Why Could Hitler Not Defeat Britain? | WWII In Numbers | War Stories

june the 3rd 1940 ship's captain william tennant sends a coded message operation completed returning to dover the so-called small ships flotilla of over a thousand vessels has rescued more than 300 000 soldiers of the british expeditionary force from the french port of dunkirk at 3 40 p.m the next day as the last of the french rear guard clamber aboard british rescue ships prime minister winston churchill stands before parliament at this point that german army and air force was looking across the channel so churchill actually has to rouse the british people and warn them that the germans are on their way and to do this he makes one of the most memorable speeches in history we shall fight on beaches landing grounds in fields in streets and on the hills we shall never surrender this will become one of the most quoted speeches of all time but behind its defiant bravado hides an unspoken truth churchill sat down he's supposed to have said to a colleague next to him we'll fight them with the shattered ends of beer bottles because that's all we've damn well got about three and five of the british army's tanks and artillery are left behind in the chaotic retreat from belgium if hitler had chosen to invade at that point it is difficult to see how the country could have defended itself because they didn't have weapons hitler intends to knock britain out of the war and quickly turn his attention to his real target russia but he is reckoned without the royal air force the scene is set for an epic confrontation but what will become known as the battle of britain will not only come down to numbers it will also come down to time [Music] between june and october 1940 the nature of warfare changes forever the second world war really marks a step change in the way that wars are fought because before the war you had to control the land and sometimes the sea now you also have to control the air the essential prerequisite for any successful invasion had to be german commander skies over the channel and for that the royal air force had to be defeated there was no doubt that you you had to achieve air supremacy reichsfuhrer adolf hitler is well aware of this operation sea lion the code name for the german invasion of britain requires 13 divisions to be transported across the channel to a series of landing points along a 190 mile front stretching from ramsgate to lime regis for that to work three things had to happen first the royal navy had to be defeated to the channel secondly the defenses at the beach heads had to be pounded into submission third in the event of a successful invasion the supply lines had to be protected so the british couldn't cut them off now to do all that you need the luftwaffe nazi air marshal hermann goering is confident that his luftwaffe can swat the british out of the sky with ease i do it in four days going he was a boastful man but he did have genuine reasons for believing that the luftwaffe could gain the upper hand over the royal air force the fact was that the luftwaffe pilots were more experienced than world air force pilots they'd they'd already learned their craft in spain before the war then in poland in june 1940 goering also has more aircraft at his disposal to spearhead what will become known as the battle of britain the luftwaffe has over 900 fighter aircraft british air chief marshal sir hugh dowding can muster 768 fighter planes of which only 520 are serviceable there's no doubt about it fighter command of the royal air force has been badly hit by the battle of france and dunkirk something like a third of british planes have been put out of action worse still at the start of the war german factories are producing almost 550 planes a month by contrast british production of aircraft was comparatively pitiful confident he can replace all the combat losses he might incur guring believes he has the numbers and that the luftwaffe outclasses the raf in virtually every important respect he is particularly bullish about his fighter pilots and their aircraft this is the messerschmitt bf 109 the principal luftwaffe fighter x after the battle of britain in fact this one actually served in that combat in 1940 this aircraft is a remarkable machine in many ways got a maximum speed of 350 miles an hour it can fly up to 35 000 feet got cockpit armor which is very very good for the pilot and very very well armed up to three cannon and two machine guns crucially these pilots some of them had served in the condor legion in spain where they escorted bombing missions they knew what they were doing ranged against the measurement is this aircraft this is the hurricane not nearly so well known as the flashy and iconic spitfire over there but this is the real workhorse of the raf it's an aircraft which is robust easy to repair but it has some problems it's only got a maximum ceiling of 16 200 feet and can only fly at 324 miles an hour very importantly it lacks cannon this aircraft does not have the firepower of the messerschmitt with only eight machine guns it does not have the punch of his opponents other problem is this it's got three fuel tanks one each wing one directly in front of the pilot if that fuel tank's pierced then fuel will flood back over the pilots and the problem is that the canopy is difficult to open some pilots find it difficult to bail out others