Why Did The Allies Ignore The Early Signs Of Invasion? | Secrets of War | Timeline

[Music] next on secrets of war Hitler's lightning strike in Poland soon gave way to a strange eight-month waiting game blitzkrieg became sits Krieg an assassination plot secret peace talks and captured invasion plans could have drastically shortened the war and save millions of lives but heroes were in short supply sits greed the phoney war is next on secrets of war [Music] [Music] on the first of September 1939 the German army poured over its eastern border into Poland [Music] the reason for their attack a raid by a handful of Polish soldiers on a radio station in the German border town of glance but Poland had not drawn first blood the raid was a sham members of the Nazi Party intelligence service had secretly dressed a few prisoners in civilian clothes and shot them at the station then dressed other prisoners in Polish army uniforms and shot them in the nearby forest to suggest that the attack had been repulsed it would appear that the poles had had committed a minor atrocity by shooting some German border people etcetera a cruel trick to say the least and one that I don't think impressed anybody in the world the blitzkrieg motorized divisions quickly defeated the hopelessly outdated Polish cavalry units on horseback the French and British governments declared war on Germany but their ground forces failed to move Allied aircraft outnumbered Germany's looked awful but there were more raids over Germany as an oaf Hitler's troops continued their rapid advance from the West Joseph Stalin Soviet Army sealed Poland's fate in just three weeks by advancing from the east and claiming their half of the spoils from these events emerged a curious period known as the Sitz Creek or phoney war an eight-month span of time from the end of September 1939 to the beginning of May 1940 without battles a time filled with both great hope and profound frustration does its king claw and it's Krieg was a strange time of waiting it was a time of relative and decisiveness a time where war plans kept getting postponed where primary politics still could have gotten the upper hand at any time the Oh bond given and Conan there were lots lots of missed opportunities during that time both for the Allies to knock out the Germans and also for the Germans to take control of Europe British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edward de la da had failed to negotiate a peace settlement with memories of bloody World War 1 battlefields and millions of casualties still fresh in their minds they wanted to avoid war at all costs Hitler had broken agreement after agreement by occupying Austria Czechoslovakia and Poland despite France and Britain's declarations of war and their promise to support the poles they still seemed reluctant to engage the enemy [Music] they were very afraid that if they set troops and sent bombers over against Germany that their countries would also be bombed and they were not ready for it however the real problem was the speed at which the Germans advanced into Poland and once the Russians came in who was clear to the ally that they would not even be able to help Poland even symbolically so therefore they did almost nothing 67 year old general maurice camilla a divisional commander in world war one from a traditional military family was the overall commander of the joint British and French forces in France [Music] drawing from his experiences in the Great War he was content to sit behind his country's state-of-the-art series of fortifications known as the Maginot Lion construction began in 1930 and was completed seven years later at a cost in today's money of more than two billion dollars the series of anti-tank defenses and heavily armed forts stretched for 87 miles along the French German border the largest structures could house 1,200 men for three months without being resupplied the generals at the time even the soldiers at the time was still carrying the mental and the physical scars of these horrendous bloody slugging matches of the Western Front because of this defensive mentality one of the greatest missed opportunities of the war occurred even before the phoney war began during the Polish campaign all of Hitler's best soldiers were involved in this invasion far to the east the defenses on the border with France were sparsely man with poorly equipped second-rate troops if you were it insisted on attacking Poland before the German military was completely ready general Gamila ordered just a few divisions of French forces on Germany's western border to advance into Germany avoiding casualties whenever possible even if it's slowed progress they met a little bit of resistant but not much and then almost inexplicably he peeps he drew them back after this day there had not really been a good explanation for why he did that except timidity except a refusal to believe that this was a real war even the war had been declared even though Poland was being destroyed and had they taken the offensive and moved into Germany the war would have been completely different since France and Britain refused to launch a full-scale attack and were indeed unprepared to advance even if they'd wanted to the next great mystery of the Sitz Krieg became where and when the Germans would attack the Western powers after an overwhelming victory in Poland Hitler turned to his generals for advice on how to invade France and the Low Countries the codename for the invasion was case yellow but the Nazi war machine needed time to rearm and redeployed Germany's western border certain high-ranking officers also thought this invasion would eventually destroy Germany they tried to delay the offensive as much as possible they devised an intentionally uninspired plan to ensure defeat German army intelligence chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris army commander-in-chief general heinrich von Brauchitsch and army chief of staff general fronts Halldor were all part of this subtle resistance movement the initial plan that Germany had for the invasion of the West was based on the old Schlieffen Plan which had worked in World War one and it involved a huge mass of troops on the northern border of Germany coming down through the low country and into France sort of like a hinge this was exactly the type of attack for which France and Britain were prepared they knew the Germans wouldn't attack directly from the east because the vaunted Maginot Line presented too strong a barrier just north of this lay they are Dan forests which the Allies felt was too thick to provide passage for a major invasion force for general gimana the only logical opening and the only invasion route he prepared for was further north through the relatively flat open terrain of northern Belgium Holland [Music] Gavilan had determined to bring his forces up to the north what he called LeGrande maneuvered illinois's and he was waiting to do this he would say at dinner parties what am I going to be able to do this grant maneuver Gamila enjoyed gourmet meals in his headquarters as he confidently waited for his chance to counter the German attack for the French troops who'd been called up to the front this inactivity was demoralizing 34 year-old John Paul Sartre one of the great philosophers and writers of the 20th century had been assigned to a meteorological section assisting in our Tillery unit near the German border the growing psychological toll of the phoney war was obvious to him Sartre wrote in his diary my work here consists of sending up balloons and then watching them through a pair of field-glasses afterwards I found the battery artillery officers and tell them the wind direction what they do with this information is their affair The Young Ones make some use of the intelligence reports the old school just shoves them in the wastebasket since there isn't any shooting either course is equally effective the French troops may have been sentenced to boredom by their leaders but there was plenty of activity on other fronts during the subscreen peace negotiations took place between the Allies particularly the British government and the anti-hitler anti-war German officers throughout the phoney war Pope Pius the 12th Vatican City was the site of much of the dialogue between the two parties the proposition they put to Pope Pius the 12th was you've seen Poland you've seen what happened to a Catholic country now is it going to happen again or will you work for peace will you help us the German resistance the principal figures in these negotiations were British ambassador's of Darcy Osborne and Catholic German resistance member dr. Joseph Neela Mueller was friends with many top Vatican officials including the Pope he knew he risked execution for his involvement in the negotiations but Mueller was committed to ridding Germany of the Nazi Party Devendra Dada community opposition what the German military opposition's desires were brought to Pope Pius the 12th the Pope then in turn spoke with the British ambassador Osborn and Osborn carried the German conspirators ideas further to London to the British government vitae not London so politician Avakian some progress was made but all of the proposals required the removal of Hitler from power the German resistance had been planning a coup against the Fuhrer however it was becoming difficult to muster support as Hitler enjoyed one military victory after another Britain waited for the conspirators to oust the Nazi leader one of the resistance members waited for the Allies to offer assurances that they would not take advantage of Germany during this vulnerable time of inner turmoil regrettably and this is often the case through all these negotiations that one sees nobody was really prepared to put their their neck on the line [Music] these tentative talks caught the attention of the Nazi party's intelligence branch known as the SD when someone mentioned them to a monk who also happened to be an SD agent without strong support from the Allies and because of the very real threat of being exposed and executed momentum for the coup faded [Music] as a high-ranking officer chief-of-staff Halldor was allowed to carry a pistol into meetings with Hitler many times he thought about shooting the Nazi leader but had been unable to pull the trigger it seems that German military tradition did not inspire radical revolutionary thinking they really did not have what it takes to conduct assassination and Coons one of the officers said I'm I regret to inform you that nothing in my background has prepared me to assassinate someone he torched an opposite Sounion here the German opposition didn't keep their promise that they would overthrow Hitler and the British government held back in encouraging the German opposition so we had this phenomenon that neither side understood the other very well and because of this perhaps an opportunity was missed besides the members of the German resistance the commander of the German air forces or Luftwaffe Hermann Goering tried to negotiate a peace several times through friends from neutral countries he seemed quite comfortable discussing Hitler's dismissal and his rise to ruler of Germany but the Allies never felt that they could trust Kerry he may have simply been trying to obtain information from the Allies for the coming battle he also seemed more interested in preserving his luxurious lifestyle than truly achieving a lasting peace for his country during the peace talks in the fall of 1939 the German army had come perilously close to invading as pre-arranged start dates had been postponed for a variety of reasons just as general gummi laws forces had missed an opportunity to act boldly by invading Germany during the Polish