Secrets of War Season 1, Ep 8: The Battle of Britain

next on secrets of war June 1940 England stands alone against brutal aggression the Germans have yet to be stopped in their Lightning thrusts across Europe the British are outnumbered but they have a secret weapon four years in the making the Battle of Britain is about to begin next on secrets of war [Music] Marshall horn refill it tight on hero of Verdun I take before he becomes premier of France called to the helm in his homeland darkest hour not broken he sues for a separate piece asks for an armistice on the 17th of June 1940 following the collapse of their army in only three weeks the defeated French signed an armistice with the Germans and removed themselves from the Second World War Britain faced a military juggernaut that had conquered most of Western Europe in less than two months and that now stood poised twenty-two miles across the English gem fall of France wiped out any basis of the planning that Britain had for the war and and they were really faced with the situation that been very serious before and was now not only catastrophic but planless stemming a growing sense of national panic a new Prime Minister rallied the British people to stand firm against the scourge of fascism the remnants of its own shattered army only barely escaping from France Britain turned to its Royal Air Force specifically to its newest component Fighter Command to hold the Germans at bay [Music] and despair the island nation the same fate as had befallen in Poland and France and Belgium and Holland [Music] at this crucial juncture the Vermont found itself unprepared to cross the English Channel unperturbed air minister and chief of the Air Force Hammond Goering ordered his vaunted Luftwaffe to subdue the English from the air to break their will with bombs without the army or Navy a revolutionary concept and one for which the German Air Force had never planned but the British through the visionary leadership of Fighter Command had been desperately preparing for this very event [Music] the contest between bombers and fighters originated with the use of the air weapon in the First World War these machines captured the imagination of military strategists on both sides of the Atlantic by the mid-1920s proponents of aviation in Europe the North America had assigned the bomber a preeminent role in modern warfare the realm of flight was seen to hold unlimited potential for development of exotic new weapons that would make traditional armies obsolete from the first world war onwards many politicians and service staff believed that the bomber was absolutely powerful that nothing would be able to touch it a lot of them followed the ideas of the italian general duo of the do a theory that a wall could be finished within a couple of days by heavy bombing one of Dewey's most vocal advocates was American general Billy Mitchell who'd flown in the war and lobbied incessantly for increased support for army aviation even advocating a separate air service he's in politic and inflammatory statements to the press eventually resulted in his being court-martialed and expelled from the military but Mitchell never wavered in his views on strategic bombing air power will determine the next war each nation is organized no matter their power at the beginning of a Conte instead of the Army Navy being a pack of airpower they will go directly to the vital centers our future in this country depends on airpower in defeated Germany however a more objective analysis of tactics and strategy arrived at a more balanced view of strategic bombing general hunts von Seeckt commander in chief at the Horrocks fair the post-world War one German military envisioned an Air Arm capable of performing a wide variety of tasks from heavy bombing to supporting fast maneuvering ground troops von Seeckt was not a pilot but he possessed an almost instinctive understanding of the airplanes potential his wartime service on the Eastern Front had exposed him to a rapidly changing tactical environment unlike the trench warfare that had dominated the Western Front he had a lasting influence on Luftwaffe doctrine when TF Alva dusty the fafa D hopped and the experience was that in future Wars the Luftwaffe would be given the primary responsibility of shortening the punishing and exhausting land war by simply destroying the enemy supply lines behind the front from the air Stewart Germany was prohibited from having its own air service so von Seeckt established a clandestine shadow Air Force to Train military pilots and teach cooperation between air and ground forces secret contacts between Russia and Germany were initiated in 1922 in return for flight training centers within the vast Russian heartland the Germans provided Western technical expertise although most of her aviation industry had been destroyed or dismantled and carried away German aircraft companies continued to build airplanes through foreign subsidiaries so-called sport flying and glider organizations promoted air mindedness and supplied a steady stream of highly motivated candidates for the Reich's fair training program German civil aviation in the 1920s was expanded and effectively militarized by staffing the national airline deutsche lufthansa with former german air service personnel under the directorship of Erhard Milch a former squadron commander and general staff officer Lufthansa passed onto the shadow Air Force information on technology navigation and long-distance routes [Music] the rise of National Socialism drew back the curtain on clandestine German rearmament between 1933 and 1936 a program of state investment fueled massive weapon is program [Music] Hitler's vision of a resurgent and re militarized rank transformed every facet of German society [Music] under the very noses of the victorious Europeans who exacted such punitive and humiliating concessions the Germans had established the foundations of the most effective fighting force in the world [Music] [Music] while the Germans were formulating their operational doctrine of air warfare in Britain Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard dominated the Royal Air Force with a grandiose vision of strategic bombing his belief in offensive warfare was more akin to religious doctrine than to objective analysis as late as that mid 1930s the RAF was still committing most of his resources to bombers [Music] because there was a reaction after the first world war a sense of never again are we going to send large armies to the continent of Europe there was an explicit recognition of the deterrent effect vampire Britain this view was immortalized by Stanley Baldwin an influential member of parliament Baldwin who at the time was a very prominent to British politician later he was prime minister of this country he told the House of Commons in 1932 that the bomber will always get through and people believed bombers were so powerful and so fast that biplane fighters could hardly keep up with you've got a much more efficient bomber and it can carry a much heavier load bomb loads go up by a factor of four in the early 1930s so not only are the Bombers much more difficult to stop but they can be much more destructive with the weapons that they carry while bombers were becoming increasingly capable in terms of payload and range fighter aircraft were also evolving the enormous ly popular idol trophy races encouraged development of high-performance single-engine monoplanes between 1929 and 1931 the British designer RJ Mitchell teamed his Supermarine airframe with rolls-royce engines creating a design that would later become an icon of the Battle of Britain the Spitfire if you look at the history of fighter aircraft in the 30s and 40s it's this constant leap frogging of technologies very often the technology would be there before the requirement and that would I think is an unusual state [Music] in 1936 civil war broke out in Spain between these socialist government and fascist rebels within months of the first crack of gunfire German aircrafts and airmen of the Condor Legion ordinances go Franco's rebellion during the next three years Germany rotated thousands of so-called volunteers through Spain to gain combat experience [Music] the Iberian Peninsula became a laboratory for German air warfare doctrine new aircraft designs such as the Heinkel 111 bomber and the Yonkers 87 Stuka made their operational debut in the clear Mediterranean skies the Condor Legion perfected techniques had dive bombing and horizontal bombing the vulnerability of civilian populations to indiscriminate attack was graphically demonstrated recalling the dark prophecies of dawei and Mitchell [Music] the slender and powerful measures met 109 streaked into combat for the first time over Spain three years later it would do battle against RAF Spitfires and hurricanes Adolphe Galland later a high-scoring ace and commander of Luftwaffe fighter squadrons from the me-109 superior to the russian may die 16 moscow flown by the republicans but he missed some of the attributes have open cockpit by plans in closed cockpit and and possible think because you should smell the enemy you could smell it because of the oil developer due to a shortage of fighter aircraft in Spain the Germans improvised a tactic that would later play havoc with the RAF in the skies over southern England it was called the finger for if you can imagine an aircraft at the each of your fingertips and imagined those four fighters being say a hundred and 250 yards apart then each man is able to round and up and down and guard his comrades by giving them plenty of warning when other aircraft are about in action the finger for broke into two pairs the Rotter in the Rotter you had a leader and a wingman the leaders job was to go after the enemy the wing man's job was to protect the leaders time meanwhile in Britain RAF Doctrine was in a conflicted State there was still tremendous amount of infighting within the Air Force itself was a real dichotomy that the British faced here of the long-range bomber and the short-range air defence fighter a royal command the demonstration brings home what sky warfare means today a giant bomber is attacked by swept up fighting planes and the crew bails out for dear life in 1936 RAF Fighter Command was created the man chosen to head the new organization unlike most of his contemporaries believed that the bomber could and must be stopped Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding was an intense and humorless man he was also something of a visionary doubting is often portrayed as a fuddy-duddy and not much of a fighter leader but in fact he was the first technocrat in history most people are not aware that doubting in the early 1930s he was on the air counsel of the Royal Air Force as the air member for supply and development and in that office his department actually drafted the specifications which led to the Spitfire and the hurricane fighters Fighter Command joined in development of what would become Britain's most important secret in 1934 under intense pressure to do something about the bomber threat a committee chaired by Sir Henry Tizard and approached an engineer at the National Physical Laboratory named Robert watson-watt [Music] the teaser committee inquired the host and desperation as to the substance of reports of death rays which could destroy aircraft the death race speculation was soon put to rest but the inquiry did result in the secret development of radar by the British government under the cover name of radio direction-finding