Original subtitles

August 25, 1944.

Paris was liberated.

That same day, to the east, Romania changed sides,

and with her defection went Hitler's only natural oil supply.

Bulgaria had already quit the Axis,

and Finland, too, began negotiating with the Russians for an armistice.

General de Gaulle, the Free French leader, enters his capital,

a capital four years before he had left a comparatively unknown soldier.

Now he was being greeted as the very soul of France.

For Parisians, the dark years of German occupation were over.

Could it be long before the rest of Europe was freed too?

August 15, 1944.

Operation Anvil, the Allied invasion of southern France.

With the break-out from the Normandy beachhead under way to the north,

Anvil was meant to begin the pincer movement

on Hitler's Germany from all sides -

the pincer movement that was to squeeze the Third Reich dry.

We leapt out near St Tropez and I thought, "They'll open up any minute,"

and suddenly out of the mists

on our particular beach there came a Frenchman.

He carried a tray of champagne glasses.

And we all stopped.

Clearly, this was utterly unexpected,

and he smiled and said, "Soyez les bienvenus, Monsieur."

"Welcome. But if I may venture a little criticism, you are somewhat late."

From there on it was known to the troops as the "Champagne Campaign".

Everywhere, during those mad, joyful weeks of August 1944,

the Germans were being driven back

towards the borders of their own country.

Those Frenchmen who had collaborated with the hated Boche

became ever more desperate.

Those Frenchwomen who had consorted with their conquerors

were now singled out for special treatment.

Thousands upon thousands of sullen, bewildered Germans were taken prisoner,

sometimes whole divisions at a time.

20,000 German troops are surrendered

by their commander, Major General Erich Elster.

General Elster hands over his pistol as a token of surrender.

General Elster commanded the Biarritz area

from the Pyrenees to the Bay of Biscay.

To many in the Allied camp, the war seemed as good as over.

Indeed, there was talk of being back home for Christmas.

But the top brass didn't always see eye to eye

on just how the final victory was to be won.

Montgomery argued

that the Germans had had a very heavy defeat in Normandy.

They'd lost approximately 500,000 troops.

43 divisions had been smashed, and 2,000 tanks.

This was the moment to really hit them.

And what he advocated was a strong drive up the coastal plain,

with the right on the Ardennes and the left probably almost on the coastline.

Day and night, never letting up, never giving them time to recover.

And, of course, he would be in command of this.

And we'd go right through, bounce the crossing of the Rhine,

come round behind the Ruhr, cut them off,

and the war would be over in 1944.

Eisenhower said, "No. I don't like this. It's a pincer-like thrust."

"You're not touching a lot of the troops

which are in France."

"I propose to advance on a broad front,

right up to the Rhine,

and then do a crossing of the Rhine

and finish the war there."

But... That was perhaps safer,

but it meant that the war

couldn't be finished in 1944.

I think the British were very slow

to realise that the main effort

for war in Europe

lay with the Americans.

I think the British press was probably slow, as well.

I think people forgot

that the great weight of divisions and supplies and so on were American.

After we broke out from the bridgehead,

supply for a very long time had to come over the beaches

or be carried by air.

Army groups found often that they couldn't do what they wanted to

for lack of supplies, particularly petrol.

Each tank used a gallon of petrol a mile.

The trucks carrying the stuff

stretched back 250 miles to the Normandy beaches.

Such had been the speed of the Allied break-out

that pockets of German troops had been left behind,

and so the road convoys had often to run a gauntlet of enemy sniping on the way.

The lorry drivers had nicknamed the area

between Paris and the front line "Injun country".

The hardest fighting of all was along the coast.

Every port had been garrisoned by Hitler

with orders to fight to the proverbial last round.

Le Havre, Dieppe, Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, had all to be assaulted in turn

by separate set-piece battle.

Hitler knew supply would be the Allies' main headache,

hence his determination to hang on to the Channel ports as long as possible

and, when finally yielded, to see they were destroyed utterly.

One third of Montgomery's forces

were engaged in clearing Germans from the Channel ports

while the rest pushed on into Belgium.

My really big moment was when we crossed the frontier,

because, you see, I had commanded the rearguard

during the withdrawal to Dunkirk.

I was then a battalion commander.

And I'd been doing flank guard and rear guard to the 3rd Division,

commanded by a certain Field Marshal Montgomery, who was then a general.

And I was very ashamed of myself.

We'd advanced to the cheers of the Belgian people,

and now a few days later, back we were going through these ashen-faced crowds,

terribly despondent -

they knew they were going to be occupied again by the Germans.

