Original subtitles

[narrator] May, 1945.

Nazi Germany is defeated.

[music continues]

The Allied Powers: Britain, the United States of America

and the Soviet Union have won victory in Europe.

[music continues]

In London, crowds gather outside Buckingham Palace.

Jubilant revellers fill the streets of New York.

And in Moscow plans are drawn up for a massive victory parade.

[vibrant music intensifies]

But this joy will soon dissipate.

A new and very different sort of war is coming.

One which will pit the former allies

against one another.

[Churchill] From Stettin in the Baltic

to Trieste in the Adriatic,

an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

[music gains momentum]

However, recent attacks by rebel forces...

[music stops]

[narrator] But despite their alliance against Hitler,

this partnership between Britain,

America and the Soviet Union

was from the very beginning

marked by deception, suspicion and mistrust.

The war has been fought and won not only on the battlefield.

It has been shaped, behind the scenes,

by the secret decisions and disagreements

of just a few men.

[sombre music with drum beats]

Men of conflicting ideologies and personalities.

Men who could have been enemies as easily as they were allies.

Winston Churchill:

the tenacious Prime Minister of Great Britain,

the British bulldog,

whose sheer force of personality defined his wartime leadership.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

the President of the United States,

the only man to hold that office for four terms,

the leader who overcame the country's isolationism

to take his people into a second world war.

And Joseph Stalin,

the brutal Soviet dictator

whose long rule was characterized

by his distrust of others

and maintained by ruthless purges and terror.

This is the story of the personal battles

that shaped the military conflict;

the war behind the war.

[explosion sound fades]

[vibrant introductory theme]

[slides clicking]

‐[explosions] ‐[troops marching]

[music continues]

[falling bombs hiss]

[music continues]

[music stops]

[narrator] May, 1940.

The Nazi Blitzkrieg had devastated Europe,

as country after country fell to the German army.

The Wehrmacht stormed through Denmark,

Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

France was faltering and already partly occupied.

And the British Expeditionary Force

was having to retreat towards the French coast.

Britain's pleas for America to support them and join the war

were falling on deaf ears.

In London,

the new Prime Minister met with his War Cabinet.

Despite the disaster unfolding on the continent,

Winston Churchill was adamant: Britain had to fight on.

But senior ministers disagreed.

The British Army in France was facing complete defeat.

‐[tense music, drum beats] ‐[rumbling sounds]

To the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax,

there was a way to save the army and the country:

a peace deal with Nazi Germany.

Britain's position was precarious;

decisive leadership was needed.

Churchill had the character and the drive,

but to win over his divided cabinet

he would have to rely on the supporters of the man

he had ousted from Number 10 and railed against

in public and private:

the leader of Churchill's party, Neville Chamberlain.

Chamberlain had become Britain's Prime Minister

in 1937.

His time in Downing Street

was dominated by the growing aggression

of Nazi Germany

and his desperate attempts to avoid another war.

I suspect that for Chamberlain

the shadow of the First World War

loomed large.

The awful loss of life, the destruction.

And I don't think he could contemplate

starting another European war

which had every danger of extending beyond that.

I don't see Chamberlain

as an appeaser... well I know many do,

but he was an honourable man

who did what he thought was his best, I suspect.

But it meant he had to sup with the Devil.

[narrator] In Germany,

Adolf Hitler had made no secret of his territorial ambitions

since coming to power in 1933.

In strident nationalistic and anti‐Semitic rhetoric,

he had demanded the creation of a Greater Germany:

a Third Reich.

[crowd cheering]

By 1938, Hitler was ready.

[music in faster tempo]

The first country in his sights was Austria,

the land of his birth.

German troops crossed the border on the 12th of March, 1938.

[music stops]

There was no obvious resistance

and little more from the rest of the world.

Britain was re‐arming itself.

But the hopes in London

were that war could still be avoided.

Hitler, however, was not satisfied

with the annexation of Austria alone.

Within weeks,

he claimed the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia,

where there was a small German‐speaking population,

should be under German control.

Still, Britain and the rest of the world

did nothing.

It's easy to forget that there was a lot of support for

the idea that these were things that were happening,

as Chamberlain famously said of the invasion of Czechoslovakia,

"in a faraway country."