campaign both sides in these various peace talks had behaved tentatively and failed to avert the approaching battle another event was about to make any further peace negotiations even more difficult major s pain best and captain our Henry Stevens were two of the most senior British intelligence field agents in Europe in Amsterdam in the 30th of October 1939 best and Stephens met with two Germans who introduced themselves as captain Schemmel and captain hull small Dutch police had intentionally stopped the men at the border they and the British were satisfied that their papers seemed to validate their identities the British sir were not well informed because they were so desperate for information and because they were ideologically prepared to believe anti-nazi speech several more cautious meetings took place in various Dutch cities during which peace proposals were discussed the two Germans were even given a wireless radio set so they could communicate with the British but then an event which took place hundreds of miles away in Munich drastically changed these talks on the 8th of November a bomb intended to kill Hitler exploded shortly after he left a building or he'd made a Nazi Party speech the Fuehrer suspected that British intelligence also known as mi6 was behind this attempt on his life on the 9th of November Stevens and best were heading by car to the cafe Bacchus in the Dutch border town of Venlo to meet the two German captains however one of these supposed resistance members was actually a vaulter schellenberg an important member of the SD he'd been ordered to put an end to this cat-and-mouse game to see what mi6 knew about the Munich bombing suddenly two cars filled with SS agents crashed over the border trap the British agents car pulled the agents into their own cars and sped back across the border into Germany a Dutch agent working with best and Stevens was killed in a gun battle in a nearby forest during the operation they interrogate of them quite thoroughly with all the trappings that the Gestapo can bring to bear and manage to get from them a pretty good rundown of the whole British intelligence network an evil shooting war this was no time to lose their eyes and ears mr. British did [Music] they didn't find any evidence that mi6 had been involved in the assassination attempt that didn't matter Stevens and best were still linked to the crime by Joseph Goebbels the head Nazi propagandist besides being an embarrassment for British intelligence the Venlo incident caused the Allies to be less trusting and more wary of genuine peace offers from German resistance members once again strange twists of fate seemed to be leading Europe closer to a long and bloody war [Music] just a few days before the Venlo incident occurred a mysterious package was discovered on a stone ledge outside of the British Embassy in Oslo Norway it was addressed to the British naval attache when he opened it later that morning he discovered technical drawings about some type of weaponry in a card signed by a well-wishing german scientist no explanation was included the package was quickly forwarded to London where RV Jones of mi6 was assigned to examining the fact that he just completed a report in the current state of the German weapons program made him the perfect man to inspect these papers which came to be known as the Oslo report [Music] it seemed to provide details on advanced rocket jet engine and torpedo and radar programs the AH flow report was so stunning that initially it was looked upon at this information none of this could be true because if it were the Germans would be so far advanced that we would not be able to to wage war against but many people in the Allied camp the Oslo report was a wake-up call Jones's judgment that these advanced military programs were real was eventually confirmed when some of these weapons were captured later in the war the [Music] identity of the well-wishing German scientists remains a mystery to this day very few people would have had access to so many different secret weapons programs aver chief Wilhelm Canaris and an engineer working at the Siemens Factory in Germany are two of the primary suspects but the debate still continues [Music] bad weather installing tactics by the officers of the German resistance said continually postponed the invasion of the West then in a tenth of January 1940 with the next planned invasion date just one week away the Allies had another stroke of good luck or at least it appeared that way at first [Music] a major Hellmuth Weinberger was flying to an important meeting in Cologne to discuss the final details for the invasion he should have taken a train the night before but he was having too much fun at the base officer's club in Munster another major offered to fly him the next day so he could enjoy a party they started off for Cologne with sunny skies but fog soon set in the two officers became lost and Lineberger began to panic he was carrying secret plans for the invasion which were never supposed to be brought in a plane precisely because aircraft can stray off course they finally spotted a river and assumed it was the Rhine which runs through cologne but while trying to locate the city they ran out of fuel and crashed in a field local police quickly arrived at the scene that was almost like Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz named Toto I don't think we're in Kansas anymore because they landed and people were not speaking German and they knew they were in trouble the river they'd seen was the muse or Maas not the Rhine the Germans had landed near the town of mashaallah on the Belgian Dutch border the officers and the invasion plans were taken to the nearby jail Hitler was furious when he heard that the plans for case yellow had been captured but the Allies did little with the information general gamma lab took the news is