And I kept on saying, "Don't worry. We'll come back."

And as we crossed the frontier, we had come back.

And a young man - I suppose he saw the red round my hat, you know -

and he ran across to my tank.

There were tears pouring down his face. And he held out his hand like this,

and he said, "I knew you'd come back! I knew you'd come back!"

A friend of mine in Brussels told me that he heard the sound of tanks,

but they were quite used to that.

He looked out of the window, and he said to himself:

"Those are different. They don't seem to be German."

Then he opened the window and leant out, and somebody waved.

He said, "They're British!" And he tore down into the street,

and so did everybody else in Brussels.

There has never been such a scene as when we liberated Brussels, never.

And some of the really tough old 30 Corps veterans

still blush to think of the things that happened.

So far, so good. Now we come to the mistakes.

We were ordered to halt. The reason was that we were outrunning our supply.

Now, this was wrong,

because we had 100 kilometres' worth of petrol with our vehicles,

and another 100 kilometres' within about 24 hours' reach,

and they should, in my opinion, have taken a chance.

Because that day that we were halted,

the only thing between us and the Rhine

was one division of very old gentlemen.

We called them "stomach divisions", because they were sort of my age,

and all had things wrong with their tummies.

They'd been guarding the coast of Holland,

never seen a shot fired in anger,

and they'd have been delighted to move peacefully into our POW camps

without having to indulge in this horrid war - that was the sort of mentality.

Plus one Dutch SS battalion - nothing.

We could have brushed straight through them, bounced the crossing to the Rhine,

cut all the Germans in Holland off from the Ruhr,

and then got round behind the Ruhr.

Unquestionably, it was, to my mind, a very bad mistake.

We should have taken the risk.

When we were allowed to advance, which was September 7,

we made ten miles in four days.

We had previously done 250 miles in seven days.

We were no longer pursuing. We were now fighting again.

Then, on September 11,

I got my orders for Arnhem.

The three main waterways of the Rhine delta

lay between the Allied spearheads and Germany proper:

the Maas, the Waal and the Neder Rijn.

Montgomery's plan was to lay an airborne carpet across these waterways,

capture the bridges,

and rush a mobile force round the left flank of the Siegfried line

to cut off the Ruhr, and so end German resistance before Christmas 1944.

I've got it.

Many people will tell you that the plan was wrong -

there were too many objectives,

or the parachutists were not landed in proper places and so on.

And the weather, of course, was not good, and did interrupt it.

But I think that if more attention had been paid

to what you might call the enemy's dispositions,

then I think the plan would have been alright.

Airborne troops who landed at Arnhem

suddenly found themselves up against some German armoured units

that were refitting there, and just happened to be there at the time.

Among the first officers who were landed among the parachutists,

the Germans found a complete copy of our plan.

And this was whisked off to the German commander on the spot,

and, of course, from then on he had all the information

of what we were trying to do.

It's anyone's guess whether,

having got that Rhine bridgehead,

at that time of year, with the bad weather setting in,

whether we'd have been able to maintain that

for several months during the winter.

Because one knew from experience how magnificent the Germans were

at retrieving critical situations.

The battle went on for three or four days,

and we couldn't really make any progress.

Eventually Montgomery decided that he couldn't go on,

and that the operation was to be called off,

and get as many people back across the Rhine as possible, which he did.

We lost quite a lot. But I think one's got to be quite honest,

and say that it failed in its object.

It achieved partial success,

and I always hate using that expression

of "glorious failures".

I wouldn't call it that, but...

it was a failure, up to a point.

The failure at Arnhem

meant the war would now definitely not be over by Christmas 1944.

It meant, too, that the initiative, for the moment,

had been lost by the Western Allies.

But on the Eastern Front, it was a vastly different story.

There, the Red Army was advancing everywhere.

In the centre, 100,000 Germans had been surrounded at Minsk.

In the north, Finland had been knocked out of the war,

Estonia recaptured, Latvia and Lithuania cleared of German troops,

and the borders of East Prussia reached.

In the south, the Ukraine had been freed.

Romania had capitulated,

Bulgaria had been overrun,

Greece cut off,

and a link-up effected with Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia.

It was a story of gigantic triumph,

of overwhelming success

everywhere in the east,

save in one near-forgotten city,

where the war had first begun five years before:

Poland's capital, Warsaw.

By July 1944, the Red Army occupied the eastern half of Poland,

that half allocated to them in the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939.

