Original subtitles

On June 22nd, 1940,

Britain stood alone against the Nazis.

France had surrendered and Prime Minister Winston Churchill

could only growl defiance.

We'll fight on the beaches.

We'll fight on the landing grounds.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.

Britain still had all the resources of its vast empire.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India,

and a host of other territories had all been quick

to declare war on Germany.

But they were thousands of miles away, across the oceans,

and their military power could not be brought to bear where it mattered.

Britain's situation seemed hopeless

and Hitler had no doubt that Britain would soon try

to negotiate a peace.

But Churchill quickly showed how determined he was prepared to be

in the war against the Nazis.

A powerful squadron of two French battleships

and two battlecruisers was lying in the port of Mers-el-Kebir

in French North Africa.

If the French ships fell into German hands,

the British navy's position in the Mediterranean would become impossible.

So, on July 3rd, a Royal Navy task force

demanded that the French ships either join it

or sail to a neutral port to be interned.

The French refused.

So the British opened fire on their former allies.

They destroyed or severely damaged three of the battleships.

Almost 1,300 French sailors were killed.

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

But Churchill's ruthlessness didn't seem to impress Hitler.

On July 19th, he returned in triumph to Berlin

and was greeted by more than a million people.

That day he made a speech in the Reichstag,

the German parliament, offering peace terms to Britain.

His offer seemed generous. Britain could keep its Empire.

In return Hitler wanted a free hand in Europe.

His plan was to conquer the countries of the East

in order to win lebensraum,

"room to live", for the German people.

But Churchill would have none of it.

The British would fight on.

This would, as he put it, be their finest hour.

Churchill's defiance was immensely popular.

King George VI wrote in his diary,

"Personally, I feel happier now that we have no more allies

to be polite to and to pamper."

But it was difficult to see how Britain

could ever turn the tables and actually win the war.

The British Army might have survived Dunkirk,

but it had lost almost all its tanks,

artillery and transport in the evacuation.

It had just 25 divisions armed mainly with rifles

to resist the vast armored columns

of the world's most fearsome war machine.

So there was little to be done except dig in and wait.

Coastal defenses were prepared

and concrete strongpoints built all across southern England.

Signposts on roads were removed

to make it harder for any invaders to find their way around.

Large open areas were littered with obstacles

to deter airborne troops.

A volunteer defense force, the Home Guard, was recruited.

It was made up of men who were otherwise

ineligible to fight, often because of their age.

By the end of June 1940,

almost one and a half million volunteers had signed up.

But there were few weapons with which to arm them.

Hitler, meanwhile, was getting on with his invasion plans,

code-named Operation Sealion.

Some 20 divisions would be landed on a broad front

along England's south coast.

Barges were gathered from all over north-west Europe.

These were hurriedly converted into makeshift landing craft.

Troops were trained for beach landings.

But for all Hitler's bravado,

those planning Sealion were worried.

Hitler might dismiss the English Channel

as just another river to be crossed.

But Britain's navy was still the largest in the world.

It might be stretched thin by its world-wide commitments,

but the Royal Navy's Home Fleet far outnumbered the German navy.

The German naval chief, Admiral Erich Raeder,

had no confidence that he could seize control of the English Channel

for long enough to get the army across.

But the Germans did have one area

of apparent massive superiority.

The Luftwaffe far outnumbered Britain's Royal Air Force.

The Luftwaffe's commander Hermann Goering had little doubt

that he could establish air control over the Channel

long enough for Sealion to take place.

On July 10th,

the Luftwaffe began attacking shipping in the Channel.

In response, the British had two of the most outstanding

of the new breed of single-engine, multi-gun monoplanes.

The Supermarine Spitfire.

And the Hawker Hurricane.

The Spitfire was slightly faster and more agile

than its German rival, the Messerschmitt Bf-109,

which escorted the German bombers.

It would be used to intercept these.

The Hurricane would prove a lethal bomber killer.

But in July 1940 Air-Vice Marshal Hugh Dowding,

the head of Fighter Command, had less than 700 fighters.

Against them were 2,600 German fighters and bombers.

The odds against the RAF were daunting.

Dowding knew that he could not take on the Luftwaffe

every time it came over the Channel.

So when the Germans began hitting British shipping,

he did nothing.

Instead, he would only use the RAF to stop the Luftwaffe

from establishing the air supremacy needed for invasion.