So, the invasion of places like Czechoslovakia,

the Anschluss with Austria in 1938,

were seen as almost someone else's problem.

These European countries and their leaderships

are doing their best

to articulate and raise the alarm

for leaders in Washington, Moscow and London,

and elsewhere,

that this will lead to further invasions

and further conquests.

So it was not just a European episode,

it was one, as they quite rightly articulated,

would lead to a grand

and more difficult and violent and long war.

[narrator] In late September 1938,

Chamberlain travelled to Munich.

He met with his French counterpart,

Edouard Daladier,

with the Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini,

and with Adolf Hitler.

The Czechoslovakians were not present

when the fate of their country was decided

and Hitler got what he wanted.

The deal agreed to the annexation

of the Sudetenland.

The settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem,

which has now been achieved,

is, in my view, only the prelude

to a larger settlement

in which all Europe may find peace.

[narrator] Chamberlain returned to Britain

and a hero's welcome on the streets.

But although some in government

were completely against such appeasement,

we now know,

there was also considerable appreciation

behind the scenes for what he had done.

Chamberlain's traditionally been the bad guy in all of this.

He comes back from Munich having signed the peace,

the peace in our time, the appeasement,

but actually, behind the scenes,

the head of the secret intelligence service MI6

had actually said to the government,

"We are not ready for war.

And if Chamberlain doesn't sign that piece of paper,

we are at war immediately with Nazi Germany,

and we aren't ready."

[narrator] A large country house in Buckinghamshire,

Bletchley Park,

was secretly purchased to become the centre

of Britain's wartime intelligence operation.

We now know from a study of intelligence files

that British intelligence was preparing for war

in 1938.

We knew that war was inevitable; it was just a matter of when.

[narrator] But in the tearooms of Westminster,

other meetings were being held

that would change the course of history.

A small gang of Conservative MPs,

led by Winston Churchill,

was utterly opposed to the appeasement of Hitler.

They discussed how Britain's foreign policy

could be changed

and how the Prime Minister could be removed to allow this.

Winston Churchill was certainly not willing to do

any kind of deal with Hitler

and this was a great difference between him and Halifax

and Chamberlain.

[narrator] As another world war loomed,

Churchill was already in his mid‐sixties.

His career had seemed set to end in disappointment,

a politician remembered chiefly for his failures

in the First World War

and his mistakes as Chancellor in the 1920s.

When we think of Churchill during these years,

he was seen as an outcast

on many of the great issues of British politics at the time.

Churchill's career up to 1939,

it was a study in failure.

[narrator] Churchill's opposition to appeasement

had given him a new political and moral purpose.

He warned that Hitler's demands

would not end with Czechoslovakia.

He would soon be proved right.

On September the 1st, 1939,

the peace Chamberlain thought he had guaranteed,

was shattered.

Germany invaded Poland. Appeasement had failed.

Two days later, on September the 3rd, 1939,

Britain declared war.

While across the Atlantic, just a few hours afterwards,

United States President, Franklin D. Roosevelt,

declared his country's neutrality.

This nation will remain a neutral nation.

[narrator] For now, this would be Europe's war.

His immediate concern really

is how he balances approaching the situation in Europe

with the fact that he is trying to keep the United States,

at least for the time being, out of the war.

[narrator] Over the next eight months,

German troops and tanks

advanced rapidly across the continent.

[suspenseful music]

Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg

were now under Nazi occupation.

As country after country fell,

so did the popularity of Britain's Prime Minister,

Neville Chamberlain.

In London, moves were afoot to remove him from office.

But how would they succeed?

[vibrant introductory theme]

Britain declared war on Nazi Germany.

The appeasement of Hitler by PM Neville Chamberlain

had failed.

A war cabinet was assembled

and Chamberlain invited one of his fiercest critics

to become First Lord of the Admiralty.

Winston Churchill was no stranger to the role.

He had been in charge of the admiralty

in the First World War,

when his record was marred

by the disastrous amphibious landing

of Allied troops at Gallipoli, in Turkey, in 1915.

[Dockter] This is something that his political opponents

used to say he was a risk taker,

and a sort of... politically unreliable

or strategically unreliable,

and it even haunts him into the Second World War.

