Original subtitles

In the Second World War,

Britain faces the biggest challenge in its history.

Across six years of conflict, we must see off invasion,

fight campaigns at sea and across the globe.

We have to invent new technologies

and win allies to our cause

in order to fight and win against an enemy

who are better prepared and better equipped.

Defeating Hitler often feels like an almost impossible task.

Tonight, we go behind the scenes of the war's most famous events -

Dunkirk, the Blitz,

the Battle of Britain,

the D-Day landings, and more -

to remember the people who really turned the war in our favour.

You may not have heard of all of these heroes and heroines,

but their ingenuity and courage helped change the course of history.

I'm Michael Burke.

When I was a foreign correspondent, I covered a dozen wars.

It taught me that conflicts can go either way without warning.

I'm Arthur Williams, a pilot and former Royal Marine,

and I know from experience

that war is not won just by the so-called great men of history,

but also by the thousands of moments of individual bravery

and resourcefulness.

His nickname was Stuffy. Stuffy Dowding.

If this reached the Germans, they would have smelt a rat.

It's only when you delve behind the well-known stories

of the Second World War that you realise how hard victory was,

and the knife edge we walked together.

Just eight months after war is declared,

our darkest hour is symbolised by Dunkirk and the little boats -

the rescue of the British Army off the beaches in France

to fight another day.

Now here's the hidden story of a handful of brave soldiers

who fought to the death to make that possible.

Young Alec jay is among those soldiers who would become known

as the Calais Force.

He and his brothers in arms are about to make a staggering

sacrifice to try and save the entire British army

in France from destruction.

Less than 50 miles east of here,

the British Expeditionary Force

is in full retreat.

Germany's Blitzkrieg, their Lightning War,

is sweeping through Europe.

Time is running out.

The Nazi war machine has the complete annihilation

of the BEF in its sights.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill wants the BEF to make a stand

on the French coast.

But there has to be an evacuation plan, too.

If Britain loses the majority of its trained army here,

we'll be powerless to resist a Nazi invasion.

You have this situation where the Germans are really close

to outflanking and surrounding the British Expeditionary Force

and the French, so now the allies are in this pocket,

and we can absolutely see the importance of these channel ports.

You've got Boulogne there.

You've got Calais there, you've got Dunkirk there.

And the ports are clearly needed at this point

to keep the British Expeditionary Force moving.

If it evacuates, where is it going to evacuate back to Britain from?

From the Channel ports.

So they had to be held.

Churchill must slow the German advance by fighting back.

And for that, he'll need more soldiers.

Defending those ports is now Churchill's highest priority.

The War Office decides to send reinforcements from Britain,

among them a teenage lad from London.

Alec jay is one of Britain's hidden heroes,

who suddenly find themselves thrown into war

and fighting a life or death battle to hold on to Calais.

I've come to meet Alec's son, John.

What sort of young man is your father?

He's a trainee stockbroker, public schoolboy.

He's a Jew.

He was very aware of the sufferings of the German Jews,

and he was very aware that if the Germans invaded Britain,

terrible things would happen to the Jewish community here.

At what point does he decide to do something about it?

He decides to become a Territorial Army volunteer.

That's a kind of weekend soldier, part time soldier.

Yeah, training in the evenings,

learning how to map-read,

learning how to assemble and disassemble a gun.

At what point does the war get serious for him?

Well, the outbreak of war, there cease to be weekend soldiers,

and he realises that he's going to be thrown straight into battle.

On May 22nd, 1940,

Alec is on his way across the Channel

to join the soldiers defending Calais.

They see intensive bomb damage, shattered glass everywhere.

There are wounded soldiers,

there are dead bodies on the quayside waiting to be taken home.

So here is this weekend soldier,

who's never fired a shot in anger,

suddenly in the middle of a battle scene.

How much does he know about his position,

the risks he's running?

He's starting to think very seriously about this.

Round his neck, he's got his ID tags with the word Jew on them,

so very carefully,

and without being seen by the other members of his platoon,

he takes off his ID tags,

and makes a little hole in the sand and buries them.

Alec Jay's reinforcement unit arrived with one simple order -

to hold the port of Calais.

A division of 15,000 Germans are bearing down

on Alec's Calais force of barely 4,000 men.

Commander of the garrison is Brigadier Claude Nicholson,

a veteran of the First World War.

Claude Nicholson tours around and tries to calm them down

because he understands that a lot of these guys, you know,

some of them are teenagers.

And he says, if you hear a shell, it's not going to kill you.

It's the ones that you don't hear that'll kill you.

You've been a Marine, can you think yourself

into the minds of those guys in Calais?

I think it would be terrifying, actually.

As Marines in modern day conflicts,

we're always deployed into war zones and situations

where we stand a better than odds chance of coming out on top.

But for the guys that were in Calais, I couldn't imagine the fear.

Dawn breaks with perfect conditions for a German assault -

the 69th Panzergrenadiers open up with a mortar barrage.

By 6pm, they've broken through the first line of defence.

For Alec and the Calais force,

retreat to Dunkirk is not an option.

Their orders are to stand firm.

The Calais Force is running low on men and ammunition.

Brigadier Nicholson doesn't know how long they can last.

Churchill now faces a critical decision.

To save the troops at Dunkirk may require the ultimate sacrifice.

A fight to the end for the Calais Force.

The lives of young Alec and his friends

now hang in the balance.

Gathering on the beaches of Dunkirk are more than 300,000 soldiers

of the British Expeditionary Force.

But to the west in Calais,

a small group of soldiers are desperately trying

to hold back the German advance.

Among them is 19-year-old volunteer Alec Jay.

What is Alec experiencing at this point?

The Stuka attacks were particularly frightening.

Dad got the impression almost that the pilot is looking at him

in the eye as he heads down to drop his bombs.

Artillery was bombing from the hills.

The whole place is in flames.

Does he know how outnumbered they are?

You know, Dad and his fellow weekend warriors are not just outnumbered,

but they are up against battle-hardened fanatics,

the 10th Panzers, who had spent the previous

autumn destroying Poland.

The Calais force, led by Brigadier Claude Nicholson,

is losing men fast.

In London, Churchill faces one of the toughest decisions he'll ever

have to make - have them retreat to join the troops in Dunkirk

or fight on to the end?

Churchill sends a message to Brigadier Nicholson.

"The eyes of the Empire are upon

"the defence of Calais and His Majesty's Government are confident

"that you and your gallant regiment will perform an exploit worthy

"of the British name."

Churchill is sacrificing the Calais force for the greater good.

On the final afternoon of the battle, they really are

in a very small space, separated from other parts

of the British garrison.

Just this little group of a few hundred men in an area perhaps

300 yards across.

And there's a German machine-gun nest on the dunes

that has a very clear line of fire

on those remaining few hundred British troops.

A brigade officer said, "We've got to take out that machine-gun nest."

They make their way through the dunes and they get

to the clearing, where the machine-gun nest is,

and then it's a First World War charge.

The command is "fix swords", and if you fix swords,

then this is for real, this is what you've been trained for.

And Dad wasn't very good at the screaming and shouting,

but this time he's screaming and shouting for real,

and they charged the nest, and then it's hand-to-hand fighting,

it's kill or be killed.

And Dad takes out the nest with his colleagues, and he realises

what he's done and he is comprehensibly sick.

Did he leave any record of what he was going through mentally?

Yeah, it was like going back 2,000 years.

It was like civilisation dropping off you.

Separated from the rest of the battalion

and about to be overrun,

Alec and his comrades had little choice now but to surrender.

Dad's own personal point of surrender occurs when a German

soldier marches up to him, reaches into his tunic and points dad's

own pistol at his throat and says, "Soll lch? Soll lch?"

"Shall I? Shall l?"

And it's really quite surreal because in the afternoon sun

of that last day, Dad looks behind

and can see the White Cliffs of Dover

clearly visible in the distance.

So near, yet so far.

Over 3,000 men of the Calais force are either killed, seriously wounded

or captured by the Nazis. One of the captured is Alec jay.

On the beach at Dunkirk, Churchill's rescue mission gets under way.

Over the next ten days, the Little Ships arrive

to play their part. 338,000 British and French troops are saved

to fight another day.

The story of the miracle of Dunkirk is born, but the Calais force,

who helped to save the BEF, will be largely forgotten.

How much of an achievement was it that your father

and his colleagues managed to pull off in the defence of Calais?

They held up a German division for a number of days

that could have sped towards Dunkirk.

Dad and his colleagues are also demonstrating to the Germans

that the British will put... put up a fight,

that it's not going to be a pushover.

Alec becomes a prisoner of war, but he manages to conceal the fact

that he's Jewish.

He escapes five times from prisoner of war camps.

He returns home in 1945 and becomes a stockbroker.

But it's Calais that affects him to the end of his days.

There was Dad from before Calais and Dad after Calais.

He lived with Calais for the rest of his life.

He would wake up screaming in the middle of the night,

suffering from terrible nightmares.

Before we started on this project, I confess, I hadn't heard

of the battle or the Siege of Calais. Yeah. I knew about Dunkirk,

I knew a lot about Dunkirk, but I didn't know about the sacrifice

those guys made there.

But the whole point was, Dunkirk would've happened

in a much-more disastrous way,

if it hadn't been for the sacrifice of the troops at Calais.

Well, that's why it's so important to remember them, I think, isn't it?