So he would only take on its big attacks.

To help him, the British had one crucial innovation.

Radar.

By the 1930s, scientists in both Britain and Germany

knew that objects well beyond human sight

could be detected by bouncing radio pulses off them

and measuring the time it took for the signals to return.

In Britain, a team of scientists led by Robert Watson-Watt

began developing radar as a means of detecting

approaching aircraft at long range.

Their work was seized upon by Dowding.

He made radar the core of the world's first

integrated air defense system.

Known as "Chain Home",

this was a string of 21 300-foot-tall radar masts

sited along the south and east coasts of Britain.

These could pick up aircraft at a range of 120 miles

and give their distance, direction, height and numbers.

The information would be passed back to RAF Fighter Command's headquarters

at Bentley Priory, just outside London.

There it would be assessed and warning of an impending raid

passed to Fighter Command's operations room.

Moonshine 1-4 Sky Blue, take target one,

- Channel G-George. - Roger.

Controllers would then alert the nearest RAF airfields

and scramble the necessary number of fighters.

The question was, would radar make up

for German's massive superiority in numbers?

The stage was now set for what would become known

as the Battle of Britain.

Since June 10th, 1940,

the German Luftwaffe had been battering British shipping

in the English Channel.

The Luftwaffe's commander, Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering,

was determined to lure the British air force into combat.

But Britain's Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding refused to take the bait.

He used his fighters sparingly, knowing that the real battle was still to come.

As this first phase of the Battle of Britain began,

the Luftwaffe had a massive superiority in numbers.

It had 1,100 single-engine fighters available

to the Royal Air Force's 700.

Almost all the German fighters

were the excellent Messerschmitt Bf-109E

with a top speed of around 350 miles an hour.

About two-thirds of the British fighters were Hawker Hurricanes,

slower than the 109s, but more agile.

The remainder were Supermarine Spitfires,

with a top speed similar to the 109s.

For their assault, the Germans had over 1,300 medium bombers,

Dornier Do-17s, Heinkel He-111s and Junkers Ju-88s,

each carrying about 4,000 pounds of bombs.

Goering selected August 13th as "Adlertag", "Eagle Day",

for the start of his main assault.

His aim was to destroy RAF fighters in the air,

and the RAF's airfields and Britain's aircraft factories.

Softening up attacks were made the day before.

These concentrated on the airfields

and the radar towers along the south coast.

One station on the Isle of Wight was put out of action,

and several were damaged,

but these were working again within hours.

Goering did not believe that radar had a significant role

to play in the battle and so these attacks were not repeated.

It was a big mistake.

Adlertag dawned cloudy,

so the main assault was postponed until the afternoon.

When it came, radar gave ample warning.

Tamworth calling. Planes heard three miles southwest.

None the less, most of the RAF airfields in the south were hammered.

But by the end of the day, none had been put out of action.

The Luftwaffe lost 46 aircraft.

Britain just 13.

The Luftwaffe mounted its largest attack

of the whole battle on the August 15th.

Waves of heavily-escorted German bombers

forced their way through to the RAF airfields.

The RAF was so overstretched that some pilots

flew seven sorties that day.

By the time the raids died away,

some 90 German aircraft had been shot down

for the loss of 42 British fighters.

The battle continued with equal ferocity over the next few days.

Both sides became increasingly exhausted.

Dowding tried to rotate his pilots to rest them,

but he simply did not have enough of them.

Many were being sent into battle with just 10 hours flying experience.

The Luftwaffe was suffering too.

Its pilots were shocked and increasingly demoralized

by the resilience of the British.

The RAF fighters always seemed to be waiting for them.

As the fighting wore on for 12 solid days,

the British losses began to creep up to match those of the Germans.

The Royal Air Force was close to breaking.

To turn the screw, Goering began using his bombers

to attack at night as well.

But this decision had an unexpected outcome.

On the night of August 24th,

a flight of Heinkel bombers lost its way

and bombed the City of London.

It was the first attack on a non-military target.

The next night 81 British bombers responded by raiding Berlin.

Hitler was infuriated and demanded massive retaliation.

This came on the evening of September 7th.

German bombers attacked the London docks

and surrounding areas.

More than 450 people died

and thousands of homes were destroyed.

But in fact, this was Goering's second crucial mistake.

By switching from the RAF's airfields

just at the moment when it seemed about to break,

he gave it the respite it needed.