i'm afraid never make it however the great advantage of this aircraft is the turning circle the result is that you can turn inside your opponent in a dogfight and that's the difference between life and death [Music] the decisive battle for supremacy of britain's skies does not happen for several weeks when it does the numbers will surprise both sides [Music] as well as winning air supremacy victory in the battle of britain requires the luftwaffe to clear the british navy from the english channel air marshal dowding identified the 10th of july as the first major day in which the luftwaffe were bombing but actually the luftwaffe had mounted plenty of sporadic attacks before then despite this the royal navy is still sending convoys through the channel until one day a convoy of 20 ships loses all but four of its number [Music] the battle for the skies does not truly take off for several more weeks and the reason for that is hitler what hitler wants britain to do is to come to terms he wants to make peace with him because he can't understand why britain won't make peace with him britain is a busted flush as far as he's concerned convinced that churchill will surrender hitler waits until august before ordering an all-out assault on britain's air bases it is just the kind of breathing space that air marshall dowding is praying for doubting did need time to bring more planes into action to to fix to repair some of the planes that he already had to train up pilots 13th of august 1940 the germans unleash a massive air raid on adler tag or eagle day 1485 german aircraft bomb britain's airfields and plane factories [Music] but eagle day is only the beginning the merciless bombing raids continue for the rest of a month in which britain's skies swarm with german aircraft at the height of the eagle campaign more than 1 700 bombers are accompanied by fighter escorts but dowding's raf is ready for the luftwaffe by the time of eagle day fighter command has over a thousand fighter aircraft and they are eager to have a scrap british fighter command also has a technological advantage they are backed up by an early warning system of 21 radar stations and 30 000 spotters that can detect enemy aircraft from up to 80 miles away the one aspect of war for which britain was brilliantly prepared in 1940 was home defense against air attack and this marriage not only of the radar system not only of the spitfires and the hurricanes but also the rhetoric of winston churchill these things came together to create something absolutely astounding in the eyes of the world [Music] the luftwaffe is astonished at least three-quarters of its raids are being intercepted on eagle day itself the raf shoots down 46 german planes for just 13 of their own on august the 18th the so-called hardest day 69 german aircraft are shot out of the sky for only 31 british right from the start the raf are winning the battle of britain but it doesn't feel like it at the height of the eagle campaign four airfields are temporarily put out of action and the number of aircrew getting killed is phenomenal which means you've got these young pilots with just 10 hours training coming into full combat service but numbers can be deceptive especially when you're getting them wrong for most of the battle of britain the intelligence on both sides was actually faulty the popular image of the battle of britain of course is david and goliath british fighter command is david and there's this huge gem goliath you know it's got absolutely massive aircraft well it's an attractive story but there were more fighters available to the british than they were available to the germans at the height of the eagle campaign the germans are convinced that the raf has lost 770 planes out of an available force of 1200 in fact they have only lost 318 and still have 1400 available and new plane production is now so fast that there are over three times more in service than the luftwaffe estimates since june british aircraft factory output has soared to 1900 new fighters in just three months germany doesn't know it but in british factories an ambitious program of aircraft production named harrogate has been operational for months they plan to produce around about three thousand aircraft in the end they end up producing more than four thousand it's a general sense of urgency workers are willing to turn up and work all night if you can't get aircraft down fast enough then the worst is going to happen even so the combined toll of more than 1300 german aircraft pounding british airfields every clear day is pushing the raf to breaking point the leaders of fighter command started worrying that they they couldn't actually maintain the fight they were going to have to move the the airfields back the raf feels like it's on the verge of collapse when on the 7th of september the germans launched the heaviest single raid of the campaign going thinks that the rf is finished and so they go on to the next stage of the pre-invasion plan 348 bombers accompanied by 617 fighters start flying across the channel but today their targets are not airfields they have one target and that's london at 5pm german bomb doors open above london's docks they dropped more than 350 tons of high explosive and over 400 incendiary bombs [Music] the inferno was so big it caused more damage than the great fire of london ten days earlier 95 british aircraft had bombed