Yeah. And that story. Mm.

Just five weeks after Dunkirk, the people of Britain

are facing the unthinkable.

Invasion.

Hitler's thinking is simple - if he can knock out the RAF

and Britain's air defences, then a Nazi land invasion

would be bound to succeed against Britain's small

and poorly equipped army.

There is just a small problem with Hitler's plan - one man sees

it coming and starts making plans to thwart it from the very outset.

A rare moment of foresight that shifts the course of the war.

Most people have never heard of Hugh Dowding, but years

before a shot was fired, it was Dowding who had the vision

to ready Britain's air defence against attack from Germany.

He's every bit the hero in his own unique way.

His nickname was Stuffy, Stuffy Dowding,

And that was because, really, he was very socially awkward.

He used to host these terrible sherry parties.

He would just have one glass of sherry and he'd play

his gramophone, and his sister would tell you,

it was almost impossible to get anybody to come

because he was so awkward.

But the other side of that was that he was an organisational genius

and he was also absolutely fascinated by technology.

And that became important because he was basically the person

who formulated Britain's air defence.

Four years before Britain goes to war, at a time when many

are still in favour of appeasing Hitler, Air Marshal Hugh Dowding

sees what's coming,

and he has a plan to make Britain's air defences the best in the world.

How's it going? Good.

So, Chris, 1935, how did the German aeroplanes compare to ours?

Well, the Germans had the advantage

that they were rebuilding their air force from scratch.

The RAF was a little bit more conservative.

Germany had been forced to disarm following the First World War,

but its government nonetheless tasks its engineers with designing

a new air force of nimble bombers and super-fast fighter planes.

But in Britain's Air Ministry, the top brass is still investing

in heavy bombers.

If you think about the period between the wars,

that was when it was thought that wars would be won by bombing.

The first side to bomb the other side's cities would win.

Now, Dowding - Stuff Dowding, he disagreed.

He thought there was a real importance in a fighter defence.

After years of chipping away at the Air Ministry, Dowding manages

to convince them that it's time to invest and modernise.

So he is in charge of this massive rearmament programme,

and fighter squadrons rapidly expands.

The first of Dowding's babies is a brand-new fighter called

the Hawker Hurricane.

This was the first RAF fighter aircraft, which was a monoplane,

so all the aircraft before, they were biplanes, very similar

to what you saw in the First World War.

So this was absolutely revolutionary for its time.

Without any doubt, this was a complete game-changer.

When it entered service, it was

probably best fighter aircraft in the world.

The Hurricanes' eight machine guns put down such a rate of fire,

they can literally saw a Luftwaffe bomber in half.

But it's the second of Dowding's new aircraft that takes the fighter

to a whole new level.

I fly a Second World War plane myself, and this is one

of my all-time favourite aircraft.

Everybody knows about the Spitfire, but what is it about this aeroplane

that makes it so special?

I mean, just look at it.

It's such a beautiful design, sort of clean lines

and, beyond the aesthetic aspect, that meant that it just could

fly really fast.

It flew, like, more than 360mph -

later versions, even much more than that.

Just look how thin that is, that just slices through the air,

so the Spitfire was one of the fastest aircraft in the world.

Dowding's new fighters are thrown into action in 1940, as the Allies

retreat in Belgium and France.

But in the dogfights over Dunkirk, a fatal flaw is discovered in both

the aircrafts' engine. As the pilots pitch over nose down,

the engines stall. At best, that means the enemy gets away,

but at worst, the aeroplane and pilot plummet to the ground.

What was believed to be the newly modernised Royal Air Force

has all of a sudden just become the weakest link

in Britain's air defence.

And just five weeks after Dunkirk, Luftwaffe bombers are heading

across the Channel.

BELL CLANGS

The Battle of Britain begins.

But in a workshop in Farnborough, one woman is about to come up

with a solution that will help alter the course of the battle

for Britain's skies.

The Battle of Britain begins on July 10th, raging through the summer

across Britain's skies.

Britain's hopes are pinned on Hugh Dowding's star fighters -

the Hurricanes and Spitfires - to save us from invasion.

But Dowding's planes have a problem.

Performing their daring manoeuvres in combat, the pilots

discover their engines are prone to failure, coming out of high-speed

dives with catastrophic results.

So what were they going to do about it? Well, the solution fell

onto the shoulders of not your average or typical

1940s engineer, but SHE was a motorcycle racer

and aeronautical pioneer

going by the name of Beatrice - or Tilly - Shilling.

Beatrice Shilling is a leading specialist in aircraft carburettors.

This 31-year-old engineer grows up with tools, not toys,

and buys her first motorbike, aged 14.

17 years later, she's a motorcycle racer and has a job

at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough.

She may not be a household name, but perhaps

she should be because Shilling is about to find a way to get

Hugh Dowding's fighters back in the game.

Tilly's solution to the problem was fiendishly simple.

It was this. Looks like just a normal washer, doesn't it?

But this is just what the engines needed to solve the problem.

Using her lifelong knowledge of engines, and some serious

mathematical calculations, she finds a solution that's beautifully

simple and effective.

It's called the RAE restrictor -

a metal disc with a hole in the middle.

This tiny piece of kit controls the fuel flow into the fighter's

engine and stops it flooding.

And most importantly, the restrictor can be fitted easily, so Dowding's

new fighters won't be grounded at the very time

they're needed in action.

The really extraordinary thing, really,

was how, behind these events,

the really big events that shape the war, there's often

a single individual. Yeah. A flash of inspiration.

Yep. Beatrice Shilling coming up, almost single-handed, with a very,

very simple solution to solve such a big problem

which, if it had been allowed to continue... Yeah.

"Could have cost us the Battle of Britain.

Shilling continues her engineering career after the war, racing fast

cars until old age finally forces her to stop.

A petrolhead to the end.

The Battle of Britain rages on. Day after day,

hundreds of Luftwaffe bombers,

escorted by fighters, cross the Channel to attack the southeast.

But Hugh Dowding, head of our Air Fighter Command,

is using ground-breaking new technology to spot

the attackers early.

It's part of the integrated air defence system

that he's been developing for years.

So this is Chain Home.

These are the wonderfully intricate, delicate and brilliant towers

that were responsible for looking out over the sea and spotting enemy

aircraft as they approached the coast.

They were very effective.

This was radar.

During the Battle of Britain, over 20 Chain Home towers watched

for enemy bombers, along with a network of 1,050 observation

stations and 30,000 observers covering 60,000 square miles.

Hugh Dowding's plan is coming together.

He's got a growing fleet of state-of-the-art fighter planes,

he's got a system of radar and men and women plane-spotters to warn

about incoming enemy aircraft.

Now for the third piece of the puzzle - the system to pull

it all together and win the battle.

This is Bentley Priory, once a stately home, now the nerve centre

of Hugh Dowding's Fighter Command.

This building conceals the secret to our success

during the Battle of Britain.

OK, Michael. So here we are.

This is Bentley Priory - Fighter Command's headquarters.

Dilip Sarkar can show me why the country's survival depends

on a place known simply as the filter room.

Why is this room so important?

Well, this is where all the information is coming in,

and we are looking at the picture nationally here. And then

the information is all plotted on this board, on this vast map?

That's right. So this is a raid. Radar tells us that there are

20-plus bandits, enemy aircraft,

making up that formation, and that raid is given

this reference number.

So in this case, H024.

Now, we also know that it's flying at 8,000 feet.

OK? So as this raid starts to move,

one of the WAAFs will be pushing

it with a stick along its direction of travel.

And that's got to be pretty scary.

That somebody's coming to drop bombs on us.

The WAAFs - or Women's Auxiliary Air Force - plot the movements

of aircraft on the giant map to build up the complete picture

of where and how we're being attacked.

This is where the pressure is at this map table.

CHATTER

They've got to make sure all the information is right.

And while they're trying to do all that, there could be another

raid coming in, and another raid coming in.

And then our squadrons have to go on the board as well.

So there's a huge amount of information

that all has to be reflected

on this map table.

It's kind of three-dimensional chess, in a way, isn't it?

Except that not only

are thousands of lives at stake, the whole future of the war.

Absolutely.

All the intelligence from this room is filtered out to command centres

so fighters can intercept the enemy.

Dowding's complete air defence system, years in the planning,

is brilliant.

Now it faces its greatest test, one of the biggest Luftwaffe bombing

raids of the entire war.

So take us back to the early morning of September the 15th. We draw

the curtains back, it's a clear, sunny day.

It's good flying weather. It's going to be a busy day.

Just out of range of the Chain Home

radars, a fleet of German Dornier bombers are rising

from the airfields across northern France.

At Fighter Command, Dowding's system soon bursts into life.

These aren't just small raids,

these are raids of 100-plus. 100 aircraft, 100 fighters, 100 bombers.

This is really worrying.

And this is all going to come across the Channel towards us.

BELL CLANGS

The call to scramble goes out at 504 Squadron at RAF Hendon.

Among them is a young Hurricane pilot from Wallasey,

26-year-old Ray Holmes.

Ray Holmes is in the bath when the alarm sounds.

Still soaking wet,

he leaps out, throws on his clothes, and within minutes his Hurricane

is airborne and ready to meet the enemy.

Dowding's plotters are tracking the progress of the German bombers.

They're making a beeline for the capital.

The first raid comes in at noon, and they are met by a big

force of RAF fighters.