confirmation that his grand maneuver in the north would be a success and that his defensive positions were well chosen the Allies could have used these plans revealing the locations and strengths of most of the German divisions near the front to launch a preemptive attack of their own but only defensive measures received consideration to circulate those sauce everything that accommodated the government's policy in France as in England was a defensive neutral cowardly vile policy everything that went in that direction was welcomed and everything against that was always denied on the surface the Allies seemed to have an advantage in reality capturing the plans for case yellow actually worked against France and Britain Hitler had not been pleased with his generals unimaginative and cautious plan now he had a reason to change Lieutenant General Erich von Manstein had been advocating a different strategy but his memos to the general staff had been filed away by resistance members finally he came face-to-face with Hitler and told the Fuehrer his idea man Stein being a man of a slightly different generation certainly a innovative in terms of his idea of what mechanized warfare do had a much more precise and a much more potent thought about the strategy to be applied in the West he torture heeresgruppe Aviv not the German Army Group in the north was to wave the red Matadors cape at the Allies and provoke them into storming forward like an angry bull into the trap then the Panzer divisions concentrated in the our den would stab at the Allied flanks like the matador wielding his sword a may invasion date was set but a smaller operation was scheduled to begin even earlier besides the Russian invasion of Finland the Battle of Norway was the only major military action during the Sitz creek like all other aspects of the phoney war this battle was riddled with lethargy and missed opportunities for months the British had been contemplating an invasion of neutral Norway in order to cut off Germany's supply of iron ore the basic metal used to manufacture many different weapons German need also considered an operation there in order to protect their supply Norway really is something that shouldn't have taken the Western Allies by surprise but certainly did even as reports of German ships massing in northern ports filtered back there was no immediate reaction by the Allies to speed up their own plans on the 7th of April 1940 British bombers spotted German ships heading toward Norway they released their bombs missed every ship and headed home not calling for more raids on the 9th of April German air and sea forces converged on Norway the British Navy managed to sink several German vessels in the northern port of Narvik the most crucial location for the iron ore trade but poor planning a lack of coordination and an unwillingness to commit enough troops eventually cost the Allies the Norwegian campaign nothing really worked civilized for me by the British sending troops over and the troops went on one ship and their supplies went on another it was just impossible to wage war and if you've got troops storming ashore without any rifle from their hands Britain decided to evacuate its forces to France to prepare for the larger battle soon to come Norway was not lost [Music] it was given away [Music] following the failed peace negotiations at the Vatican of their chief of staff Colonel hunts austere earth still tried to assist the Allies and undermine Hitler Oster had passed repeated detailed warnings of the invasion of France in the Low Countries to the Allies through his friend yes bear tooth sauce the Dutch military attache in Berlin sat on austere countenance an austere had known each other since the early 1930s in Berlin they shared the same disapproval for national socialist policies Colonel Astor found sauce to be a like-minded individual and he supplied him time and again with internal information on German military strategies military TV it was a case of the boy who cried wolf they were telling them that the invasion is coming the invasion is coming and then it didn't come but there had been so many postponements that by the time the invasion was actually to begin that people had begun to disbelieve the information Oscar and sauce warned the Allies about the invasion of Denmark which took place in the same day as the Norwegian campaign no one listened Danish troops were so surprised when the Germans crossed the border that the government surrendered within hours of the invasion ironically there was so much valuable information leaking out of Germany from various resistance sources that the Allies failed to appreciate its significance there's a general rule I think in espionage that when information is easy to come by it's not worth very much only if it's accompanied by Blood Sweat toil and event it's likely to be real when it just comes pouring at you as it did of anti-nazi sources in Germany - the ally they tend to disbelieve it not good enough besides Auster's warning the Allies had several other clues as to the time and location of the impending attack in March of 1940 French intelligence received important documents from German double agents who were working for the Allies on food [Music] the German agents are given a questionnaire where it is said check out the roads between Saddam and Abbeville shoes God Bevere and the lines of communication the rivers to be crossed the carrying load of the bridges the petrol depots on the way and so on like the dog this new information didn't fit into the French military's neatly prepared plans [Music] I need the module we went to see the Army's superior headquarters to tell them that the attack would shortly come through the our den they made their headquarters study this possibility then their third bureau said it is not possible that an armored force such as the vert macht could cross