berlin the bombing of london's dockyards marks a decisive change in nazi's strategy the bombing of london is often seen simply as a reaction by hitler's at walmart burley let's teach the british a lesson if at the bottom of london had long been part of the plan the idea was that there would be serious and heavy attacks on london to disrupt the capital just a week before german troops began to land on the sussex kent coast but in fact the blitz of britain lasts eight months more than 000 tons of bombs are dropped on london and other cities over 40 000 perish 250 000 people are rendered homeless within the first month and over 2 million homes are all destroyed but british morale remains unbowed it's often said that blitz spirits was a myth it's not true blitz spirit was not a myth but it's real the blitz never really came close to shattering the morale of the british people the luftwaffe certainly threw sufficient numbers at breaking britain's spirit just after midnight on the 15th of september 1940 goering sends in wave after wave of bombers forcing the raf to face his fighter escorts in dogfights over london the 15th of september is still commemorated as battle of britain day the raid lasts 19 hours our best guess is that something like 1500 aircraft took part and the british estimated that they shot down 185 german aircraft for the loss of 29 aircraft of their own in fact only 74 german aircraft are destroyed but it's enough to convince goring that daylight bombing raids are too costly to continue from that day the german blitz is only conducted at night the battle of britain is effectively over in the end for the germans the battle of britain was an unwinnable battle the level of attrition that the german air force had to take during this period was enormous the loss rates were catastrophic loss rates it's the day when hitler effectively threw in the towel gave up on the invasion of britain and turned his attention elsewhere hitler has other things to focus on rather than some tin pot island on the edge of the atlantic no he's planning something else he's planning to conquer russia [Music] the conquest of russia has always lurked at the center of adolf hitler's plans as early as 1923 he identifies russia and the ukraine as places which are ideal for the laban's realm the living space that he needs for the german people the idea was to create colonies that could be sort of farms for germany but also give them lots of mineral resources coal oil and so forth the plan basically was for the native population who were considered unto mensch under beings to be cleared out of these areas this was a murderous plan in its basic inception a certain portion of them were going to be starved a certain number of them were going to be killed worked to death even though britain is inconveniently holding out on the western front hitler decides it no longer matters when hitler is controlling that vast swathe of european russia britain will no longer have any allies left in europe and so she'll just have to sue for peace by june 1941 hitler and his yes men in the german high command convince themselves that a blitzkrieg through russia can take moscow in three months if the french army could be defeated in six weeks the premier army in europe as well as they're concerned then the red army is no it's a paper tiger to use the word hubris to describe the german mood after their huge successes in france in 1940 isn't isn't enough hitler's faith in the german army was overwhelming the rice fuhrer also takes encouragement from the red army's wretched performance in its november 1939 invasion of finland the so-called winter war sees over a million soviet soldiers fought to a standstill by a mere 300 000 finns russia's casualty rate is also seven times that of finland's the idea that the red army who had suffered terribly at the hands of tiny finland were going to be able to resist the germans seemed absolutely incredible but hitler failed to notice two things the first was that the russian army was very good at adapting they learnt from their mistakes and the second thing that hitler failed to appreciate was that red army tactics simply rely on wave after wave of humanity overwhelming enemy positions this was the preferred tactic of general georgi zhukov whose recent success against the japanese in manchuria has promoted him to the top of stalin's purged officer corps just in time to come face to face with blitzkrieg stalin has huge numbers of intelligence warnings 84 in number saying that the germans are going to attack there's no doubt the germans are going to attack and stalin disregards them all under the soviet's non-aggression pact with the nazis in the first year of the war the russians are giving the germans 900 000 tons of oil one million tons of cereals and half a million tons of weapons grade phosphates stalin is convinced such essential commodity trade will keep his borders intact but the evidence suggests otherwise three spies even gave him the exact date on which hitler was going to invade but again stalin ignored it on june 22nd 1941 hitler sends the largest invasion force ever assembled into russia more than 3.6 million men 7 000 artillery pieces 3 500 tanks and 2 500 aircraft supported by over six hundred thousand forces are heading stalin's way despite repeated warnings the soviets are totally unprepared for germany's operation barbarossa