RDF what you need for a radar you need a high-powered transmitter you need an ultra sensitive receiver you need some form of directional antenna and you need some form of presentation system in other words a cathode ray tube now by the early 1930s all of those things were well within the current technology and people were playing around with them as a result we get radar being invented quite independently in Great Britain the USA Japan Russia and in Germany and each nation thought that it alone had this secret appeasement had failed to stop Hitler's expansionist agenda [Music] after the Munich crisis of 1938 Germany stood astride Europe like a schoolyard bully once again the continent was marching to the drumbeat of impending war in Britain Daria Fighter Command and the scientific community raced to protect in doubting x' words the home base from the coming rain of destruction [Music] 10th of May 1940 the Germans committed some 4,000 aircraft to the invasion of France in the Low Countries the Dutch and Belgian air forces were virtually wiped out within hours hundreds of French aircraft were caught on the ground war had to also come to the Royal Air Force that the RAF sent over a component force to support our land forces and to support the French land forces on the Western Front in 1940 the french air force we'd hoped would be able to defend themselves but the french air force was hopelessly outdated and i'm afraid to say that when war came they didn't fight very well so the bulk of fighting fell upon the area the British pilots fought bravely but were overwhelmed by superior numbers and tactics within five days of the assault without impeding the German advance the RAF had lost over 200 aircraft there was no real integration between the British Air Force Royal Air Force it was sent to France and their French counterparts so there was nothing there to really integrate the air defense and so that they could contain the Luftwaffe even for a short period of time during the frantic confusing fighting in France signaled intelligence did provide some insight into the enemy's objectives soon after the opening of the German campaign in the West the British government code in cipher school at Bletchley Park successfully cracked the codes encrypted on the german enigma cipher machine and began reading looked off a message traffic [Music] eventually decrypts of those signals called ultra within the British intelligence community revealed that Hitler intended to finish off France before turning his attention across the channel the threat of invasion if not eliminated was at least delayed enigma decrypts also confirmed the swiftness of the French collapse the information stiffened a British refusal to send over more fighter aircraft the French are being nearly beaten and in the British phrase you don't throw bad money after good and therefore the planes were kept in this country they operated over France during Dunkirk but they operated from bases in this country another source of signal intelligence during the Battle of France was deciphered Morse code from German bombers and voice transmissions from fighter aircraft broadcasting on the new VHF or very high frequency radio range there was a creation of the wire service which was a generic term for many of the radio transmission interceptions basically you try and build up a picture of what was happening and then relay that with other intelligence sources and created a much wider picture once the me-109 and me1 100 fighter squadrons had relocated to occupied france they're clear VHF transmissions fell within range of listening posts in southern Britain the RAF quickly realized it had too few German speaking operators and with many of the men posted to other military units personnel were recruited from the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and the women's Royal Naval Service by the 22nd of June when the French surrendered they RAF had lost 1,000 aircraft 435 pilots were killed or missing only 66 of the 261 hurricane fighters sent to France returned the speed and finality of the German victory had taken even the optimistic Hitler by surprise in the weeks following the collapse of the Western Front he expected Britain to see the obvious futility of continued fighting resistance by the obstinate British could interfere with Hitler's grand obsession moving east into Russia since May of 1939 plans had been prepared to wage long-term economic warfare against Britain using the Luftwaffe in the Navy to sever vital supply lines in light of the swiftness of the French collapse the idea of a similar brief campaign against Britain grew increasingly attractive to Hitler but he still held out hope for a negotiated settlement he believed that the war was virtually over at the end of June 1940 so did a lot of other people and massively nee believed it the American ambassador Joseph Kennedy in London believed it and a lot of other people thought that we would make terms with Hitler that seemed to be the common sense thing to do Hitler made quite generous overtures to Britain he was going to he wasn't going to take our colonies office in in all around the world which the Germans thought was a very generous thing since we'd stolen all of theirs at the end of the first world war so Hitler could afford to be very generous he'd really didn't want to come he didn't want to invade France he didn't want to invade Britain he wanted to get on with his Labor's round policy to invade Russia that was what he was after and he needed time as disastrous as the fall of France was for the British the Germans did not emerge unscathed we should remember that they although the Battle of France was lost the Luftwaffe suffered significant attrition of for example its Messerschmitt anyone