the our den without difficulties it cannot be done so they eliminated this possibility at all these don't eliminate city portes this brings up I think one of the greatest problems that any intelligence agency has whether it's going back to the days of the Romans or its present day how can you destroy the policymakers of a government to abandon their mindsets the policies that they themselves have crafted even when they're faced with intelligence which says the answer is different should be different the French themselves had proven an attack through the our Dan could work during a 1938 war game nurse a dog a French officer attacked through the forest with a group of Tanks and routed the opposition the government had already spent so much money in the Maginot Line super fortress that the results of this armored attack were never published it was a question of people hiding their heads in the sand it's ludicrous military tactics not to cover every possible base in terms of how somebody's going to come at you they've put all of their eggs in one basket they decided the only possible invasion plan had to be based on the old Schlieffen Plan and therefore they were going to defend against that but that left them unable to defend against anything else the invasions of Poland in Norway had given the Allies a clear look at the new age of mobile warfare modern forces moved quickly and coordinated their strikes using field radios in fact radio traffic in the Arden region was up sharply in the first days of May 1940 the location of the Luftwaffe is fighters and bombers offered yet another clue all of the Bombers were in the north and all of the fighter plans were in the South fighter planes have one mission and that is to protect the advance of the tanks and the troops along with the tax warnings from German resistance members intelligence reports and the location of enemy units all pointed to an attack through they are down [Music] however gamla and the other allied generals were still confident that the Maginot Line was the answer [Music] on the 10th of May silent German gliders landed atop the state-of-the-art Fortress of ebony mouth in Belgium along the protective Albert Canal [Music] using flamethrowers and special directional explosives these elite German forces managed to neutralize most of the powerful turrets within one hour [Music] the January plane crash mashaallah had included plans of an airborne attack against this very fort no special defensive measures had been taken German ground forces used more trickery to capture several heavily guarded bridge heads across the Meuse river in the north they rode trains across the bridges dressed as civilians or his soldiers from other countries other groups at different crossings pretended to surrender the chairman tried Reuters and a dozen of them and ten of the Rousseff didn't work but a couple did work that's all they needed Panzers poured across the openings [Music] Dorothy who art was a 19 year old girl living with her family near the city of Brussels she remembers the abrupt end of the phoney war prepared most people including us didn't expect anything on the 9th in the evening we slept quite fine until the first hours in the morning everything was normal then we started hearing frightening bombings the shock was very violent the first military event we saw was the arrival of the French army going towards Brussels to take its position gamilons grand maneuver had begun in order to counter the advancing german ground troops the very best Allied troops moved into northern Belgium but the defensive positions they began to occupy were hardly worthy of a narrow extend get the worst of both worlds you still think of being defensive but you leave your defenses to move into uncharted territory and set up another defensive line as the French and British in the north readied themselves for what they thought was the main German attacked puncture divisions raced through the Ardennes Forest to the south [Applause] when the invasion of the West began Hitler was secreted in a bunker near the western frontier of Germany and when he learned from his intelligence reports that the Allies were going up into the northern part of the low country he jumped up and down for joy because he said basically they've bought our rude Luftwaffe fighters destroyed many Allied planes in the ground due to this overwhelming air superiority the pumps were units were able to cross defended southern bridge heads on the Meuse as planned the main thrust came through the French town of Saddam at the edge of the Ardennes Forest [Music] the Allies still had an opportunity to react the Germans were advancing but not as quickly as they'd hoped Gamal ah had time to send reinforcements to other defensive positions in the South except he was still convinced that the main attack was in the north I think it was just a question of being so convinced of a military theory that you could not change your views on it even when the evidence started piling up [Music] the French and British actually had more troops and tanks than the Germans but the Allies chose to scatter their tanks randomly along the front for infantry support they didn't have a concentrated armoured column in order to launch a counter-attack the Germans pushed on and the terrain beyond the our den became more flat and open the speed of the advance increased French intelligence had tried to warn gamma la the enemy's interest in the roads between Saddam and Aberdeen near the coast now the punters were streaking across this very route the West was in danger of collapsing [Music] as the Battle of France began Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister Chamberlain had tried to reason and negotiate with Hitler and it failed now a military minded leader was taking over it's fairly obvious statement to say but I think I should still say the