And the Germans had been told that Fighter Command was on its knees,

so here they are on the way to London,

when there are squadrons from 11 groups, and they must have attacked

them like terriers, really.

Pilot Ray Holmes is in the thick of the action, he's attacking

a Dornier on the right flank, shearing bits off its wing

before climbing up to attack another one.

But this one is fitted with the latest Nazi experimental weapon -

a flame-thrower.

Imagine the gut-wrenching fear of realising that the enemy are now

modifying their aircraft to spray fire.

The flame-thrower malfunctions, spraying Ray's cockpit with oil,

but as the windscreen clears, Ray realises he's on a collision course

with the bomber, and dives underneath the belly of the plane

to avoid it.

And the amazing thing about this is we've got Londoners on the ground

who are actually able to watch this, are able to watch what's happening.

It must have been unbelievable that this isn't an airshow,

this is people fighting and dying and... Right overhead,

over England, over London.

In the skies above Westminster, Pilot Ray Holmes goes in

for another attack, and another.

In the confusion of a desperate dogfight, the Hurricane's wing

shears off the tail of the Dornier.

They're both going down, as a bomb even falls on Buckingham Palace.

This Hurricane begins to fall out of the sky.

He has no option but to bail out.

He jumps, his parachute opens, and he hits the roof

of a block of flats.

His parachute snags on the gutter and he comes to rest with his feet

dangling above a dust bin.

Ray survives, and by the end of the day, as he is helped

down from his perch, Fighter Command has lost 29 aircraft

but have shot down 56 enemy planes.

The Luftwaffe retreats.

So, as night falls on September the 15th, where are we with the war?

Well, at the end of the day, Britain was still in the game.

That's the bottom line, isn't it?

So the Germans cannot continue sustaining losses like this.

It was absolutely obvious to everybody that there was

a turning point, that Britain had weathered the storm that summer,

and whatever happened after that was not going to be as bad.

And it was all ultimately controlled from this room. From here.

Two clays later, Hitler postpones his invasion.

The Battle of Britain is won

through the bravery of pilots like Ray Holmes,

the brilliance of engineers like Beatrice Shilling,

and from this humble office at Fighter Command headquarters,

the vision and strategy of Hugh Dowding,

which alters the course of the war.

It's tempting, isn't it, to play the game

of "what if"? Without Dowding, we could easily have lost

the Battle of Britain.

If we lost the Battle of Britain, the Germans could well have invaded,

and there was precious little to stop them.

Without Dowding, we could have lost the war.

Hitler is soon making his next move, bringing war to the homes and lives

of ordinary people.

Britain's ports and factories are in the firing line

in what will become known as the Blitz.

We're familiar with the unforgettable images

of London, blitzed and ablaze.

But this is the forgotten story of Liverpool, whose citizens endure

seven nights of continuous bombing, then show Hitler how a city

of ordinary souls can fight back.

HOOTER

While the people of Liverpool go

about their daily business, down on the quayside

the city's dockers are at work.

Keeping up the vital flow of supplies from across the Atlantic -

weapons, fuel and food.

In 1941, these clocks are the mouth that feeds Britain.

Hitler wants to close that mouth for good.

Hitler may have given up on invasion after the Battle of Britain,

but on May 1st, 1941, he turns the might of the Luftwaffe

onto Liverpool.

That night, the Germans dropped a terrifying combination of high

explosives and firebombs, hammering the clocks at Bootle and Wallasey.

But it's not just the clocks that take the hit.

Nearby are row upon row of tightly packed terraces, the homes

of dockers and their families.

The following night, the bombers strike again.

On the third night, they're back in even greater numbers.

Nearly 300 bombers unleash what will be the most devastating attack

of the Liverpool Blitz, killing 850 civilians.

Mike Royden grew up in Liverpool.

His mother, Hazel, is one of the many thousands

caught up in the horror of that night, as Hitler's bombs rained

down on the city.

Your mum was a girl then.

Yes, she was ten years old.

And she was...actually, she had a lucky escape. Yeah.

It was a munitions train -

it was shunted back up to the Breck Road sidings,

which is up near Anfield,

and it was up near the suburban housing.

And the train didn't take a direct hit, but the line did.

And then the train caught fire.

And so, one by one, these trucks are going up.

And, of course, my mum was in the Anderson shelter in the garden.

How close was she, and what happened to her?

So my mum comes out to the shelter and they go into the house,

only to find the front door has been completely blown in,

off its hinges,

and there's a big piece of iron that seems to have been blown

over from the railway line.

And then there's what looks like snow all over the place

and all the trees are covered in all this... But it's the cotton

off the munitions train that's just blown up all over the place.

The family has survived, but the neighbourhood is shattered.

70,000 people across Merseyside lose their homes in the May blitz.

In Bootle, just 15% of houses were left standing

When I was a foreign correspondent, I covered a dozen wars,

and I was bombed a few times,

so I know, I suppose, a bit of what the people of Liverpool

must have felt.

It's...it's the noise, the dust, always the dust,

the fury and the sense of powerlessness, helplessness.

But, you know, I chose to be there,

I knew I could eventually go home.

But the poor people of Liverpool,

these WERE their homes.

These WERE the lives that were being torn up.

By the final morning of the May blitz, after seven nights

of bombing, the city centre lies in ruins. 1,800 people are dead.

No-one knows how the city will respond. Hitler's strategy

of bombing clocks and homes could succeed.

Now it's down to the resilience of the people to get Liverpool back

on its feet and keep Britain in the war.

It's how things start to get back to normal - your light comes on

in the house, or the electricity's back on, or you come in and the gas

is on again, and it's little things like that that start to build up

and build up. And gradually, over a period of time, you know,

the morale starts to improve.

Byjune, you've got a number of berths being put back into use

in the docks. By July they were working to 90% capacity.

So when you start to see these gradual improvements,

that's a turning point. Yeah.

The Liverpool dockers keep the port up and running throughout the war.

Although ordinary working civilians are helpless to defend

themselves, their will to carry on defeats Hitler's ambition

to shut down the vital port of Liverpool.

What's so striking about the Liverpool Blitz or Calais

or the Battle of Britain is the bravery and ingenuity

of ordinary people - those figures behind the scenes who are helping

to change the course of the war.

For Britain, there are four more years of war ahead, but ordinary

heroes have helped prevent invasion and will next take

the war to Hitler.

What did you make of our fighter pilots?

These guys were 20 years old and they were in combat

in awful conditions.

I take my hat off to them.

I think what they did was seriously scary.

What about you, Michael?

Well, he's the man I REALLY admire. Dowding?

Yeah. He's a very reserved, formal, rather aloof man,

who came up with the ideas

that actually made defending Britain in the air

possible, and pushed them through.

HE'S my hero.

Thanks to our hidden heroes and heroines, Britain JUST survives

the first stage of the war.

British industry, however, is badly damaged and our natural

resources critically low.

To continue fighting, we need vital supplies like oil,

which means importing millions of tonnes from overseas.

Hitler knows if he sinks enough of our supply ships,

he can force Britain's surrender.

So his state-of-the-art submarines, known as U-boats, fan out

across the Atlantic.

The Nazis' U-boats are picking off our merchant vessels almost

at will - any time, anywhere they like, but there's a hidden story,

and that's in how we see them off.

Across millions of square miles of the Atlantic, a deadly

cat and mouse game takes place.

The swift and silent U-boats hunt the slow merchant ships

stacked with cargo.

The battle plays out on an epic scale, and within it, terrible human

dramas face the individual sailors.

One of these hidden heroes is a Yorkshireman who volunteered

for a life at sea, Peter Franklin.

He's a 20-year-old radio operator on a merchant ship.

I was going to say, he didn't look very old, does he?

No, and war is, as ever, a young man's game.

Peter's ship, the Richmond Castle, is mid-Atlantic with 5,000 tonnes

of food, when a torpedo slams into it without warning.

In his diary, Peter describes the scene of horror that follows.

"As I went past the engine room escape hatch, I saw one man,

"a greaser, standing there.

"He must have got hot oil or scalding steam thrown all over him.

"He wasn't pleasant to look at.

"How he got out, nobody knows. He was in the engine room tunnel

"when the torpedo struck there." Oh, it's like hell, isn't it?

It's really awful.

And the ship he was on sank in just eight minutes.

Forced to abandon the sinking ship, Peter scrambles to one

of the lifeboats,

when the U-boat surfaces.

But having destroyed the ship and its cargo, the German crew takes

pity on the survivors, throwing them some rations,

then it disappears to find a new target.

Peter spends a further nine days adrift at sea,

but survives this ordeal AND the war.

I'm a former soldier myself,

and I had, I suppose, the advantage at least being on level terms

with my enemy or foe,

but people like Peter Franklin, it's the unknown, isn't it?

I mean, he's sailing along in an unarmed ship with almost

his hands tied behind his back, not knowing when his time

is going to come. Absolutely, yes.

And you never can tell when that torpedo is just going to strike

and that's going to be it.

Before war's end, 29,000 merchant mariners will lose their lives.

These sailors are not in the military, they're civilians,

yet they suffered a proportionately higher death rate

than ANY of the Armed Forces.

The U-boats had a really, really terrifying grip

on the convoys.

You put yourself into the mind-set of the sailors that are chugging

along at five knots, in the dark, in the cold, heading home,

but not knowing if they're going to get there.