Alliance and they were not able to replace those usually they had quite heavy losses in that battle they've got to reform a lot of their units they've got to move into new airfields in France that were hardly in the airfields in the pas-de-calais area the Germans had to carve all those out with their construction troops to to make a clutch of fighter airfields there as the diplomatic clock ran down the German General Staff began tentative planning for a cross-channel invasion dusting off five-month-old contingency plans in June signal intelligence from the British wise service substantiated what aerial reconnaissance had first discovered preparations for intensive flight operations from airfields in northern France the Germans were getting ready for a major new offensive what was not clear was how and when it would come the flow of ultra materiel had declined with the occupation of France since most German communications were done over land line telephone but in July and ultra decrypt revealed in order to Luftwaffe squadrons do not bomb the Channel ports here at last was strong evidence that an invasion was being planned the Germans would need these ports to disembark men and equipment on the 16th of July Hitler issued a directive to his commanders to prepare for landing operations against England it went by the codename sea lion six days later the British government rejected the Fury's latest peace proposal the window of good weather in the channel was getting smaller three months at most and Russia beckoned many people think that Hitler had everything planned like a railway timetable he certainly didn't have the Battle of Britain planned but it was left to the Luftwaffe first to destroy the Royal Air Force especially Fighter Command and then would follow Operation Sea Lion the German invasion of this country and in gorings Bureau Goering said if my boys did their job properly there won't be any need for an invasion any fool can see that Germany has won the war the Brits might need a little bit of encouragement to come round to that point of view but it's quite clear heck we've defeated France we just walk right through these guys I mean we're top of the world we're great [Music] the confident Luftwaffe air crews winging their way across the channel to carry out Hermann Goering was promised to Hitler to force England to sue for peace were assumed disabused of their enthusiasm on the 16th of July the eve of the start of the air campaign and the same day that Hitler ordered preparations for operation sea lion the head of the Luftwaffe intelligence Lieutenant Colonel Joseph beppo's Schmidt issued an assessment of Royal Air Force capabilities it was seriously flawed and one of the amazing things in Bank this intelligence assessment is it I it identifies most of the British strengths as weaknesses and most of the British weaknesses as strengths this Hutta all it was MIT it also had something to do with the ideological background of the high command of the Luftwaffe they convinced themselves that the German Luftwaffe in conjunction with the organization of the people the folks coming shaft was superior to Western democracies - - that you knew about invasion timothean Smits report stated that British aircraft production could easily be knocked out that mid-level RAF leadership was ineffectual and that many of those commanders were not even fliers production of Spitfires and hurricanes fighters actually increased during the Battle of Britain and all RAF commanders were rated pilots Schmidt's most egregious error however was in failing to even mention the British radar defense system the Germans do from pre-war days that we had radar yes but inside the Luftwaffe there was something like eight intelligence departments each part of German intelligence liked to keep its own knowledge to itself the Germans using an obsolete Graf Zeppelin had spied on British radar experiments in 1939 the British designs were considered amateurish so the Germans wrote them off as strictly experimental Germany had developed a workable radar much earlier but due to its cult of the offensive only belatedly employed the technology [Music] the secrets of the British radar system escaped the Luftwaffe for over a year with disastrous results since his appointment to fighter command in 1936 Air Chief Marshal Dowding had been racing to establish a secret chain of radar sites that could provide the essential element of time time to react to an incoming threat it was called chain home doubting wanted about sixty miles of extra range if he had sixty miles he could get his fighters into position before the bombers reached London if you could protect London you could protect anywhere in England but London was the prime target Dowding got much more in reality chain home could detect incoming aircraft up to 30,000 feet and a hundred miles away and could give the bearing the approximate altitude and number of aircraft in an approaching formation by the outbreak of the warm 20 of the transmitter and receiver masts had become a feature of the landscape along the eastern and southern coasts these sites were supplemented by chain home low specially designed to detect aircraft flying below 3,000 feet local residents knew of these mysterious soaring powers only as Air Ministry experimental stations and were smart enough to inquire no further [Music] TRUCKING incoming aircraft was only part of the air defense system Fighter Command needed to know the position of its own aircraft in order to direct them to the intruders they had a system called pipsqueak which was one aircraft in each formation for 15 seconds of every minute it would transmit a homing signal and this could be triangulated on the ground so that you knew where the fighter formations were once an