barbarossa was the single most important act of the second world war which completely transformed its character and it represented the fulfillment of hitler's foremost dream of laban's realm of a triumph over the jews and the bolsheviks and also providing the german people with this empire in the east with a vital source of food and oil southern russia ukraine and caucuses in particular are incredibly rich in mineral resources we're talking about oil we're talking about coal enormous coal reserves there too there's food and there's enormous amounts of wheat fields in southern russia and in ukraine on paper the red army has formidable forces at its disposal at least 5 million men 10 000 tanks and more than 6 000 planes available but 70 of its force is spread out occupying poland the country that stalin and hitler partitioned as allies just a few months ago despite all 84 intelligence-led warnings of an invasion stalin finds the german assault so shocking that he has a minor breakdown this is a man who still can't believe this is happening he goes to his dacha his country house and he spends three days there in isolation refusing to see anybody by the time stalin takes control the germans are 400 miles into russian territory and the red army has lost almost 5 000 tanks and close to 2 000 planes the initial blitzkrieg into the soviet union actually went very well indeed the russian air force for example lost more planes and the british lost during the entirety of the battle of britain goring is ecstatic blitzkrieg is proving so effective that entire russian armies are cut off and forced to surrender [Music] by the middle of july less than a month after the start of the campaign 300 000 russians have been taken prisoner and in fact frank halda the army chief of staff declared that the whole war had been won in just 14 days but there is a lot of fighting yet to come the german invasion plan involves a three-pronged attack army group south will strike the rich russian heartlands of the ukraine and crimea meanwhile army group north and army group center will push north of the impossible prippet marshes then divide at smilensk army group north will swing up to leningrad while army group center will smash through to moscow for hitler's generals moscow is the absolute key if moscow falls they say then russia will fall with it the nazis wanted to take moscow for good military strategic reasons in part if you visit russia you'll see that all the train lines converge in moscow all the transport networks the canals the road network they all go through moscow so capturing moscow would have been an important blow against the soviet union but hitler disagrees with his generals for him taking the resource rich bread basket of the ukraine and the oil fields of the caucasus is just as important as the symbolism of taking moscow russian oil and russian corn was absolutely vital to germany to continue with the war once barbarossa had been launched there are train loads of corn oil every sort of commodity flowing from stalin's russia to hitler's germany so much soviet food in the bellies of german troops inevitably leads to famine the german army are being fed by those fields that raises the obvious point what's going to happen to the 30 million russians who are normally fed by those fields well the solution is very simple they all have to starve to death genocide is at the heart of laban's realm but in russia the nazis miss a trick the population they are starving might even have supported them the soviet union was a very brutal place and it alienated large parts of its own population collectivization was not popular with peasants to say the very least so all the rural peasantry are our obvious constituency the nazis could have courted [Music] but the nazi's own brutality towards these people whereby they treated them as inferior human beings meant that whatever tentative practical steps they might have to reach out to that population were undermined by their own brutality their own racism their own violent thuggish colonial attitude to these people and for russian soldiers the destructive logic of laban's realm makes even surrender fatal by the end of september two million soviet troops have been captured and by the end of the war that's risen to 5.7 and the germans only had space to hold 790 000 prisoners of war so the obvious question is what happens to them and at least 3.3 million russian pows are either shot or starved to death in german captivity that's murder the civilian population fares no better hard on the heels of panzer divisions come german einsatzgruppen death squads we tend to think of the holocaust happening just in places like auschwitz and in gas chambers but actually millions of people were simply shot to death by these ss units called the einsatzgruppen this didn't just include political figures like soviet commissars but jewish men women and children too the einsatzgruppen are a chillingly efficient killing machine the most infamous mass shooting of jews by the einsatz group in the former soviet union uh occurred at babiya a ravine outside of kiev in september 1941 the local jews were taken out to this big ravine near kiev and they were forced to undress stand at the edge and be shot into it and something in the region of 33 000 jews were shot very very few managed to survive by lying there pretending to be dead having mounds of earth