Had Goering continued to attack the airfields,

the RAF could not have continued to defend the skies.

Instead on September 15th,

British radars picked up another massive assault on London.

The first wave of 100 bombers and 400 fighters

was intercepted.

Fighting raged all the way from the coast.

In the afternoon, another fleet of 150 bombers renewed the attack.

Winston Churchill was at Fighter Command headquarters that day.

After he heard controllers calling in reinforcements

from neighboring groups he asked,

"What other reserves have we got?"

The reply was, "There are none."

But it was obvious that the Luftwaffe had failed

to gain control the air, and on September 17th,

Hitler postponed Operation Sealion.

The Battle of Britain did not really end, it died away.

Hitler now tried a new tactic.

By October 5th, the daylight raids stopped

and the Germans concentrated on bombing Britain's cities by night.

This was the so-called Blitz.

London was attacked every night but one up to November 12th.

On November 10th, the center of the city of Coventry was obliterated.

The Blitz continued into 1941,

with the last major raid being made on London

on the night of May 10th.

More than 50,000 civilians were killed in the Blitz,

but there was never any question of Britain cracking.

Victory in the Battle of Britain

was a moment of huge national relief.

Pilots had come from all over the empire to join the RAF,

and from countries occupied by the Nazis,

like Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Churchill summed up the nation's gratitude.

Never in the field of human conflict

was so much owed by some many to so few."

But, for Hitler, this was no more than an irritating setback.

Britain, he was convinced, could never be a serious threat.

So he now turned to Eastern Europe.

For Britain, there was now a chance rebuild with a view,

one day, to taking the fight to the enemy.

But to do that, Churchill would need help.

Britain may have won the Battle of Britain,

but it was still immensely vulnerable.

Night after night, its cities were hammered by the Nazis' Blitz.

Its supply lifelines at sea were under constant assault.

Churchill needed more help.

And there was only one country that could provide it -

the United States.

By 1940, the US had recovered from the Great Depression

and the economy was booming again.

It had immense reserves of manpower

and unrivalled industrial strength.

But the people of the United States were utterly opposed

to becoming involved yet again in Europe's wars.

In July 1940, a poll showed that only eight per cent of them

were willing to enter the war.

Undeterred Churchill lobbied the US President,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Roosevelt had long admired Churchill

for his outspokenly anti-Nazi views

and the two men shared an interest in naval affairs.

Roosevelt had been Under Secretary for the US Navy in 1917.

After he became President,

Roosevelt kept in touch with Churchill.

The two began a correspondence,

Churchill signing himself "former Naval person".

For all his avuncular image, Roosevelt had no illusions

that German aggression would one day suck America into the war.

So he began the long job of preparing

American public opinion.

I am a pacifist,

but I believe you and I

will act together to protect

and to defend our science, our culture,

our American freedom

and our civilization.'

In July 1940, he got approval

for a massive expansion of the US Navy,

including the building of six large battleships

and a new class of aircraft carriers.

The following month, Congress agreed

that the National Guard and other reserves

should be called up for one year's active duty.

And in September, a large expansion

of the 150,000-strong US Army was agreed,

with a limited number of conscripts being chosen by lottery.

The first number...

drawn by the Secretary of War

is serial number 1-58.

That same month, Roosevelt announced a deal

under which the US would supply Britain

with 50 World War One destroyers

in return for 99-year leases on bases in Newfoundland and the Caribbean.

The British Navy, desperate for more escorts

to fight the U-boats, began taking them over within days

of the deal being signed.

The clearest sign that Roosevelt was slowly winning the argument

came in the November 1940 presidential election,

when he convincingly defeated the isolationist Wendell Wilkie

with 27 million votes to 22 million.

At the end of the year, Roosevelt spoke to the American people,

setting out the four essential freedoms

which he believed were at stake,

and which Britain was fighting to uphold.

Freedom of speech and religion,

and freedom from want and from fear.

To save these the United States must become

the "arsenal of the democracies",

in other words, it must arm Britain.

We shall send you in ever increasing numbers,

ships, planes, tanks, guns.

That is our purpose and our pledge.

But some Americans remained implacably opposed

to helping Britain.

One of the most outspoken was the American ambassador in London,

Joseph Kennedy, father of the future President, John F Kennedy.