[narrator] Churchill would not fare much better

in the early months of the Second World War.

He'd returned to the Admiralty

determined to rebuild his reputation

as a military strategist.

In an effort to try and slow Hitler's advance,

he championed a plan to move allied troops

into Norway and Sweden,

to cut the supply lines of iron ore

to the Nazi War Machine.

Unfortunately for the British, the Germans got there first.

They invaded Norway on the 9th April, 1940.

Britain attempted a counterattack,

but it was unsuccessful.

The campaign was a military and strategic disaster.

Yet, this time,

it was the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain,

rather than the First Lord of the Admiralty,

that got the blame.

I fear Chamberlain's goose was already cooked.

In some ways, Britain hadn't really

got its head around the fact

it was a war, and not only a war,

but a war with a ruthless military power.

And mistakes were made, without a doubt, in Norway.

And the surprising thing, in some ways,

is that Churchill survived it,

but it didn't seem to be held against him.

[narrator] Behind closed doors in Westminster,

there were some who saw

the public's willingness to blame Chamberlain

as an opportunity.

As Allied troops withdrew from Norway in late April,

the Prime Minister's political opponents

made their move.

On the 7th of May, the House of Commons gathered

for one of the most momentous debates in its history.

Moving adeptly from the disasters

of the Norway campaign,

speeches soon took aim

at the government's overall conduct of the war

and at Chamberlain's position as Prime Minister.

On the second day of the debate, a vote was forced.

It transformed the debate into a vote of confidence

in Chamberlain himself.

It became a sort of de facto vote of "no confidence"

partly because Chamberlain made the mistake actually,

of standing up in the House of Commons

and saying "I hope my friends will vote with me on this."

So, if you like, challenging his Conservative Party MPs

to back him or sack him.

And, of course, he got the answer he didn't want.

[narrator] Although the Prime Minister won,

around 40 Conservative MPs voted against him.

and 60 abstained.

The blow to his authority

meant his resignation was inevitable.

Chamberlain wanted his foreign secretary,

Lord Halifax, to succeed him.

But Halifax, was seen as altogether too patrician,

too high Anglican and too much of a Chamberlain crony

to be acceptable to Labour Leader Clement Atlee

and the opposition benches.

Halifax told Chamberlain

he did not want to be Prime Minister

and pleaded ill health.

On May the 10th, 1940,

as Germany swept into the Low Countries,

Chamberlain resigned.

[music fades]

That evening, Churchill made his way

to Buckingham Palace

to meet King George VI

and become Britain's second wartime Prime Minister.

The rest of the country still had no idea

that Chamberlain had even resigned.

What had been agreed between a few men

behind the scenes in Westminster

would have repercussions across Europe.

Addressing the Commons, Churchill declared,

"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."

Churchill would be

a very different leader for Britain.

[Kumarasingham] He was seen as someone who would be able

to bring the country together,

to bring Parliament together and prosecute the war.

But it's interesting to note

that when Churchill did become Prime Minister in May 1940,

he was not the leader of the Conservative Party.

Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservative Party,

and he remained in the cabinet

effectively as the Deputy Prime Minister.

The realities of British politics

at that high elite level, where there was still

a vast majority of the Conservative Party,

supported Neville Chamberlain,

and did not want Churchill

to become leader of the Conservative Party.

[narrator] Churchill's position was precarious in the extreme.

To stay in Downing Street,

he would have to keep the party grandees on side.

And events on the continent were soon to test that support.

German forces had swept through Belgium,

the Netherlands and into France.

The British Expeditionary Force had been dispatched to Europe

at the outbreak of war.

But by late May 1940,

around 400,000 service men were encircled in Belgium

and Northern France.

We had put forward an expeditionary force

to bolster up the French and the Belgians.

Not of itself very large comparatively,

but politically most significant.

And the collapse of France and the collapse of Belgium

really left no other outcome

for the British Expeditionary Force

other than withdrawal by sea.

[narrator] Retreating to the edge

of the English Channel, at Dunkirk,

they faced annihilation

at the hands of the advancing Germans.

After just 16 days as Prime Minister,

Churchill now faced a crisis which could end his premiership

and the ability of the British to continue to fight the Nazis.