put on them more bodies on top and then late at night managing to dig their way upwards and crawl out and and get away from it but it was one of the largest massacres of that sort during the war there are hundreds of such places throughout the former soviet union ultimately we think that something like 1.5 million soviet jews were murdered by the nazis a lot of news came back to the home front about these public executions in the east and people sent film reels home they took photographs they sent their reels home to be developed and in some of the photos you can see lots of germans standing around with cameras in their hands they had little cameras it was extremely popular to take photographs it was almost like tourism jews gypsies homosexuals the mentally ill anyone deemed a threat to aryan superiority becomes a target they were people like the famous dunamo kia football team that defeated a nazi team in an infamous football match they were anybody of that kind those they don't kill they enslave some seven million eastern europeans are sent into labour battalions and they're brutal places on the battlefield the number of russian casualties is equally unimaginable 44 000 soldiers fall every single day nazis are pouring hellfire down upon the great bear but hitler has not won yet there are two military aphorisms that every soldier knows and that hitler ignored at his peril the first is that no plan survives contact with the enemy and the second never fight a land war in asia unless you're heading west hitler ignores both of them and that will prove to be a big mistake the barbarossa invasion plan assumes the red army is so weak that a german blitzkrieg will take moscow in three months but the plan seriously underestimates both its opponent and the soviet union's sheer size hitler can't even conceive of the challenges of space the challenges of scale that he's confronting in the former soviet union [Music] it is the biggest country in the world and that's really key here [Music] the soviet union is not only land rich its 170 million strong population provides stalin and his chief of staff marshal zhukov an almost limitless resource of fighting men and almost a million women conscripts the soviet union put women into arms like no other belligerent state in world war ii they were often in highly technical roles snipers they were in tanks they were radio operators the bravery and valor of stalin's female fighters soon provide him propaganda gold the whole number of women became heroes of the soviet union people like zoya christinanska the famous partisan tortured and hanged by the nazis and they took photographs of this whole process that were published then in the soviet uh press to sort of mobilize their own population to avenge this awful and heinous crime but when the crunch comes what will define the battle between the world's two most hated dictators will not be russia's thirst for vengeance it will be the weather and most crucially the numbers by december 1941 soviet commander marshal zhukov has 200 new divisions ready to throw into the fight against the german invaders russia possesses the numbers to repel the nazis but her troops lack equipment the soviet union was really good at churning out stuff that those in power thought that people needed and it actually was really poor at producing the stuff that they actually needed one glaring example of this is this one garrison division in leningrad that's got just 21 machine guns about 100 pistols and 300 rifles all to share between seven thousand men armed or not the ruthless zhukov sends his troops into battle often with just dutch courage to protect them russian soldiers are equipped with a hundred grams of vodka a day to get them drunk enough to give them the courage to charge across no man's land the communist disregard for human life is shocking for every one soldier killed or wounded on the german side on the russian there are no fewer than twenty zhukov simply doesn't care how many he must sacrifice in essence zhukov's principle strategy is very simple it involves sending more human beings at the enemy the enemy has bullets to fire at them [Music] and around 300 000 who refuse to fight are simply executed by the nkvd stalin's secret police by contrast german manpower resources are stretched to their limit it starts to dawn on some german minds that maybe just maybe hitler is bitten off more than he can chew by the end of july barbarossa's three army groups sustain a combined total of 213 301 losses but german high command can only supply 47 000 replacements franz halder now this is the man who had prematurely declared victory within 14 days was now writing in his diary we reckoned on about 200 divisions but we've already counted 360. so if we smash a dozen they'll simply put up another dozen if the numbers aren't bad enough the sheer logistics of getting men and material to the front line is also proving a challenge simply supplying army group center requires running some 25 goods trains every single day and the problems with the russian network means that at most the germans are getting ate through because around 350 000 partisans are operating behind german lines in the eyes of hitler's generals though the gravest error of all comes in august when the fuhrer orders gadarian's second panzer group away from army group centre's advance on moscow and sends them south instead