You know, I've got a relative who lost his life.

He was a radio operator on a merchant ship torpedoed

by a U-boat in the Atlantic.

And you're able to connect, aren't you? Cos everybody's got some

relative of the family who played a part in the Second World War.

The urgent task facing the nation is how to end the carnage

in the Atlantic before it's all too late.

It's in - or rather below - this unassuming building

here in Liverpool that there's a nerve centre that's fighting

the Battle of the Atlantic, trying to outwit the U-boats and keep up

the flow of food and fuel and raw materials and ammunition

that's keeping us alive.

This is Western Approaches Command, where the Royal Navy organises

Atlantic convoys and tracks their progress.

It's like walking through the 1940s -

the telephones, the utility desks,

the green and yellow paint.

YOU C8D SGHSGWYOU C8D sense

the ghosts that used to work here, and you can sense it's a place

where history was made.

Men and women work here round the clock to try

and protect our shipping, but for the most part,

all they can do is watch, wait and hope.

All the violence and horror is

taking place a thousand miles away

out there, but how is that playing out here, on this big wall?

On here, everything would be plotted on.

First thing we look at is a convoy being plotted,

and so we've got a convoy on its way from Britain. From Britain

to America. Heading over to New York.

And these are the individual ships in the convoy?

Those are the ships that are there for protection, yeah.

A U-boat will have spotted that convoy and other boats will now

be lying in wait.

It's a tactic called the wolfpack.

A single U-boat is too easily chased off by warship escorts...

...but if several patiently stalk a convoy from the depths

then strike together in the dark of night, we don't

have the firepower to stop them.

How long we...have supplies that will last? So we're running low

on supplies, we're close to the point where we're days away

from running out of oil, and that effectively becomes

a "do we surrender?" decision at that point, because without the oil,

we can't carry on the war.

We need help.

And Winston Churchill hopes to get it from a good friend

in the United States.

After a year of war, Britain needs help from America to stay

in the fight.

All hopes rest on President Roosevelt.

Churchill knows that if he goes to Roosevelt with cap in hand,

he's not going to get very much.

He needs to offer something.

To America, Britain's pockets are woefully empty.

But one man thinks Britain DOES have something to offer -

the head of Imperial College in London, Sir Henry Tizard.

Tizard is an ex-pilot and played

a leading role in creating the radar

that helped win the Battle of Britain.

He remains active in the world of secret military research,

where he is respected and liked.

He often spends his nights at work, chatting with his staff

and playing billiards.

His colleagues have been developing things that will change the course

of warfare - more accurate radar, jet propulsion, even atomic weapons.

Tizard is an unsung hero of World War ll.

He gets a meeting with Churchill to discuss a proposal

that, in peacetime, would be utter madness.

He thinks Churchill should give away our most valuable technological

discovery to the Americans in the hope that they can turn

blueprints into kit.

In our war-torn state, there's no way we can develop these ideas

further, but the Americans have the resources

to do exactly that.

The plan is they take our secrets, use them to make new weapons,

then sell those weapons back to us, along with oil and other

badly needed provisions.

The cost - we lose ownership of world-changing discoveries.

But the benefit - we might just survive the war.

It's a hell of a gamble.

Churchill accepts that our survival as a nation rests

on Tizard's proposal.

Tizard is dispatched to Washington to wow the President

with our secret military research.

But even if Roosevelt is willing to deal, there's no guarantee

these weapons will be ready in time to help.

But after two weeks, Tizard is ready to reveal his ace in the hole -

a series of working prototypes.

His hand-picked team of scientists gather here at Liverpool to join

the ocean liner the Duchess of Richmond. They're carrying

with them a black metal trunk.

Inside it, all the treasures of Britain's science and engineering.

They stow their precious cargo on the bridge, giving it

its own armed guard, and telling the captain to dump it overboard

if he comes under attack. The U-boats will be waiting for them

just as much as any oil tanker.

Then, as the ship leaves Liverpool, the city comes under attack

from German planes.

The ship escapes the city and avoids the U-boats,

to deliver the precious box.

The Americans are impressed with its contents, and agree to Tizard's

secrets-for-weapons plan.

Churchill may have sold the family silver, but in return,

America is sending us vital supplies as well as, in the background,

turning our inventions into useful equipment to fight

against the Germans.

But it could take months or years before any of our prototypes make it

into the field.

And that's time Britain doesn't have.

Britain is losing the Battle of the Atlantic.

The seamen know it, their commanders know it, Churchill knows it.

Later in his history of the war, he will write,

"The only thing that really frightened me in the war

"was the U-boat peril."

While we hang on for dear life,

the Germans go from strength to strength,

launching 20 new U-boats every month.

1942 brings a chance to turn the tide, and to Churchill's relief,

America joins the war at last.

Convoys start to cross in even greater numbers, protected

by the US Navy now, as well as our own.

But the Germans still retain the edge in tactics and technology.

In fact, they're sinking so many ships,

their commander, Karl Doenitz, calls this his happy time.

Britain might not yet be defeated, but we do need to find a way

of stopping the U-boats, otherwise America can send

all the supplies they like -

they'lljust end up at the bottom of the ocean.

The best way to destroy a sub is actually from the air.

U-boats submerge to stalk their prey, but they spend much

of their time on the surface, making them easy to spot and bomb.

Unlike warships, bomber planes can patrol huge areas, outrun

any ship in the sea and run no risk from torpedoes.

But the problem for the bombers is finding the subs

in the vast ocean. As it happens,

one of Sir Henry Tizard's prototypes is designed to do exactly that.

While Doenitz and his wolfpacks are roaming the Atlantic,

the brightest British, Canadian and American minds

are on their tails.

For nearly three years, we've been a whisker away

from creating a new kind of air-sea radar that can spot objects

miles away, and could transform the battle with the U-boats.

In late 1942, American engineers turned Tizard's radar prototype

into a working system...

...powerful enough to spot a U-boat's periscope,

and compact enough to fit inside a plane.

How does this start giving us the upper hand?

The big idea as you move into 1943,

is they start going on the offensive,

going hunting for U-boats,

and that is near their bases

on the French coast and the Bay of Biscay, with a lot of aircraft

like these Wellingtons using this new radar system that they've got.

At last, the predators have become the prey.

But one problem still remains -

our aircraft can only attack targets close to shore.

We don't have a plane with enough range that can reach the middle

of the Atlantic, where the U-boats can still hunt freely.

Then, after four years of marathon Atlantic battle,

a new American bomber changes everything -

the 5-24 Liberator

Why was the Liberator a better aircraft than the Wellington?

It was its size.

It's got four engines, it's got great range,

so they can really get out into the middle of the Atlantic,

where the U-boats have been causing problems,

and start protecting convoys right the way across to Britain.

So we've got an upgraded radar.

We got a bomber that's capable of getting out into the middle

of the Atlantic gap. Where do we go from there?

By, really, sort of April, May 1943,

a lot of things are starting to come together.

You get very long range Liberators descend towards convoys under attack

to just go and kill U-boats.

The difference is stark.

In August 1940, we sank just two U-boats.

But in May 1943, we sink 42.

Admiral Donitz's his own report to Hitler sums up

the transformation perfectly.

"We are at present facing the greatest crisis in submarine warfare

"since the enemy, by means of location devices,

"has made fighting impossible, and we are suffering heavy losses."

In the summer of 1943, one month later, Donitz withdraws -

the longest engagement of the entire war is won.

The gamble - the enormous gamble - all these secrets handed

across to the Americans with no real guarantee.

But it did ultimately pay off -

the Americans did come over as our allies,

they did turn a lot of the technology

into war-winning gadgets and things.

But I suppose there are people who will say we lost a lot

of our wealth, we lost a lot of our scientific and technological

pre-eminence, but that was the price that we had to pay.

Tizard's technology undoubtedly

helped secure victory in the Atlantic,

but the sailors caught in the heat of battle have another source

of help that they themselves know nothing about.

Intelligence from Britain's classified code-breaking factory,

Bletchley Park.

Gosh, here it is, the Enigma machine.

Never actually seen one in the flesh.

It just looks like a normal typewriter,

but when you think about how many lives were in the balance

with what this machine is capable of doing, it's incredible.

Looks really humble.

Historians believe breaking Enigma shortened the war by years.

Alan Turing - the man who led that effort - is rightfully famous.

But he is just one of thousands of hidden heroes working here

in complete isolation and secrecy -

so secret, their stories are still emerging eight decades later.

How hard was it to maintain the information

that they were processing, bearing in mind

it was absolutely top secret?

Everybody knows that if you came to Bletchley Park,

you were made to sign the Official Secrets Act,

you were given some kind of really scary induction talk

where there was a pistol on the desk

when you signed the Official Secrets Act.

And the subtext of that being that

"if you don't do as I'm telling you you must do, then, you know,

"you may pay the ultimate price".

They also compartmentalised people so that very, very few people

had an overview of everything that was going on on the site.

We've still got some veteran codebreakers who are still alive.

They've never heard of Enigma.

They were just given the machine to work

and told, when the machine stops, you phone through the results

and occasionally somebody says "well done".

That's your contribution to World War ll.

It's completely meaningless.

But the change in Britain's fortunes is real - as the successes

of Bletchley's secret heroes and heroines are reflected

on the battlefield.

For the first time in this war, we're not just

staving off defeat, but we're actually starting to carve out

some pretty hard-won victories.