The exiled Polish government in London was anxious to assert itself

before the Russians overran the country.

Otherwise, in their eyes,

it would merely be an exchange of occupiers rather than true liberation.

As the Red Army approached Warsaw,

the German garrison seemed ready to leave.

On July 29, a Russian broadcast talked of Warsaw's impending liberation,

and urged the workers of the Resistance to rise against the retreating Germans.

On August 1, the Polish underground army inside Warsaw did rise,

though they did not all support the London government.

However, the aim of those who did

was to fly in the government-in-exile once they had control

and set up a legitimate regime before the Russians arrived.

But the uprising coincided with the Russian offensive running out of steam,

a coincidence that nevertheless suited Stalin's book.

Stalin was very suspicious of the underground,

but it was utterly cruel that he wouldn't even try to get supplies in.

He refused to let our aeroplanes fly and try to drop supplies for several weeks.

And that was a shock to all of us.

I think it played a role in all of our minds

as to the heartlessness of the Russians.

We had a very strong underground organisation,

with a civilian government and all the military commands,

and that was organised during the four years of the German occupation,

and it just surfaced and took its functions.

The postal service, which was run by Scouts,

was the only means of communications between the various districts of Warsaw,

which were completely cut off by enemy fire.

The Scouts, to get from one district to another,

had sometimes to go through sewers, or under the enemy fire.

At the very beginning of the uprising

we had ammunition for only, I think, ten or 12 days.

And then we had to rely on the ammunition taken from the Germans,

or there were factories of ammunition and arms in Warsaw going on,

and they were producing their own ammunition.

There is something in the Polish character which is optimistic,

and we do not give up so easily.

I would have given half of my life

for the privilege of participating in the Warsaw insurrection.

There was a tremendous intensification

of moral life, intellectual life, emotional life,

the best sides of people coming to the foreground.

We had lots of recitals through all the Warsaw insurrection.

There were people who took single-handed actions against the tanks,

people who threw themselves at enemy machine guns, things like that.

There was plenty of individual heroism.

The London Poles almost pulled it off.

By the end of the first week, they controlled most of the city,

and the RAF was set to fly in the Polish government-in-exile.

But then Hitler, realising Stalin was going to do nothing,

ordered the SS to crush the uprising,

which they proceeded to do with great relish and ruthlessness.

The bombing was very bad - without interruption, practically.

Not only bombing, we had artillery also.

We would cover our dead with newspapers.

This was the first thing always, you see, before the funeral,

in order not to spoil the morale.

During the last days of the uprising,

only one district was left unoccupied by the Germans.

There were three to four, perhaps 5,000 people.

There were sometimes 30 or 40 people sleeping in one room.

Now, the Germans were bombarding us with their dive bombers.

We had less and less food, you know.

We had some starches, we didn't have bread,

we had spaghetti, things of that sort.

And at the end, you know, we would kill horses, and eat horse meat.

And dogs were eaten also.

The London Poles became more frantic in their hopelessness,

and blamed the British for their plight.

But the RAF couldn't fly in much supplies

as long as Stalin refused to let them refuel in Soviet-held territory.

By the time he'd been persuaded to relent, so little was left of Warsaw

that the supplies dropped fell more often than not into German hands.

We were terribly disappointed. The whole world forgot about us.

I feel that Poland was betrayed by Allies, you see?

It was the end. We felt there was absolutely no hope for us,

that we wouldn't get any help from the Russians.

The Germans were set on absolutely annihilating us,

and therefore I didn't bother to duck

when I was going under the fire, anything like that.

I just had the feeling that I should die sooner or later - sooner, better.

The Germans brought their biggest siege gun,

the dreaded giant mortar nicknamed "Thor",

each of whose shells weighed more than two tons.

It was a hopeless battle now that had been going on for ten long weeks,

and had already cost the lives of more than 200,000 Poles.

The time had come to call a halt.

Surprisingly, the Germans allowed the Poles to surrender honourably,

and treated them not as partisans fit for execution,

but as enlisted combatants, due the rights of POWs

under the Geneva Convention.

Clearly, some of the German generals

already had their eyes on possible war-crimes trials after the war.

Once the remaining citizens had been driven from the city,

Warsaw was systematically razed to the ground.

Hitler was determined it should never rise again.

Thus ended one of the war's most tragic episodes.

Despite the bombing and the privations,

the morale of the German people that autumn of 1944 was surprisingly high.

They responded well to every propaganda call Hitler made.