incoming formation had reached the British coastline a network of ground observers phoned more precise visual information up the command ladder phone lines from ground observers chain home stations the Wye service all streamed artery like into the heart of the system at Bentley Priory RAF Fighter Command headquarters outside of London from this most unwarlike setting air chief marshal Hugh Dowding orchestrated the air defense of Great Britain [Music] in an underground command post called the filter center information was collated and analyzed to produce at any given moment a snapshot of the aerial situation over all of Britain [Music] warnings of incoming formations were phoned to one of four Fighter Command groups into whose area of responsibility the Germans were flying operations rooms at the group level like this one would further monitor the path of the intruders from there the information went to sector stations and then to individual squadrons for another phone would ring doubting built up the first integrated air defense system in the world it just had to be good enough he wasn't going to go after high-tech for its own sake [Music] the Royal Air Force fighter pilots did not know that the information that they were getting came from radar he didn't matter they were told to vector to a certain position and they did it any mention of radar or details of the doubting system was forbidden instead the public was offered reassuring news of other equally complex air defense schemes newsreels of May 1940 extolled the virtues of aerial patrols increases its home patrol maintains a 24-hour sky vigil in reality a wasteful concept reviled by Fighter Command and made obsolete by radar and recreated on a motion picture sound staged this elaborate group operations plotting room had the feel of the real thing but it made no reference to radar instead the discarded technique of sound detection provided early warning [Music] in July of 1940 as the battle was joined the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing forces were somewhat balanced the Luftwaffe had almost 3,000 aircraft of which 1,000 or any 109 fighters compared to the RAF s 804 Akane's and Spitfires but the Luftwaffe had no plan for a strategic air campaign against Britain furthermore the RAF unlike the Luftwaffe earlier opponents was a modern air force defending its own territory Fighter Command was committed to the battle for which it had been preparing since 1936 the British integrated air defense system was a wonder of applied technology to use a modern term it was a force multiplier it laid the foundation for modern command and control and provided the critical margin in the fight to defend the home base [Music] the Battle of Britain did not begin on any particular day in July of 1914 or did it end decisively in October nevertheless it has been popularized mythologized and misrepresented [Music] the enemy was not vanquished he withdrew to fight another day on another front however Britain remained a beacon of democracy to the world and the legend of the fuels was born the fighting started with night probing raids and attacks on coastal shipping primarily to draw out Fighter Command and test its mettle by mid-august the waited the Luftwaffe offensive moved to British airfields factories and radar stations in the south oddly talk or Eagle Day was the code name for what was to have been the start of a crushing blow to the RAF by the 13th of August the first day of the offensive Bletchley Park was familiar with the term undertook they didn't know what this code name adlet augment but there were many many references to it in the air and the ultra signals that they were picking up of course it was only after the Germans start their large-scale attack on Great Britain that suddenly they realized just what Adler tag was and it does show how limited was the value of the ultra information at that time they major advantage during the Battle of Britain of having ultra was that it enabled the British to to make more accurate assessments of German air force strength and deployment but not tactically to assess when or where a raid was going to arrive [Music] for mid-august to the sixths of September the most intense fighting took place between Fighter Command and waffle [Music] basically the battle britain was a fight about it was a battle between two sets of single seater low-wing monoplane fighters on the German side the Mississippi 109 on the British side the Spitfire and the Huracan the three aircraft shared similar development backgrounds as bomber destroyers during the 1930s they were not designed to go dogfighting around the sky with enemy fighters they had to be very fast to get into a maneuver into a firing position to engage an enemy bomber that was what they were there for just prior to the Battle of Britain in late May 1940 pilots flying hurricanes and Spitfires were surprised to experience a sudden boost in the rate of climb of their Merlin engines the standard aviation fuel of the Luftwaffe and RAF at the outbreak of war was 87 octane under a top-secret agreement with American oil companies the British Air Ministry had acquired supplies of 100 octane gas already in use with the US Army Air Corps since 1938 the increased performance of the British planes remained a mystery to Luftwaffe fighter pilots until late August when a forced down Spitfire was carefully analyzed in the higher octane fuel was discovered [Music] as powerful as the Merlin engine was it was handicapped by a conventional carburetor in float mechanism as opposed to the fuel-injected Daimler engine of the me-109 the Merlin had a tendency to stall out in inverted flight most embarrassing during a dogfight this problem was solved by a woman a woman engineer quite remarkable in her