A Boston Irish businessman who had made his fortune

booze smuggling during Prohibition,

Kennedy hated the British and seized every opportunity

to claim that they would shortly be forced to surrender.

However, Kennedy's virulence was counterbalanced

by the growing admiration many Americans felt for the bravery

shown by the British people during the Blitz.

In particular, the broadcasts by the CBS London correspondent

Ed Murrow helped to change public opinion.

This is London.

I remember the evening of Sunday, December 29th.

It was just like any other winter evening.

The first bombers were over London at about half past six.

Soon the fires hissed from the top-floor windows.

Hitler once boasted,

"I will rub out their cities."

This is what he meant.

Encouraged by his electoral success,

in January 1941, Roosevelt introduced his so-called Lend-Lease bill.

The United States would supply weapons and war material

to Britain and China, which was still struggling desperately

against the invading Japanese.

Payment would be delayed.

Roosevelt likened lend-lease

to lending a neighbor a hose to put out a fire.

You would worry about the payback later.

Roosevelt was also being canny.

It also meant that, unlike in 1917,

if America had to enter the war,

it already would have a substantial weapons industry.

American war preparations didn't end there.

Roosevelt secretly authorized US military staff

to discuss a common strategy with the British

should America enter the war.

By April 1941, he felt confident enough

to take another step to help Britain at sea.

He greatly extended the Pan-American Security Zone,

the area within which US warships

would protect US merchant vessels.

In May, US troops set up bases in Greenland,

and in July US Marines were sent to replace

the British garrison in Iceland,

which was there to deprive the Germans of its harbors.

The US Navy also began providing limited convoy escorts,

particularly for US ships carrying Lend-Lease materials.

Hitler now gave his submariners strict instructions

not to sink American ships,

as he didn't want to provoke the United States into war.

But inevitably there were clashes.

On September 4th, 1941,

a British aircraft attacked a German Submarine.

Thinking that the strike had come from the nearby US destroyer "Greer",

the U-boat fired a torpedo at it.

The "Greer" responded with depth charges

and there was a running battle which lasted three hours.

Neither vessel was sunk, but the tension was mounting.

On November 17th, the destroyer "USS Kearney"

was hit by a torpedo while on convoy duty off Iceland.

The U-boat commander claimed it was an accident.

He had been firing at a British ship

and the "Kearney" had got in the way.

But 11 US sailors were dead

and the destroyer only just made it back to port in Reykjavik.

Roosevelt protested and the US press was outraged.

However, the American public remained

resolutely opposed to going to war.

Within weeks, at the end of 1941,

the situation was reversed in a single day.

But in the meantime, Britain would have to fight on alone.

And luckily, it had an astonishing weapon to hand.

It looks like just another mansion in the English countryside,

a bit run down.

But Bletchley Park once contained a secret

that fundamentally affected the course of World War Two.

Because it was at Bletchley that Britain worked out

how to read Germany's most secret codes.

Since the mid-1930s, all the German armed forces

and intelligence departments had adopted

a standard machine for encoding their messages.

The Cypher Machine E, better known as Enigma.

It was developed in the early 1920s as a handy tool

for businessmen to keep commercial messages secret.

It was powered by a battery, and its encoded messages

were transmitted in Morse code to be decoded

on a second Enigma machine at the receiving end.

The critical element of the machine was three rotors

which could be set to scramble the message in a way

which could only be unscrambled by another machine

with the same settings.

The rotors could be replaced and set differently.

As a result, each letter typed could

come up in any one of 150 million ways.

Given the almost infinite number of settings,

it was not surprising that the Germans remained convinced

throughout the war that Enigma was uncrackable.

It was the Poles who took the first steps

in solving this baffling puzzle.

They knew of the existence of the Enigma machine

and assembled a team of top mathematicians to crack it.

Marian Rejewski,

Jerzy Roszickzi,

and Henry Zigalski.

But the team could not decipher messages

without knowing the internal wiring of the rotors.

The solution was supplied by French intelligence,

which sent its Polish allies material

gathered by a spy in the German army's cipher department.

Amongst this was an Enigma manual.

The Poles were able to reconstruct an Enigma machine

and begin laboriously decoding messages.

By July 1939,

Hitler was sounding increasingly threatening towards Poland.

Britain and France had promised to come to its aid.

It was clear that war was coming.

So intelligence officers from the three allies met in Warsaw.