America is in the war as our ally, our vital Atlantic supply lines

are wide open, and we are starting to take the fight to Hitler.

The tables have been turned, but for how long?

The really crucial theatre of war is to the east, in Russia.

From the very beginning, Churchill knew that by helping Russia,

we'd be helping ourselves.

In 1941, he wrote, "We shall give whatever help we can to Russia

"and the Russian people."

Roll forward two years,

and we had exactly the kind of help that Stalin needed.

British codebreakers about to unravel a secret so powerful

Stalin could use it to smash Hitler's invasion

of the Soviet Union.

Here at Bletchley, more work of the utmost secrecy continued -

to read the Nazis' encrypted radio messages.

Since early in the war, cryptographers here

have been stumped by a fishy Nazi code nicknamed Tunny -

short for tuna fish.

David, what is Tunny, then?

If you think of Enigma as a tweet,

then Tunny is more of a long e-mail.

The second difference is who's using the system.

Enigma is used by the army at the divisional level

and in the Navy by individual ships,

whereas Tunny was used by very, very senior Germans

communicating to one another at quite long lengths.

We often think that Enigma is top, top secret -

but, in actual fact... There's a level above again!

If you read one enigma message, probably doesn't tell

you a great deal. Whereas if you can read even a single message

from a senior commander, where he's laying out his thoughts

or his plans, then that one message can be really, really powerful.

Wow. So if we crack this,

then we know exactly what the Germans are doing. Yes.

Only a select group of people know that Tunny exists -

even within the German military.

They believe we'll never come close to reading a single message -

except we do exactly that.

This is the machine that sent that message.

It's called a Lorenz S242,

and they are only known to be four of them left in the world.

Makes the Enigma look like a child's toy.

The Enigma uses either three or four rotors to turn a message

into a scrambled stream of letters.

The Lorenz, on the other hand, has 12 rotors.

Unlike Enigma, the Lorenz codebreakers

have no captured machine to help them.

But an unknown young maths whiz takes on the challenge.

If he cracks it, we'll see into the mind of Hitler himself.

In 1940, Britain was alone and on the verge of surrender,

but a series of behind-the-scenes victories in diplomacy,

technology, and intelligence transformed our fortunes.

In 1941, a mistake by a German radio operator enables Bletchley Park

to decipher one message from Hitler's most complex code.

But without the machine that made it, they don't know

how to read any others.

Then a young member of staff is given a go - 24-year-old Bill Tutte.

His father was a groundskeeper in Newmarket, and he got a scholarship

to the local grammar school.

He managed to get a scholarship from there to Cambridge.

There are basic things you can do if you're a code-breaker,

and one of them is, if you're looking at something

that appears to be random but is very long,

the question is, is there actually a pattern?

Using nothing more than a pencil and paper, Tutte finds that pattern.

He realises that the opening 12 characters of every message

are not part of the message itself -

they're actually instructions for creating the secret code,

one letter for every rotor on the machine.

To go from 4,000 jumble letters to a conception of a 12-rotor machine

is an enormous leap.

It's pretty impressive.

Tutte now knows how the messages are encrypted,

but a daunting task lies ahead.

The Lorenz machine has more possible settings

than there are stars in the universe.

Decrypting each message means

finding these countless settings one by one.

The process takes so long that, by the time Tutte can read a message,

it's old news.

The question is how to work them out at speed.

The answer is to apply brute computing power.

And this is the machine that did it.

It's called the Colossus, and it has some claim

to be the world's first electronic digital computer.

By feeding the messages on tapes like this into the machine,

then the Lorenz's precise settings can be revealed in hours

rather than weeks.

This breakthrough uncovers an intelligence gold mine.

Almost four years into the war,

it yields a nugget of information

that can upend the conflict far away on the Eastern Front.

In July 1943, the Germans are preparing to attack the Soviets

with close to 3,000 tanks and almost 800,000 men.

The idea is that they're going to use their heavy armour

as a spearhead to smash through the Soviet lines

and lead to a decisive victory on the Eastern Front.

It's an excellent plan, and it should work for the Germans.

And we should know because we've been

listening in on the whole thing.

Bletchley Park decrypts the secret battle plans.

Churchill sends the message straight to Moscow.

Using our intelligence, the Red Army prepares an almighty counterattack

at the western Russian town of Kursk.

The result is the biggest tank battle in history,

and a crushing German defeat.

The Battle of Kursk set the Soviets on the path to victory -

it was their first step in a very long, hard road

that would see them go all the way through to Berlin.

And what of Bill Tutte?

He almost took his work on the Lorenz machine to the grave -

it remained an official secret until just before his death in 2002.

After the war, he left Bletchley and he went into a specialist field -

graph theory - and he became a world renowned figure in that discipline.

Since the arrival of the World Wide Web and the internet, graph theory

is absolutely central to all sorts of systems that operate now.

So he's had an enormous impact on all of our lives since the war.

So not only has he broken the Nazi's High Command cipher machine,

which was believed to be unbreakable, but he's also laid

the foundations of what we all use pretty much every day today.

Absolutely, yes.

And if you'd asked him about it, he would have been very, very humble

about the whole thing.

Bill Tutte. Think of the problem that faced him.

Yeah. I mean, you, as one man,

come up with a solution for breaking an unbreakable machine

that underpins the entire Nazi hierarchy.

The interesting thing, I think, about him - and the other people

who made breakthroughs here at Bletchley Park,

like Turing and so on -

is that they were capable of two things.

The most intense, detailed work, and the sudden leap of imagination

to take them to the solution of the incredible problems they solved.

While the codebreakers at Bletchley work away in the shadows,

the British Army is making a last stand in the blazing

North African sun.

The Western Desert was the main area of battle for Britain,

for the Commonwealth.

We weren't really fighting anywhere else.

We are struggling to defend our colonial possession, Egypt,

which borders an Axis-occupied colony, Libya.

If we lose Egypt, we lose the Suez Canal - the critical supply

route for Middle Eastern oil, and a vital link

to India, Australia and more.

Without these, we lose the war.

Trying to take it from us is one of Germany's best and brightest -

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The Desert Fox.

We were in retreat.

We were preparing to evacuate,

Cairo was under threat.

It was a rumour that General Rommel

had already booked his rooms in Cairo.

Rommel has pushed halfway to Suez, but with his own men exhausted

and running short of supplies, his offensive grinds to a halt

at a railway siding called El Alamein.

We managed to fight Rommel to a precarious standstill,

but Churchill is unhappy with the progress of his existing

commanders in the field.

So, in August 1942, he appoints a new man to the task in North Africa.

Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery -

also known to his men as Monty.

INAUDIBLE

A famous battle here at El Alamein will make a household name of Monty,

but behind the great general stands a man out of the limelight -

a former film-maker who outfoxes the Germans

with an unbelievable trick straight out of Hollywood.

Like all good blockbusters, this one begins with a convincing pitch.

Instead of attacking now,

Monty wants to spend time and money

rebuilding our forces.

Churchill reluctantly agrees, writing, "We are in your hands.

"And, of course, a victorious battle makes amends for much delay."

Monty's opening act is to

assemble a force of 190,000 men

and more than a thousand tanks -

among them, the latest weapon arriving from the USA.

This is the legendary American M4 Sherman tank.

They built nearly 50,000 of them

and it saw service in every theatre of World War Two.

It's the first tank that gave the Allies a real fighting chance

against the deadly German Panzers.

Tanks like these bring star quality to Monty's production,

but now he must set the stage for battle - a short 35-mile front

between the Mediterranean to the north,

and a deep desert depression in the south,

which is impassable for tanks.

He can't go around either side.

He can only make a direct assault

against the heavily fortified German line.

If it works, he'll halt the German advance - permanently.

But he must somehow take Rommel unawares.

Having a weapon like this is great,

but it does present rather a large problem,

and that is that you can't park hundreds of 34-ton

main battle tanks in the middle of a vast, empty desert

without the enemy finding out about them pretty quickly.

So in order for Monty to maintain the advantage,

he's got to pull off a pretty impressive magic trick.

And that is he's got to convince Rommel that this isn't a tank.

Montgomery orders Operation Bertram to begin -

the biggest booby trap of World War Two.

It's an enormous bluff.

While actually preparing to strike in the north,

he orders his men to trick the Germans into thinking

the attack will come in the south.

Many people know of Monty's brilliance

in the North Africa campaign,

but few have heard of a man who made a crucial

contribution behind the scenes -

his director of camouflage, Geoffrey Barkas.

Barkas was a very nice man.

He was a filmmaker who had fallen -

like many filmmakers do - on hard times,

and he made his own film called Tell England.

But he'd ended up running the sort of demonstration unit

for the Shell Motor Company.

To make Rommel think that our attack is coming from the south,

Barkas decides to create a fake army.

To German observers in the air, and from their own front line,

it should look like four armoured divisions preparing for battle.

In reality, it's like the world's largest film set,

which must be ready for action in just a few weeks.

Like all filmmakers, they had a deadline - and that deadline

was literally a deadline because if they got it wrong,

there would be a lot of dead men out there.

With astonishing speed, the set takes shape.

Fake tanks are made out of fabric and wood,

every empty box in the Army's possession is gathered up

to look like ammo dumps.

Barkas reportedly even commandeers all the papyrus in Egypt.