This one was for collecting winter clothing for the Eastern Front.

Hitler reduced the call-up age that autumn to 16%,

and raked in those who so far had escaped it on grounds of essential work.

Some 700,000 new recruits were raised,

partly for the Volkssturm, a sort of Home Guard,

and partly to replace his terrible losses in both east and west.

But he also had in mind a more daring use for his new recruits.

Since his defeat in Normandy, Hitler had been planning a major counterattack,

hoping not just to halt the Allies before they reached the Rhine,

but to turn them back so decisively that they would want to sue for peace -

a peace that would give him a breathing space to stem the Russian advance

before it got too close to Berlin.

Such was his fantasy.

To that end, too, he'd been conserving his panzers,

re-equipping them after their mauling in Normandy.

But where to strike?

That autumn of 1944,

the Allies in the west had closed up to the German border

along a 1,000-mile front,

and had even penetrated the Siegfried line in one or two places.

But supply still remained a problem, for Antwerp was not yet open.

To the north of Antwerp lay the bulk of the British forces.

If, by a daring blow, Hitler could capture Antwerp and reach the sea,

he would not only eliminate the Allies' main supply port,

he would also have split the Allies in two,

and the British might once again have to contemplate a Dunkirk.

Eisenhower, in manning his 1,000-mile front,

had had to spread his forces thinly in places.

One such place was just 125 miles from Antwerp - the Ardennes,

of 1940 magical, mystical memory for Hitler.

If only history could repeat itself for him.

In war, one must remember that you can't be strong everywhere.

12th Army Group, Bradley's army group, were given certain tasks.

And therefore he had to decide

where he was going to be strong, and where he would be weak.

And he assessed the situation

and decided he'd thin out on the Ardennes sector.

We were told by some of the men

who were in the houses that we took over

that it was a very quiet sector, nothing happened.

Once in a while a patrol was sent out.

They would hear sometimes the crackling of a gun in the distance,

and... well, there was nothing to it.

I was... not exactly green,

but there weren't too many in our particular unit

that had had much in the way of any combat experience.

On October 24,

I was ordered to come to Hitler,

to his headquarters in East Prussia.

And he developed me and General Krebs,

the chief of the army group in the centre, who accompanied me,

that we would get,

end of November or beginning of December, strong reinforcements.

He named... 20 infantry divisions,

ten armoured divisions, and a lot of other special troops,

and he promised that we would be supported by the air force,

with about 3,000 planes.

But we were totally surprised.

He explained that the objectives, Antwerp and Brussels,

were something of a risk,

and might seem beyond the capacity of the forces available,

and their condition.

Nevertheless, he had decided to stake everything on one card,

because Germany needed

a breathing space.

A defence struggle, he said,

could only postpone the decision,

and not change the general situation for Germany.

For his attack, Hitler, unknown to the Allies,

had assembled more than half a million troops.

Opposing them were just 80,000 ill-equipped, inexperienced Americans.

It seemed like May 1940 all over again.

The morale of the German attacking forces was high,

and this compensated, in my opinion,

for our comparative weakness in weapon and in manpower.

We saw this build-up of forces - tanks in great number,

more tanks than we had seen in the last two years.

We even saw aircraft,

and then we saw that the preparations were well kept in secrecy.

"Null Day" - Zero Day -

December 16, arrived.

Feuer!

The barrage lasted an hour, and gave the Allies

a taste of what they had themselves meted out at Cassino some months,

and at El Alamein some years, before.

The last great attack of the Germans in the west had begun.

Hitler's most desperate gamble was on.

As a simple soldier, everything is on the road,

and you think these are more divisions than they are.

Therefore we had the feeling that this build-up of force

might enable us to reach the final goal, which was Antwerp.

The weather was foggy.

The American and British air superiority didn't matter in that type of weather,

and therefore we believed that we would be successful.

Surprise was total.

It began a day of monumental confusion for the Allies,

the worst they experienced in the whole European war.

Even as the first Wehrmacht waves were overrunning

the American positions along the Ardennes,

talk at Allied headquarters back at Versailles

was focused more on the news of band leader Glenn Miller's death

than of the possibility of the biggest German offensive in the west since 1940.

It was the day Eisenhower was promoted five-star general,

and the day Field Marshal Montgomery applied for leave

to go home to England for Christmas.

Ike was attending his chauffeur's wedding that morning,

while Monty was playing golf.

As the day wore on, the resemblances to May 1940 grew.

