reckon that between two hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand people were involved in murdering jews of those 99 percent of people who actually killed jews were never brought to court in west germany somewhere between 100 and 6 000 and 140 000 people were investigated and only 164 people in west germany were actually found guilty of murder 164 people for six million plus murders that is a quite extraordinary figure if you look at overall numbers including the trials carried out by the east germans and the austrians again the outcome is absolutely pathetic in terms of sheer numbers the reason for such leniency was political the biggest reason was the switch from the war to the cold war so at that point chasing communists became a higher priority because as the second world war came to an end the biggest danger to democracy appeared to be the western powers erstwhile ally joseph stalin stalin's a big winner from the second world war he's got a lot more territory in 1945 than he ever did in 1939. one of the tragic dimensions of world war ii is the fact that it seems to vindicate stalin personally yes it's cost him millions of lives but he's now also got a kind of narrative attached to his personality he presents it afterwards as his own personal victory but the soviet command economy was not geared to sustain the empire that stalin and his successors created of the back of the second world war you could say the soviet bloc became on the face of it very strong but actually it got far too big far too unwieldy and within really quite a short time the whole thing collapsed again as the cold war heated up the soviets found it increasingly expensive to compete with the other great winner of world war ii the united states was overwhelmingly the biggest winner it came out of the war incomparably richer as well as more powerful than it had been at the outset the united states then navigates into the post-war time period as really a beacon of economic strength and security whereas almost every other belligerent was both physically ruined and also financially bankrupt the second world war cost the nations of europe an estimated 958 billion us dollars and brought france britain and germany to their knees as the iron curtain of communism began to sweep over eastern europe general marshall ex-u.s chief of staff from world war ii realized that something had to be done it wasn't enough for america to be strong europe had to be stable as well and the best way for europe to be stable was for its economies to thrive marshall advocates a generous program that shares economic wealth with the countries that were affected by the second world war to include the former nazi germany he was smart enough to recognize that restricting germany's economy would probably mean that we would repeat the cycle that was created by the versailles treaty at the end of the first world war under the marshall plan 16 european nations received a total of 13 billion u.s dollars in financial aid between 1948 and 1951 west germany received 1.4 billion dollars france almost 2.3 billion but by far the biggest recipient of usaid was great britain there's also a vital strategic reason for the marshall plan to make sure that europe is prosperous enough in order to be able to arm herself as a bulwark against any form of encroaching soviet union but martial aid wasn't the only legacy of the second world war some admirable institutions emerged certainly the united nations later nato and of course the eu because of the determination to bind together france and germany in such a fashion that they would never think of going to war again in 1950 you had the european coal and steel community coming into play now that's a block of six nations there to trade in those essential materials you have france germany italy belgium holland luxembourg the six european nations most physically affected by the war and you can see by incremental steps these countries are deliberately coming closer together so the kind of disaster that took place with the first world war then the second what couldn't happen again if you can create this kind of trading block or almost this idea of a single state you can't therefore have a war because you no longer see each other as separate countries you see each other as kind of brothers and sisters and that makes a lot of sense to the french to the germans to the dutch these nations experienced what it was to have foreign soldiers boots marching up and down their lanes to have their people subject to to to control by foreign nations britain never experienced that so perhaps it's not surprising that britain feels it's never lost its sovereignty it's damn well not going to lose its sovereignty now the economic boom that followed the post-war slump created a new prosperity that particularly benefited the war's biggest losers germany would not count itself as a big winner in 1945 but it certainly looks like it came out of it in the best possible way one of the huge irony of the second world war was that if germany had not gone to war nothing could have prevented germany from dominating europe within 20 years by entirely peaceful economic and industrial i mean [Music] look at germany today germany is a thriving uh representative democracy with a strong economy japan also benefited from the post-war settlement but there was another winner from the second world war and that was china's mount sedong it's said that when the japanese prime minister visited mao in beijing in 1972 and apologized for the japanese invasion of china back in the 30s mao supposedly said to him well actually you don't need to apologize because if you hadn't done that the chinese communist party would never have come to power featuring the japanese opened the way for mao and the chinese communist movement to confront chiang kai-shek effectively and to win the civil war four years later [Music] in 2019 as we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of the second world war the forces that drove it into being seem to be raising their ugly heads once again [Music] one of the reasons for fighting the second world war was to free the world of tyranny from suppression and order to foster liberalism democracy and all these big ideas today there's an almost near collapse of trust in the liberal elites and one's fear that all sorts of very illegal elites may once again be assemblant is something i think we should be very frightened of it's always easy to look at the past and make distinctions say no no it was different then we've moved on well believe me the world really hasn't changed all that much we need to be around the 21st century that the shadow of these wars hangs over us and that we don't want to repeat them but that's something we have to educate all the time into understanding what happened in the second world war and making sure it never happens again because if the world does go to war again then the numbers are going to be much bigger than the world war ii numbers [Music] you

Channel: War Stories

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Keywords: military history, war, war documentary, military tactics, war stories, history of war, battles, wwii, battle of the bulge, vistula-oder offensive, auschwitz, japan ww2, atomic bomb wwii, red army, russia ww2 history, battle of berlin, enola gay, fat man bomb, dresden bombings, end of wwii, hitlers downfall, hitler death, radiation poisoning, full length history documentaries, world war 2, full length documentaries, history documentary 2021, full length documentaries 2021

Id: A9pKuUqr3EM

Length: 45min 34sec (2734 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021