All the people working for the camouflage unit

knew how to make something out of nothing.

That's what filmmaking and theatre design is -

you make something wonderful out of bits of old canvas.

It's all very well pretending to attack down south,

but how do you hide the real army up north?

Once again, Barkas has a frankly bonkers plan.

He places 700 empty trucks on the front line.

This is where the attack will begin in earnest -

but for all the Germans can see, it's a harmless lorry park.

And this is where the really clever bit begins.

Only days before the attack, the trucks - which are positioned here -

in the dead of night, move

out of position and are replaced exactly by the tanks.

Each of the tanks' crews

has been equipped with this lightweight sunshade.

Now, bear with me. This does look slightly ridiculous.

But to the German observers that are flying high overhead,

it looks like just any other truck.

It's business as usual, and they carry on the way.

The fate of the British army rests on this flimsy deception.

All it takes is ONE German soldier to notice something amiss,

and it's curtains.

Monty is impressed - so impressed, in fact,

that he scraps a back-up plan

to pull his troops back, should this crazy scheme fail.

He writes, "lf we're attacked here, there will be no retreat.

"If we can't stay here alive, then we stay here dead."

The Germans fall for the deception,

Montgomery unleashes a spectacular artillery barrage

in the place the Germans are least expecting.

It's a successful opening night,

but the battle still rages on for two bloody weeks.

Then on the 4th of November 1942,

Rommel retreats.

It was an important moral victory and the British Army needed it.

And what Churchill said after the war, and it's hyperbole,

but he said, "Before Alamein, we never had a victory.

"After Alamein, we never had a defeat."

Geoffrey Barkas, after the war, said,

"lt was the biggest production that I ever worked on."

He obviously was a dreamer, an ideas man. An eccentric, actually.

But look at this. If you were standing there,

it wouldn't fool you for more than a couple of seconds, would it?

But I suppose if you're in an aircraft,

and you are in an aircraft an awful lot, looking down,

maybe desert, no trees or anything...

...but you can pull the wool over their eyes.

Yeah, you certainly can. I think if you were at height,

which you would have to be because of anti-aircraft,

which would be protecting these tanks and defensive positions,

and you're travelling quite fast as well.

All you need to do is glance down.

You've got the heat of the sun, sweat in your eyes.

You're tired.

It's all this ingenuity, these kind of mad, crazy ideas.

Isn't it extraordinary how,

in the war, there was a lot of these wacky ideas and some of them

came off and some of them made a really big difference. Yeah.

Victory in North Africa put Britain on the offensive, but that might not

have been possible without thousands of volunteers who fought

for our country, yet never set foot here.

Six months after El Alamein, we pushed the Nazis

out of North Africa, but few people are aware that our victory is made

possible by men not just from the UK, but from what was then

the British Empire.

Here in the UK, I find that the contribution of imperial troops

has largely been ignored or not represented as much

because here the narrative is a lot about Britain standing alone

and fighting against the Nazis.

The numbers are extraordinary.

The numbers are soaring, and that is two and a half million men

from the subcontinent.

And that's currently regarded as the largest volunteer force

in the world.

Where were they sent?

So they found themselves in the Middle East and North African fronts,

in Sicily, in Cyprus.

Men were sent from India to almost every single theatre of war.

Here we have a letter that's from a Havildar,

or a junior officer, in the British Indian army.

And he says, "The war in the place where I've been fighting is now

"over with the total defeat of the enemy.

"Now we're having a bit of rest.

"But what's going to happen next?

"God alone knows.

"His Majesty The King came down to visit us.

"It was indeed a godsent opportunity to see him.

"He was awfully pleased with the extraordinary gallantry

"of our army."

These are men who are caught up in the trials and tribulations

of war that really does span across the world, that's sometimes

something we forget.

It's not simply a European war or an American war.

It's a world war.

And I think knowing about the contributions of Indian soldiers

starts putting the world back into the war.

Five months after El Alamein, the Allies have all but crushed

German and Italian forces in North Africa.

From here, they'll be able to invade Europe and enter the final phase

of the war, but will only pull it off with a combination

of deception, trickery and subterfuge.

To press home their advantage, Churchill and the Allies decide

they need to take the island of Sicily, here, right slap bang

in the middle of the Mediterranean.

It's the stepping stone to mainland Europe and the key to control

of this area of sea here.

But...but there are thousands of German and Italian troops

dug in on the island.

The Allies need to mass 160,000 of their own troops

here in North Africa if the invasion is to stand a chance.

The problem is it's all too obvious.

Hitler's bound to find out that the Allies are massing

their troops here in North Africa.

And it's an easy deduction to make that Sicily is the target.

How can Britain fool the Germans into thinking it's not the target?

That they plan to attack somewhere else?

In Whitehall, Ml5 are masters

in the art of spreading false information.

They need to fool Hitler into concentrating his defences

as far away from Sicily as possible.

If they fail, the Germans will be waiting to cut the invasion

force to ribbons.

The intelligence services set about fabricating a completely

different, but totally believable, invasion plan.

Can they fool Hitler into believing that they plan

to hit Greece instead?

If the ruse works, then they'll still have the element

of surprise when they attack Sicily after all.

Ml5 consider every possible plan, no matter

how far-fetched it might seem.

One of Britain's most prolific schemers is a budding author

by the name of Ian Fleming.

After the war,

Fleming will go on to create James Bond, but, for now,

he's been busy dreaming up a list of 51 possible ways to wrong-foot

Hitler with fake intelligence.

In 1943, it looked like there was only one plan that might fool

the Germans, but, if it did,

it would alter the course of the war.

Fleming calls plan number 28

"Not a very nice one."

It details using the dead body of a British officer to put

fake invasion plans directly into the hands of Hitler.

Considering this somewhat gruesome plan are two ambitious intelligence

officers, Ewan Montagu, who, before the war, was a successful

barrister and an RAF officer, could Charles Cholmondeley.

Montagu's legal background has gained him a reputation

for mastery of detail.

Cholmondeley, frustrated in his ambitions to fly

due to poor eyesight, finds adventure at Ml5

through his fertile brain.

Between the two of them in the belly of the Admiralty, no doubt burning

the midnight oil, they decide to actually go ahead

with Fleming's plan.

What they need to make the plan work is a fresh, dead body disguised

as an intelligence officer and loaded with fake documents

that show the allies actually intend to invade Greece and not Sicily.

Then they have to sit back and hope that Hitler swallows the bait.

It might seem like an absolutely mad plan, but Britain has little option.

Montagu and Cholmondeley's first challenge is to get a body.

In wartime London, there are plenty of bodies, but this one needs

to be fresh with no physical marks and, crucially, no family ties.

A 34-year-old homeless Welshman named Glyndwr Michaeljust come

into the morgue having taken rat poison.

Now, the coroner doesn't think that the rat poison

will show up if Glyndwr is examined.

He has no other marks on his body either, but he can be made to look

like he's been in an air crash at sea.

Montagu and Cholmondeley set about their mission, now codenamed

Mincemeat, to construct the life of a man who never existed.

Professor Rory Cormac is an expert in covert actions.

He can show me the extraordinary lengths they went to transform

a dead homeless man into a British officer carrying

fake invasion plans.

They have to come up with a plausible back story.

The name they chose was Bill Martin.

They settled on him being an acting major.

So a rank which was senior enough to justifiably be carrying

this sensitive material, but not too senior

that the Germans would know who he was.

And you can see the level of detail and the planning in all of this.

They stuffed his pockets and his briefcase

with what in the jargon is called wallet fodder, or pocket litter,

to again help create a plausible back story.

How much time did they spend putting this together?

Ages. The Germans are not stupid.

They are on the lookout for British intelligence

and deception operations.

So the British intelligence establishment took attention

to detail incredibly seriously.

So here we see the lovely Pam, Martin's fake girlfriend.

Who was she? She actually worked for Ml5.

She was a young Ml5 clerk who posed for this particular picture.

Again, just to build this credibility

that Martin's a real person with a real girlfriend.

And, along those lines, there are letters from her.

There's a receipt for a ring he bought her to make

that relationship seem as credible as possible.

The personal effects are a smokescreen.

Montagu and Cholmondeley really want the Germans to read one letter

in particular to send them on a wild goose chase.

To me, naively, it seems a little bit obvious.

I mean, you've got a letter stuffed in somebody's pocket and a title

at the front is says Personal and Most Secret.

But it is such a brilliant letter

written by the vice chief

of the Imperial General Staff, Archibald Nye.

And you see Sicily is even mentioned, but it's mentioned

as a cover target and almost as a kind of double bluff

just to throw the Nazis off the scent.

And then, instead, he explicitly says

we are going to invade through Greece,

even naming the beaches that the Allied forces

are going to roll up on.

If this reached the Germans on its own, you're right,

they would have smelt a rat. Well, deception is about creating

an entire fake reality to make the key piece of information

as plausible and as powerful as possible.

What Montague and Cholmondeley now need to do is plant the body,

and the plans, somewhere the Germans will find them.

They plan to take the body to the coast of neutral Spain

near the port of Huelva.

They've chosen Huelva because it's known to be crawling

with Nazi spies, the very people that Montagu and Cholmondeley

want to find the body and believe that it's Major Martin who's died

in a plane accident at sea, en route to delivering vital documents.

British, French and American troops are still pushing the Axis forces

out of North Africa.