The overwhelming German might, their relentless speed,

above all the chaos in the Allied rear,

as bewildered, untried troops dashed for safety,

clogging the roads and preventing reinforcements reaching the front.

A rumour was spread that the Americans

would hand over part of the prisoners of war to the Russians,

and that helped to build up morale and the will to fight.

7,000 Americans surrendered in one go,

the biggest mass surrender of American arms in the European campaign.

German newsreel cameramen had a field day.

The fog was lifting a little bit in the area where we were,

but by about 12 o'clock, we found that we couldn't go any further,

that it was just a question of surrendering.

The lieutenant went and made arrangements

with the German officer in charge,

and came back up and told us that we had one hour

to dismantle and destroy our weapons,

or dig holes and bury whatever we wanted to bury,

and be ready to come off that hill within one hour.

The first American prisoners didn't know what was going on.

They came to us, asked for bread, and we had bread enough,

so we gave them bread and they gave us chocolate.

After two or three days,

we already saw that the resistance of the American troops

was stronger than we had believed.

They had been able to break through

because we could get no fighter-bomber support.

The weather was sitting right on the treetops,

and we couldn't pick up any of their moving troops from the air.

But on Christmas Eve, the clouds lifted,

and thereafter the fighter-bombers came in,

and they simply destroyed the German armour.

Manteuffel's panzers had run out of petrol,

still some 70 miles short of Antwerp.

Motionless, they were sitting ducks for the Allied planes.

"It was a great slaughter",

the American divisional commander wrote in his report.

For Hitler, it was more than the beginning of the end.

The failure of this offensive affected morale,

and, therefore, the behaviour of the soldiers and the civilians alike.

Thus we have contributed to speeding the end of the war.

With the German offensive halted,

Americans from the south and British from the north

pressed on the bulge that had been formed within the Ardennes front-

the bulge that gave this particular battle its popular name.

They met in mid-January 1945,

by which time the German army was in total disarray,

for the Russian winter offensive had begun four days before.

Now Hitler's gamble in the west was seen to be supreme folly,

for, to do it, he had denuded his defences in the east.

With its carefully hoarded reserves of fuel and equipment

and, of course, of men too, gone,

the German war machine began to disintegrate.

I would say that Hitler's attack in the Bulge brought the war to an end

perhaps six months earlier than it would otherwise have ended.

The Germans could have fallen back to the Rhine,

which was a real obstacle.

But they had nothing with which to hold the Rhine, because essentially,

the reserves of the German army, the mobile troops and the reserves,

were destroyed in the battle of the Bulge.

The German soldier was exhausted,

and he had only one desire: to end the war.

But he was willing to fight on,

to cover the rear of the Eastern Front.

On January 20, 1945,

Zhukov's tanks entered Germany proper for the first time,

a mere 100 miles from Berlin,

the occasion being celebrated

by a particularly savage sacking of every village in sight.

Soon, thousands upon thousands of German civilians

took to the roads westwards, away from the dreaded Russians,

producing scenes reminiscent of those long lines

of French and Belgian refugees five years before.

As the Allied bombing intensified,

more and more German cities were reduced to rubble.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler had written, "Even if we cannot conquer,

we shall drag the world into destruction with us."

All during March, the Russian guns could be heard in Berlin.

They came to me and said, "Do you want Cleves taking out?"

By "taking out" they meant all the heavy bombers putting on to Cleves.

Now, I knew that Cleves was a fine old historical German town.

Anne of Cleves, one of Henry VIII's wives, came from there.

I knew that there were a lot of civilians in Cleves,

men, women and children.

If I said no, they would live. If I said yes, they would die.

A terrible decision you've got to take. But everything depended

on getting a high piece of ground at Materborn.

The German reserves would have to come through Cleves,

and we would have to breach the Siegfried line and get there.

And your own lives, your own troops, must come first,

so I said yes, I did want it taking out.

But when all those bombers went over the night...

just before zero hour, to take out Cleves,

I felt a murderer.

And after the war I had an awful lot of nightmares. It was always Cleves.

The cities west of the Rhine were cleared of German troops -

Bonn, Koblenz, Mainz and, of course, Cologne.

By March 22, no German soldier fought west of the Rhine.

Only the Rhine now lay between the Western Allies

and the heartland of Hitler's Germany.

Preparations began straightaway to cross it.

At nine o'clock in the evening, I remember waiting,

sitting in a command post.

Then the news came through that the Black Watch were over the Rhine.

Rather historic, you know, in a way. They were over the Rhine.