guderian was absolutely incensed with this but actually hitler did it for pretty good reasons because army group south was getting bogged down around kiev and desperately needed to be helped not only do the germans take kiev the russians lose a massive 616 000 troops in the process but just as his generals predict hitler's victory at kiev takes its toll on german efforts to seize moscow without guderian's panzers army group center can't push on towards moscow and it's its advance just turns into a crawl really the advance on moscow does not regain momentum until early october by then it is too late russians have a name for their autumn reigns rasputitza the dissolving of the roads most roads in russia particularly this time were mud roads meaning that when it starts to rain torrentially for days on end they will turn to mud and be almost impossible so launching their assault against moscow in october 1941 this was a problematic time because the mud meant they couldn't move at the lightning pace that they'd previously been able to when defeating france holland and so forth kadarian returns to moscow from kiev but his tanks grind to a muddy halt they're just nine miles from the capital one has to remember how narrowly the russians held on in october if those forces which had gone south had been out there in the north it's very doubtful that moscow could have helped whether stalin could have survived whether the soviet union could have carried on with the war hitler who does not trust his own army's high command takes control of german forces his tactic is simply stand and fight much to his general chagrin and as a result millions of germans will die by december the germans lose more than eight hundred thousand men and hemorrhage two thousand casualties every day and that's before winter sets in winter is the russian secret weapon it gets so cold the temperatures in that winter fell at times to minus 40 degrees celsius the germans had no clue how to conduct a war in those circumstances and they're very bad even their weapons cannot cope with the extreme cold this is a german mauser carbine typical weapon of soldier to make it work what you have to do is bring back the working parts put in five bullets push it forward and then pull the trigger eject and so on all of that requires lubrication if this thing isn't lubricated it will not function and that's fine in normal temperatures the problem is that in the russian winter the gun oil actually freezes solid it stops being a liquid and becomes like this under those circumstances it stops being a rifle it becomes a club and the fact is the russians have lubricants that work at low temperatures the nazis don't many german troops don't even have overcoats to protect them from the cold this great mighty german army their soldiers are reduced to putting layers of newspaper under their tunics to keep out the icy cold things get so bad the propaganda minister joseph goebbels launches an appeal the german public sends 67 million items of winter clothing but charity woolens can't prevent vast numbers of soldiers from freezing to death [Music] in january 1941 zhukov launches a fierce counter-attack that starts to push the enemy back [Music] the german blitzkrieg is over operation barbarossa is staggeringly costly to the german war effort germany begins the invasion with around 163 operational divisions and just a year later they're down to 58. this was absolutely catastrophic and ultimately the defeat of moscow was the beginning of the end that really was a turning point in the war barbarossa failed to achieve any of its objectives blitzkrieg fails for the first time and hitler has only himself to blame in classic dictatorial fashion when faced with impossible odds hitler doubles down on the 7th of december 1941 japan bombs the americans of pearl harbor and within a few days hitler has declared war on the united states this is absolutely insane he's not just well waging a war with the biggest nation on earth he's now waging a war with the richest nation on earth but hitler is operating on a different plane to the rest of the world one of the factors that clearly plays a part in hitler's decision to declare war in the united states is his warped view of the jewish conspiracy and there would use all the roundness of what he says and therefore the declaration of war in the united states is a declaration against world jewry as well as against the united states the japanese have now handed hitler the perfect excuse to turn this into a worldwide war against the jews why the japanese would risk the wrath of the greatest nation on earth is another story altogether one rooted in numbers [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: War Stories

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Rating: 4.6759257 out of 5

Keywords: military history, war, war documentary, military tactics, war stories, history of war, battles, World war 2, wwii, battle of britain, raf outnumbered, wwii in numbers, the blitz londons longest night, operation barbarossa, operation sea lion, churchill we will fight them on the beaches, hugh dowding battle of britain, spitfire ww2, british hurricane ww2, messerschmitt, adlertag 1940, eagle day ww2, adolf hitler, hermann goering, luftwaffe, v for victory, nazi germany

Id: O4P2nBe3C_M

Length: 44min 43sec (2683 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021