The clock is set to invade Sicily from here in ten weeks' time,

Montague and Cholmondeley need to dupe Hitler

into massing his defences in the wrong location.

On April the 19th, Montagu and Cholmondeley pull the body

out of the morgue deep freeze and start to dress it.

The feet are so frozen they can't get the boots on so they thaw them

out with a two-bar electric fire and they put the body in a canister

marked Optical Instruments and drive it to Scotland, to be put on board

a submarine bound for Spain.

Only the captain knows the true nature of the mission.

On the 30th of April, the submarine surfaces off Huelva

and ejects the body.

Tied to its waist is a briefcase containing the fake invasion plans.

Just as Cholmondeley and Montague hoped,

a Spanish fishing boat discovers

the corpse and takes it back to port.

It's now only nine weeks to the invasion, and one of the most

crucial turning points of the war depends on the fake plans

successfully getting into the hands of German intelligence.

If they fail.

The invasion is in real trouble.

The lives of thousands of Allied troops are at risk.

To draw Nazi spies in to find the bogus major and his plans,

they leak intelligence messages that the British are looking

for his briefcase.

They sent some messages about some papers from this Major Martin,

of being of great importance and of great secrecy.

This is another intricate part of the plot, because the Brits knew

that the Germans were intercepting and decoding these, they knew

the Germans were going to read these two letters.

It's the 21st of May, just six weeks before the real invasion.

Montagu and Cholmondeley are anxiously listening out

for any radio traffic suggesting

that Hitler has fallen for the fake invasion site.

Codebreakers at Bletchley pick up a signal from German high command.

The message orders Mediterranean commanders to prepare

for the imminent invasion of Greece.

Montagu and Cholmondeley have done it.

The Germans found the body and, with it, secret documents

and, most importantly, the proposed plan of the invasion of Greece.

They've fallen for Mincemeat's subterfuge.

Ml5 hastily send a telegram to Churchill, which simply reads

"Mincemeat swallowed, rod, line and sinker."

To set a trap for the bogus invasion, Hitler moves an entire

Panzer division, 19,000 men, from France all the way to Greece.

The total forces defending Greece jump from one division to eight.

The morning of the 10th ofjuly.

Germans are dug in and ready to cut down Allied troops storming

the beaches in Greece.

But nothing happens.

Instead, Hitler is horrified to receive reports that Sicily

is under attack.

160,000 British, American and Commonwealth troops

put their lives on the line.

The British expect huge casualties. 10,000 men in the first week.

But, with German defences concentrated elsewhere,

around 1,400 Brits are wounded or killed.

Thanks to Sicily, the Allies will wrest control of the Mediterranean

from the Axis forces and Hitler receives a clear message.

"We're coming for you."

A message delivered by British intelligence.

So, Michael, Operation Mincemeat there.

Isn't it fascinating that it was Ian Fleming, you know, author

of all those wonderfuljames Bond novels, who came up with the not

very nice idea of using a corpse?

You could almost say Hollywood couldn't make this stuff up,

but, of course, that's exactly where it came from.

They must have been about the most successful spymasters

of the Second World War.

Well, there's no doubt. After the war, they just went back

to ordinary life.

I mean, one of them sold agricultural machinery

after the war ended. The other became a solicitor.

And Ian Fleming, whatever happened to him?

Glyndwr Michael, the man who unknowingly gives his corpse

to save thousands of lives, is buried in Huelva, Spain.

The inscription now simply notes that he served

as Major William Martin.

In 1943, the Allies push on from Sicily into mainland Italy.

But Hitler can still fight back hard.

His industrial war machine is powered by factories

all over German-occupied territory.

The Allies need to disable these factories if we are to stand

any chance of advancing into Europe.

But they're deep behind enemy lines.

For the past three years, Churchill has been pioneering a new way

to attack targets like this

with the Special Operations Executive, or SOE.

Some of these men and women would often be an odd choice

for the military, but they are perfect for sabotaging the Nazi

war machine from the inside.

One of the hidden stories of this army of unlikely heroes

is that of Harry Ree.

Good morning, sir. Good morning.

This is Harry in a film that was made about his mission.

Harry is playing himself.

We make extensive inquiries before we recruit our people.

Do you think we're the right people for the job?

We're sure of it. All right. I'm on.

Harry is a 24-year-old school teacher who's fluent

in French and German.

But he's an unusual candidate to strike a killer blow

to the Nazi war machine.

Harry's son, Jonathan, can reveal what drove his father to enter such

a dangerous world.

What sort of person is Harry Ree as war breaks out?

He's teaching in a grammar school.

His background, though, was very posh.

He'd been to public school and Cambridge University

and his parents were very rich.

So he was a posh socialist.

He doesn't it doesn't look very warlike, does he?

He definitely wasn't warlike. In his braces in front of the blackboard.

He was he was a schoolmaster by vocation.

He loved being a schoolmaster.

And, as a pacifist, he thought he would sit it out at first.

But then he decided that he wanted to join the war because he thought

that, after the war, his pupils would not respect him

if they thought he'd sat it out.

Harry trained for his mission here, at Bewley in Hampshire.

It may look like an idyllic stately home, but it's shadowy history

as a training ground for the Special Operations Executive

can be revealed by Drjuliette Pattinson.

What's significant about the room that we're currently sat in here?

They would learn in this room about different kinds of gadgets

such as these.

We've got a wireless set here that is hidden

within, like, a lunch box.

So you can see the wire here that this is the aerial.

So you can see it's wound up at the moment, but it

would be unravelled and then strung up, maybe in a tree, to get

the reception to enable this to work.

Well, what do you think this is?

It's obviously a shaving brush.

Absolutely.

Ostensibly, it's a shaving brush.

But, as you can see, there is a nice little gap inside.

And so you could secrete amsomething like this.

Which is a silk map, could be a map of France, for example.

This is the sort of thing you dream about when you're a boy growing up,

like, escape maps

and things hidden in shaving brushes.

And then you have other things, such as the exploding rats.

Yeah, a rat that has been hollowed out and then filled

with plastic explosive.

Seriously?

And I have...

You have said rat here. An example here.

No way. This wonderful rat.

It will have a seam underneath

where it was filled with plastic explosive.

Honestly, that's a real thing? Yeah.

Armed with the tricks of the trade, Harry is ready to join the hundreds

of SOE agents coordinating sabotage in France -

blowing up trains, financing resistance, assassinating informers.

The SOE's ruthless methods earn them a nickname -

the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

The risk of being caught is high, revenge by the Germans merciless.

What was the survival rate like for these people?

I mean, would they last the retirement age?

So the French section, when they were recruited, some

of them were informed that they had a 50/50 chance

of survival. It's such a dangerous job, isn't it?

Absolutely. Agents are risking their lives

and many of them were captured,

many of whom were tortured, and a lot of them were executed.

In April 1943, our idealistic young teacher is parachuted, under cover

of darkness, into France.

By the 10th of May, he makes his way east

to the manufacturing area around Sochaux, near the German border.

He tries to blend in while looking for opportunities to hit the Nazis

where it hurts.

He's good at getting on with people.

He's good at summing up people's characters.

And he was very, very careful about how he conducted himself.

He would never carry a gun himself.

Everyone said that he was just extraordinarily prudent, cautious,

but he's pretty brave.

He got into situations where he was in extreme danger

and he had to get out of them pretty quickly.

But he would certainly not have described himself as brave.

And I think actually he would have said that the most important

thing is to be prudent, be careful.

Harry's new territory contains a prime British target.

The Germans have commandeered the Peugeot car factory in Sochaux.

At 30 acres, the factory is one of the biggest in France,

and it's capable of churning out tens of thousands of vehicles

for the Nazis.

Harry discovers that the manager of the factory, Rodolphe Peugeot,

has sympathy for the resistance

and makes his acquaintance.

But the factory has also caught the attention of the RAF.

It's number three on their list of top industrial targets.

On the 15th ofjuly,

they arrive to stop the factory for good.

165 bombers determined to wipe out the Peugeot factory

in one devastating raid.

The night's clear - perfect bombing conditions.

They drop hundreds of tons of high explosives, the crews are convinced

that they've done the job.

But next morning's reconnaissance reveals the truth - the bombs

have missed their target.

Instead, they've destroyed several nearby villages, killing 100 people,

injuring many more.

The Peugeot factory's assembly line is still rolling out munitions

for Hitler's war machine.

Harry and the people of Sochaux are horrified by the deaths caused

by the RAF raid.

And he went to see Rodolphe Peugeot and said, look,

this air raid was a terrible disaster.

Can you help me do it as an inside job so that your factory

will be selectively sabotaged,

but there will be no more civilian casualties.

So, Harry and Rodolphe Peugeot get together.

What the plan they come up with?

The plan is that they will organise, or rather that Harry will organise

a sabotage to plant bombs directly on the machines inside the factory.

And Rodolphe introduces him to his chief engineer,

who introduces him to other workers in the factory

who will carry out the plan

on condition that Harry will get a guarantee from London that the RAF

will bloody stay away.

Harry arranges for explosive charges and detonators

to be delivered by parachute.

But on the 26th of September, one of Harry's contacts betrays a nearby

resistance cell to the Gestapo.

16 people are executed by firing squad.

The Germans are closing in on Harry and his resistance network.

Pretty handsome chap, isn't he?

Yeah, I mean, he looks completely untroubled in this photograph,

doesn't he, you know? Clear brow and all this sort of thing.