There the British and French were astonished at how much

the Poles had done in decoding Enigma,

and the Poles agreed to send two

of their reconstructed machines to London.

Just two weeks after they were handed over, Poland was invaded.

By the time Poland fell to the Germans,

the Polish cryptographers had destroyed all evidence

of their work on Enigma.

Some were captured and tortured,

but none revealed what they had been up to.

The task was now taken up by the British

at their Government Code and Cypher School

at Bletchley Park near London.

Its head was Commander Alistair Denniston.

Denniston recruited a strange collection of mathematicians,

chess masters and crossword puzzle experts

to continue the decoding.

Among these experts was Alan Turing, a Cambridge don.

In 1936, Turing had described the idea

of a "universal computing machine" -

a machine that he believed would one day be able to solve

all mathematical problems.

He used his ideas to design decryption machines

known as "Bronze Goddesses".

The raw material for Bletchley came from the British Y service,

a chain of radio listening stations

which monitored and recorded German transmissions.

The messages were fed into Bletchley's Bronze Goddesses

and permutations run until at last the key was found.

Once a message had been decrypted, it was translated,

analyzed and passed on the appropriate authority.

From the moment he became Prime Minister

and learned of Bletchley's work,

Winston Churchill understood its extraordinary importance.

He referred to Bletchley's output as his "ultra secret" information,

and Ultra became its codename.

The distribution of Ultra was tightly controlled.

Senior commanders were shown only that information

which directly concerned their operations.

The need to keep the source of the intelligence secret

was so great that Churchill insisted that no action

could be taken on the basis of Ultra material

unless a cover plan had been developed

to convince the Germans that the intelligence

must have come from another source.

The third critical element of the Bletchley operation

after decoding and assessing the material,

was keeping control of it.

Often Ultra revealed vital information

about German plans and actions.

News of forthcoming attacks and other intelligence

was filed away in a massive card-index system.

This was constantly mined for answers to questions great and small.

By the end of the war, Bletchley was decoding much of the German traffic

almost as fast as it was being sent.

It was jokingly said that it would have been quicker

for a German commander to ring Bletchley to get his orders.

It was at sea that the Allies first became aware

of how vital information from Ultra could be.

An early example of its potential came on June 8th, 1940.

The British aircraft carrier "Glorious"

was covering the convoys withdrawing Allied troops

from Norway, when Bletchley decoded signals

showing the German battlecruisers "Scharnhorst"

and "Gneisenau" were approaching its position.

A warning was passed to Royal Navy headquarters,

but unaware of how accurate the information was likely to be,

this chose not to pass it on.

The "Glorious" was intercepted and sunk.

The British navy had learned the hard way

just how important the new source of intelligence could be.

It was not a mistake it would make again.

Bletchley also performed a critical role

in the build-up to the Battle of Britain.

It had provided a clear picture

of the Luftwaffe's order of battle,

and the overall strategy being adopted by

its leader Hermann Goering.

This information convinced the head of British Fighter Command,

Air Marshal Hugh Dowding,

that his tactic of committing his fighters bit by bit

rather than in large numbers was the correct one.

A tactic that played a crucial part in preserving the RAF's

narrow winning margin.

As Britain continued its lonely fight into 1941,

it had at last found a way of fighting back.

Bletchley Park was ready for action.

The major breakthroughs had been made.

The systems for exploiting them put in place and well tested.

In the coming years Ultra and the work of Bletchley Park

would prove vital to the Allied successes.

But as the Battle of Britain and the Blitz ground on,

these were still a long way off.

Churchill still needed more immediate results

and by early 1941,

he thought that he had at last found a way to get them.

Nazi Germany might now control most of Western Europe,

but Britain's Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,

now decided to take the war to the Germans.

We shall not flinch from the supreme trial.

All will come right out of the depths...

Even before France had surrendered,

he was looking for ways of striking back,

and of keeping resistance alive in the countries

which had been overrun.

Just as the last troops were being taken off the beaches of Dunkirk,

Churchill was already planning ahead.

He wrote to his chiefs of staff demanding the formation

of raiding forces which could attack

the coasts of occupied Europe.

Within a few days a call for volunteers

had been circulated to create a force of 5,000 men.

They were to be called Commandos,

after the highly-mobile Boer units

which had fought the British for three years in South Africa

at the turn of the century.

Ten Commando units, each of 500 men, were set up.

They began practicing attacks from the sea.