time a Miss Beatrice shilling miss Beatrice shilling was at the Royal Aeronautical establishment at Farnborough and she worked there in one of the departments that had to deal with this problem and she dealt with it by in the float of the carburetor she put a small device to stop it cutting out and she herself went round with other people fitting them into RAF aircraft an RAF pilots with their typical RAF humour call this miss shillings orifice however modified the Spitfire and hurricane squadron suffered under adherence to outmoded air combat tactics vectored into position by the efficient doubting system RAF pilots frequently lost the advantage due to 1930s maneuvers developed to counter the threat of unease corded bombers as he British techniques were based on the battle that was perceived was going to come as opposed to the battle in reality that came the RAF would train to fly in what were called victories that is a triangle of aircraft with a leader and two wingmen the two wingmen spent in the all of their time making sure they didn't hit the leaders tail and they didn't touch wingtips with each other so the whole of their vision was inward-looking where they should have been looking around the sky the degree to which more flexible tactics such as the finger four were adopted depended on the initiative of individual squadron leaders and group commanders knew RAF pilots were reaching the squadrons with as little as twenty hours of flight time in Spitfires and hurricanes many were killed on their first operational sortie but the flow of men and machines into Fighter Command continued at a sufficient rate to replace losses in the brutal calculus of war the RAF and the Luftwaffe had reached a state of deadly equilibrium frustrated by continued losses attacking military and industrial targets on the seventh of September Herman Goering initiated a campaign of terror against the people of London in one of the Wars bitter ironies this act of retribution in fact relieved Fighter Command from the defence of its own airfields [Music] and the predictability of the German attacks increased their vulnerability the operational results of air combat during the battle who were consistently overstated by both sides either for propaganda purposes or just out of the confusion of combat both intelligence organizations seriously overestimated the number of enemy aircraft they shot down the Germans by a factor of between three and four the British didn't correctly identify the problem which was that a German aircraft shot down was often claimed by more than one pilot out of debt leaden skies come British fighters who've helped drive off Nazi Raiders over London here's a typical RAF report 30 bombers and 20 according [Music] Londyn quite a bit and I don't think the old place has changed a lot there's plenty of balloons still there and I think Jerry's going to have a pretty tough time to make a real message well I think a cup of tea is indicated now thank you I remember the great day of the Battle of Britain when the fifteenth of September Sunday the 15th of September we were told at the end of it with a hundred and eighty-five German planes have been shot down the true think it was about 54 German planes the Germans did the same they felt by the 15th of September they had almost wiped out Fighter Command the German planes came over here were met by two or three hundred fighters they could not believe it two days later on the 17th of September and ultra decrypt revealed the order to begin dismantling invasion transport facilities in Holland [Music] operation sea lion was called off the weather window had closed and by now Hitler had turned his attention back to Russia the failure to establish air supremacy over Britain and the heavy losses of September 1940 where Germany's first major setbacks of World War two [Music] Fighter Command had prevailed in the daylight Battle of Britain at a cost of more than 500 pilots killed or missing their youthful faces captured forever in time in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to [Music] it is often said that the battle britain was won by a narrow margin but in fact at the end of the battle Fighter Command was as strong numerically both in stare craft and in pilots as it was at the beginning of the battle moreover the Luftwaffe was still powerful in the air assault and Britain was not yet over London was on the verge of enduring a nine-month ordeal the night blitz and there was a lot more resilience in that German than the German armed forces then was appreciated whether Hitler ever actually intended to invade Britain or even if he had the physical means to do so will continue to be debated by historians but what cannot be argued is what was accomplished both in real and in Psychological terms the inexorable advance of fascism had finally been stemmed for the first time since 1934 the German military machine and failed to impose the will of the Europe on a European power it was a battle that thousands of people actually could watch here were hundreds of thousands of British people standing on the ground cheering on a little bit like cheering your team on and actually seeing what was happening right above them and knowing what was at stake soon the skies over kempt and East Anglia once defended by diminutive Spitfires and hurricanes would throb with the sound of vast air armadas heading eastward towards fortress Europe [Music]

Channel: Secrets of War - Full Episodes

Views: 28,840

Rating: 4.7419353 out of 5

Keywords: Charlton Heston, War, WWII, World War, World War II, Third Reich, Hitler, Nazi, Germany, Allies, England, British, Non-fiction, Documentary, Series, FilmRise

Id: -_MsykyjbG4

Length: 52min 2sec (3122 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2016