But imagine the stress of day after day, week after week, month

after month, playing out this part, knowing that one slip...

And you're done. ..and you're going to be done.

You're going to be tortured and killed.

Somebody or other at any time could have betrayed

you to the Germans.

I mean, imagine living with that stress for long periods of time.

We think we have stressful lives now.

Harry, the lapsed pacifist, is desperate to prevent another

catastrophic air raid on the factory and surrounding villages.

He radios London to stall the RAF, to let him destroy

the factory his way.

By November, his team are primed for sabotage.

As Harry's team is about to slip into the factory and prepare

the explosives, they run into a problem.

The German guards are not leaving as scheduled.

Instead, they're involved in a game of football with the Peugeot workers

and would-be saboteurs.

It's surreal.

The plan has to be aborted.

Every day that passes, the Gestapo tighten the net around Harry.

On the 5th of November, Bonfire Night, the saboteurs try again.

Using Harry's plan, they plant the bombs in the factory at the points

which will cause maximum damage.

Harry and his team have pulled off an extraordinary strike

at the heart of the enemy.

The factory lies in ruins, destroyed from within,

and incidentally, possibly saving the lives of hundreds of civilians

at risk from another Allied bombing raid.

For the next six months, production of German military equipment

on the Peugeot assembly lines is at a complete halt.

Harry's attack hits Hitler's war machine where it hurts.

With this and others like it, the Nazis will struggle to stay

on the offensive, paving the way for D-Day.

And despite the utter destruction of the factory, no lives are lost.

As a pacifist soldier, he did think it was a good kind of operation

to have been engaged in, as there were no casualties,

but very serious damage to machinery.

But Harry and his team have just made themselves

public enemy number one.

The Gestapo soon hunt Harry down,

and in a desperate escape to Switzerland,

he's shot four times, but remarkably gets away.

He said, "Extraordinarily lucky."

That's what he said! Which I think is putting it mildly.

After those extraordinary experiences,

what was the rest of his life like?

He went back to being a schoolteacher.

And working with young people was what he always wanted to do,

and that's what he devoted his life to.

Harry's story is typical of the unassuming men and women

who make the SOE such a success.

They showed that the Nazis can be stopped

and the final stage of the war is coming.

By the summer of 1944, the Allies have made the Atlantic safe again,

secured North Africa and neutralised fascist Italy.

They're finally ready to take Europe back from Hitler by invasion.

The planning for the D-Day invasion is the most complex

military operation ever imagined,

let alone planned, and there's still one huge challenge

that needs to be met, and that is how do you push forward

the advantage and reinforce

the troops that have just landed on the beaches

when you don't control any of the channel ports

you need to bring in reinforcements, new supplies and heavy weapons.

Our final story is of a young British civil engineer

who was tasked with solving that problem...

The challenge starts two years earlier, when the Allies first begin

to work out how to invade Fortress Europe.

Invasion by sea needs a harbour.

If we can't capture one, we'll have to build our own, and fast.

Churchill is pushing a bold idea that he'd first had

in the First World War - to create a prefabricated harbour

here in the United Kingdom, to build it in sections

and then tow it across to France and the invasion beaches.

It's a daring gamble, and it's going to require ingenious engineering

to make it a reality.

A major headache is how to get heavy vehicles off the ships

and onto the shore.

The War Office thinks the answer lies in long floating bridges,

but if the bridges fail, the harbour is useless.

Solving that problem fell to Allan Beckett.

I'm meeting with Allan's son, Tim.

So, this is a picture of Dad in 1939.

Gosh. Smart, eh?

He was very much a very clever and inventive engineer.

So, day one for your father on the job, then,

how does he get involved? What does he do? What's his task?

He was working in the bridging unit, and Colonel Everall,

his immediate superior, gave Dad a sketch and said to him,

you know, "Beckett, you're a yachtsman,

"see if you can come up with a solution for it."

Well, Dad's solution for the problem of the long sloping beach

and the tide that went up and down

was to come up with a number of floating pontoon units

and then to connect them up with bridges.

And these bridges could twist between the two ends.

It had to cope with waves, so it had to twist and turn

and move with the water,

and that was the novelty of it.

Allan's idea is up against two other prototypes.

The code name for his is The Whale.

The others are The Swiss Roll

and a combination called the Hippo and Crocodile.

The War Office need to know that these floating roadways

can support trucks in heaving waves and changing tides.

They're put to the test in Scotland.

We've got some pictures of the prototype being tested,

but you can see it's pretty rough here,

and you can see that somebody is driving a truck along it.

Did you feel sorry for the drivers that had to test this?

Well, I must have been quite exciting.

All three prototypes are about to be put to the test

in a way no-one could have planned.

A huge storm blows up, wreaking havoc on the Scottish coast.

Allan is given an order to report to the testing base immediately.

He went up there on the train, sort of full of trepidation.

And he didn't know what he was going to see

and whether it would all be wrecked or what.

But he got there, and he said the Hamilton Swiss Roll had gone

and the Hippo and the Crocodile had settled and collapsed,

and his floating roadway was twisting and turning and everything,

but it was still there and they were still managing

to drive a truck up and down it.

So, the powers that be in the Army made their decision,

and they ordered ten miles of it to be made.

The Allies had given themselves just over a year

to get ready for D-Day.

Allen's Whales are only one part of what becomes known as

the Mulberry Harbours.

Hundreds of British engineering companies are building

one of the largest construction projects the world has ever seen.

And now, they only have seven months to go.

You have to get it right, don't you? There was a lot at stake.

It had never been done before and it will never be done again.

It didn't really matter how much preparation you did,

you couldn't fully understand what challenges you were going to meet

and what the enemy would throw at you.

Finally, four years after the British

evacuated Dunkirk, they're back.

It's D-Day.

Allan Beckett joins the biggest invasion in history to ensure

their advance into occupied Europe.

If his floating bridges and the Mulberry Harbours failed,

the invasion force could be left paralysed on the beaches.

Dad went over. They had some quite good American launches

filled with long-range fuel tanks,

So, they were in this thing full of petrol,

and he was aboard it with some very young American Gls.

He said they were all, you know, pretty terrified

and they got worse as they got near to Normandy

because there was a lot of bodies floating around

and still fighting going on.

The Allies may have taken the beachheads,

but the cost is heavy - 4,400 already dead.

With the invasion force still fighting close by,

Allan sets about his job of liaising construction between

Mulberry A, on the American beaches,

and Mulberry B, for the British and Canadians.

Arriving with Allan's floating bridges is another vital component

of the Mulberry harbours -

the breakwaters to protect them from the sea, known as caissons.

Military researcher Jacob Thomas-Llewellyn

has been studying how this colossal armada became a harbour.

Some of the individual constituents of these various structures

were enormous, weren't they?

I mean, probably the most notable example are the concrete caissons.

The largest units were over 6,000 tonnes. Each?

Each. Each one of these? Each one. 6,000 tonnes? 6,000 tonnes.

Just explain what they do, what they are.

So, the basic principle with the caissons

is that they were hollow in design,

and it was because of this hollow structure

that they were able to float. That's the astonishing thing, isn't it?

These constituent units, 6,000 tonnes of concrete,

and yet they float.

Building two Mulberry Harbours requires 147 of these caissons

towed up to 100 miles across the Channel.

This is the moment of truth - will they work?

They're sunk into position

while Allan's floating bridges reach over the waves,

ready to meet the ships.

NEWSREEL:

If Allan's floating bridge design fails, the harbours will be useless.

How revolutionary are the techniques that are being involved here?

In terms of the scale, it was completely revolutionary.

We're talking around over a million tonnes of equipment.

The project, in civil engineering terms,

is probably one of the largest in history.

But just as Allan's floating bridges

are ready to carry their first trucks, disaster strikes.

NEWSREEL:

Normandy suffers the worst storm in decades.

The storm totally destroys Mulberry A.

The American harbour takes the brunt of the storm,

but the British one clings on.

Allan and his team of engineers begin repairs.

Despite the damage, it becomes a fully operational harbour

just four weeks after the D-Day landings.

The harbour's so successful, it becomes known as Port Winston,

and it remains operational until November, 1944,

as the Allies push on into Europe.

11 weeks after the landings, the French take back Paris.

The Mulberry Harbours are a guarantee that the Allies

can keep up momentum against Hitler.

If Allan Beckett's floating bridges hadn't worked,

the harbour would have been a failure,

and so perhaps would have been the invasion.

How much of a contribution did the Mulberry Harbours make

to winning the war?

I think it showed how ingenious

British civil engineering has and can still be.

I think it was one of the defining projects

which allowed the Allies to win in north-west Europe.

Allan Beckett was a soldier in a hidden army of civil engineers

who made D-Day a world-changing success.

For the next ten months, the Allies fight their way across Europe

until they meet the Soviets in Berlin.

Hitler commits suicide and the Germans surrender

on the 7th of May, 1945.

The Japanese follow on the 2nd of September.

Britain and her Allies have won World War ll.

Allan Becket is awarded a military MBE for his war-winning ideas.

A keen sailor since he was a boy,

he even returns to the English Channel

to enjoy the challenge of the waves and the tides.

The Second World War is filled with stories like these -

our heroes and heroines were just a few ordinary men and women

called upon to do extraordinary things.

This is how the Second World War was really won.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media