One unit was ordered to specialize in parachuting

and using assault gliders.

This soon became the basis of the separate Parachute Regiment.

Admiral Sir Roger Keyes was appointed Director of Combined Operations.

Churchill instructed him to prepare to mount three major raids

as soon as the threat of an invasion of Britain had passed.

One of Keyes' first tasks was to develop ships

which could land his new troops.

Three cross-Channel ferries were converted

so as to carry landing craft.

On March 4th, 1941,

Two Commando units and a demolition squad

were landed on the Lofoten Islands off northern Norway.

Their main objective was to destroy factories

which converted fish oil into glycerin for explosives.

The Commandos achieved total surprise

and landed without a shot being fired.

A German armed trawler in the harbor was seized.

They quickly destroyed the factories and the fish oil tanks.

One officer could not resist using the local post office

to send a telegram to: A Hitler, Berlin.

It read: "Reference your last speech,

I thought you said that wherever British troops land

on the continent of Europe German soldiers will face them.

Well, where are they?"

The Commandos then rounded up 60 Norwegian collaborators

and 225 German prisoners, before returning without any losses.

With them they also took 115 Norwegian volunteers.

These would then join the Free Norwegian forces in Britain.

The Lofoten raid was an enormous public relations success

and a huge boost for British morale.

But its most important result was one which could not be publicized.

The capture of a set of rotors for an Enigma machine.

Although the machine had been thrown overboard

from the armed trawler, its crew forgot the spares.

They were to give invaluable help to the cryptographers

of Bletchley Park in breaking the German naval codes.

Then in December 1941,

four Commando units landed at the Norwegian port of Vaagso,

and were immediately involved in heavy fighting.

The approach to Vaagso was covered by the small island of Maaloy,

on which the Germans had placed artillery.

This was quickly overrun,

but across the water in Vaagso the fighting was intense.

It took several hours for the main German garrison to be subdued.

The Commandos then blew up several factories

sank eight ships before withdrawing.

These raids convinced Hitler that sooner or later

the British would attempt to retake Norway.

So for the remaining four years of the war

he kept some 250,000 troops there,

troops which might have proved vital on other fronts.

But effective as they were,

Commando raids were not enough to stop the Nazis.

Churchill needed other ways to hurt them,

so he focused on the resistance movements

in the occupied countries.

In July 1940, a Special Operations Executive,

SOE, was formed,

as Churchill put it, "to set Europe ablaze".

Its objectives were to encourage sabotage

of the enemy war effort,

gather intelligence and prepare clandestine forces

to disrupt German defenses.

The bulk of SOE's activities centered on France.

Soon agents were recruited in Britain to build up

and co-ordinate the French resistance networks.

Radio operators and couriers

were also trained to support them.

One problem was then how to get these teams into the country.

Submarines, high-speed launches and fishing vessels were all tried out.

But the German coastal defenses proved difficult to penetrate.

The answer was aircraft

and, in August 1940, a special RAF unit was set up

with Whitley bombers and short take-off and landing Westland Lysanders.

Agents and equipment were either parachuted in

from the bombers or flown in and brought out by the Lysanders.

On moonlit nights, a growing number of reception committees

would be waiting as an increasingly widespread network

of resistance groups was built up.

But all the while, they were hunted

by an increasingly sophisticated German counter-espionage system.

This used direction finding equipment to locate

hidden radios and double agents to infiltrate networks.

The work of SOE agents was desperately perilous

and their life expectancy short.

The slightest lapse in concentration

might betray them to the Gestapo.

Many suffered torture and death.

But Churchill was sure it was worth it.

Keeping resistance alive in the occupied countries

gave hope to millions that liberation would eventually come.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC,

was also enlisted to raise the hopes

of those living under German rule.

It broadcast the news in all the languages

of the occupied countries.

The German penalty for listening to these bulletins was death,

but people tuned in regardless.

The BBC also played a crucial role in transmitting

coded messages to resistance groups.

These always came after the Nine O'Clock News.

Message très important pour le chef de Guile.

Attention, il va pleuvoir brougrement ce soir.

For the peoples of occupied Europe,

the prospect of liberation might only be a distant dream,

but in the middle of 1941 it suddenly became more likely.

For by, Britain was no longer alone in fighting Nazism.

It had gained a massive ally but it wasn't America,

which Churchill had assiduously been courting.

It was the Soviet Union.