Chamberlain and Churchill were radically different people Chamberlain was forced it and as a result of that he had a major problem about the prosecution of the war because it was such an abhorrent thought for him when Churchill takes over you're seeing discernibly more robust pugnacious demeanor [Music] it was still very little that the new Prime Minister could do in the current battle the speed of the German advance and gamilons inability the shifties forces to the south and left hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers trapped between the enemy and the English Channel German soldiers had simply maneuvered around the vaunted Maginot Line most of its guns were not built to fire towards France so it was decimated from behind a vulnerable dinosaur from another hero [Music] the puncher commanders were ready to make the final push to annihilate the enemy but suddenly the Germans stopped one of the great mysteries of the Second World War still really exists to this day is why Hitler ordered the troops to halt in front of Dunkirk it has never been satisfactorily explained the Allies had been working for years to crack the German cipher machine known as enigma the code was finally broken during the invasion and British intelligence intercepted and decrypted the order from Hitler demanding that his generals stop [Music] Hitler wanted to prove definitively who was actually wearing the pants in the family and that was the reason that he stopped the tanks and relegated the commander-in-chief to a bit player in other words Hitler won his power struggle but he strategically lost the campaign whatever the reason this gave the Allies time to rescue the troops trapped at Dunkirk Operation Dynamo began as boats of all shapes and sizes left England the British had hoped that 50,000 soldiers could escape the beaches alive even this seemed unlikely as the Luftwaffe appeared in force [Music] but the ships kept coming undaunted by the damaging airstrikes over 300,000 British and French troops were brought back to England Hitler's chance to force a peace settlement and fast in spite of the Allies superior numbers France had fallen in a matter of weeks on the 19th of May 1940 general kamala was relieved of his command on the 5th of June one day after the evacuation of Dunkirk dalla da was ousted as premier Charles DeGaulle a longtime advocate of mobile armored warfare became Undersecretary of Defense [Music] the old leaders were gone and new ideas had emerged but it was too late France was lost that God mom didn't make a heart the May 1940 German attack and the defeat all that is sinister for us French people for me as an officer from my colleagues that's the greatest tragedy of our lives to have seen that defeat a whole country's disaster millions of people with their horses their bikes their animals their mattresses all of them going to southern France it is the most terrible thing it's been said that hindsight is 20/20 and it's easy to second-guess decisions made many years ago yet the subscreen period was filled with so many missed opportunities that it's hard to believe what would have happened if France and Britain had provided Poland with immediate military assistance as we had ciphered so now it doubtless would have been a victory not only for the Allies but for all of humanity if the war could have been shortened to the winter of 1939 to 1940 what if the French troops on germany's western border had continued to advance during the Polish campaign the combined French British forces missed opportunities of invading on the ground they missed opportunities of countering in Norway there were just so many times when better thought put into the process of really winning a war against Germany might have actually won that war instead they sort of waited in a defensive way for Germany to actually make a further invasion and thereby lost a lot of time and a lot of opportunities [Music] what if the German resistance had assassinated Hitler and negotiated a separate peace accord the greatest opportunity that the Allies could have hoped for would have been the fall of the Hitler regime what if the Allies had kept faith in hands austere and prepared for the exact day of the invasion [Music] vermin if one is to draw some type of conclusion from the so called sits Grigor phony war particularly on the French side there is nothing more dangerous for an army than inactivity what if the Allied leaders had paid attention to the many clues and strongly opposed the German advance through they are den there are many lessons to be learned amongst them are don't be obsessed with the last war that you've fought what if the Allies had learned the lessons of blitzkrieg in counter-attacked with numerically superior concentrated tank divisions the Allies were the obvious loser but even Germany failed to fully capitalize on its opportunities during this it's great in keeping with the bizarre nature of the phony war the party that benefited most was not even directly involved I would say the real big winner during the phoney war period was Stalin because he had made this pact with Hitler that not only allowed them to divide Poland but which also allowed the USSR to take possession of Balkan state and and to amass an enormous amount of territory under their control almost without firing a shot perhaps the only positive result of the inactivity of the phoney war was that it gave John Paul Sartre time to write Being and Nothingness [Music] he also wrote the age of reason while being held captive after the fall of friends the information and opportunities were there for the taking but they were either not recognized or they were ignored and that is the real tragedy the sorrow of the SIDS Creek [Music] you

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Length: 50min 34sec (3034 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020