The fact that France collapsed so quickly

came as a real shock to Winston Churchill.

[narrator] On the 26th of May,

as a desperate attempt was launched

to rescue the stranded soldiers from Dunkirk,

the War Cabinet began

a two‐day‐long meeting in London.

But the politicians were starkly divided.

The new Prime Minister wanted to fight on,

while the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax,

wanted to contact Mussolini

and convince the Italian dictator

to broker peace terms with Hitler.

Churchill was completely opposed to this.

But he also recognised that in the war cabinet

that he wasn't necessarily going to win the fight

against Halifax and Chamberlain.

[narrator] The battle in Whitehall went on for days.

The future of Britain and the course of the entire war

hung in the balance.

The war cabinet was in complete disagreement

about the way forward.

If Halifax resigned, and others followed,

the government could fall.

It was Churchill's powers of persuasion

on the 28th of May that carried the day.

Nobody knows for sure

what exactly Winston Churchill said,

but they came out of that meeting

and everyone was convinced that they were going to fight on.

So it's a remarkable moment when Winston Churchill changes

the course of history personally.

What you have in a sense is this whole secret world

going on, pulling the strings of what's happening.

[narrator] Later that day, the Cabinet unanimously agreed.

Britain would fight on.

The attempted rescue of more than 300,000 troops

stranded on the shores of Dunkirk

had already begun, on the 26th of May.

And in just 12 days, a swiftly assembled fleet

of more than 700 vessels, large and small,

arrived on the French coast and carried to safety

the bulk of what Churchill called

the "root and core and brain of the British Army."

[Jackson] The extraordinary response,

the naval response, not only the Royal Navy,

but of numerous small boats owned by whomever,

civilians on whatever calling, a remarkable response.

Very brave defence of the perimeter

by those troops who had given that job

which should only end in one of two ways for them:

death or capture.

And they did that job and bought the time

for the sea evacuation to take place.

The RAF put in a great effort

to maintain over the perimeter

air superiority or least air equivalents.

And keep the German bombers off the soldier's backs.

[narrator] On the 4th of June,

Churchill made one of his most famous

and stirring speeches.

[Churchill] We shall fight on the beaches,

we shall fight on the landing grounds,

we shall fight in the fields,

and in the streets.

We shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender!

[narrator] Churchill's brilliant words

transformed a military defeat into an act of heroic defiance.

[gloomy tune]

But Dunkirk was, at best, a glorious failure.

I don't think Churchill is ever under any illusions

that this was anything other than a catastrophic defeat

and regarded it as so, and just the prelude

to what he expected, which was a German invasion.

And he was aware, of course, that he got the soldiers off,

but they left all their artillery,

and their trucks and their tanks behind them.

[narrator] The British Army had lost almost 50,000 soldiers

as well as most of its tanks and equipment.

Churchill, remember, after Dunkirk,

warns the British people

that wars aren't won by glorious evacuations.

The Dunkirk evacuation, of course we think of it

as the heroic efforts of 330,000 men

evacuated from the beaches.

But we mustn't forget that 50,000 were left behind.

5,000 taken and, you know, went into some sort of hiding.

And so, behind the scenes

there's a new branch of military intelligence,

known as MI9,

and it's their role very swiftly to set up secret escape lines

to get those soldiers,

and later airmen if they're shot down,

back from behind enemy lines to fight again.

[narrator] Acknowledging Britain's vulnerability,

Churchill desperately reached out to Roosevelt

through a series of telegrams,

in the hope that the President might bring the United States

into the war.

But despite his best efforts,

Churchill had to settle with the US

allowing Britain to purchase much needed arms and equipment.

Roosevelt's "cash and carry" scheme

gave Britain the supplies she needed

to remain in the war.

For Churchill, he thought that the aid

that came from the US was of paramount importance

to surviving what the Germans might throw at the allies.

[narrator] Adolf Hitler had expected Britain

to seek a peace settlement

after the capitulation of France.

But he had underestimated

the kind of a man he was dealing with

and the resolve of the British people.

Churchill stuck to his word to never surrender.

[solemn tune with drum beats]

The fight for Europe moved to the skies

with the Battle of Britain.

The Royal Air Force now took on the German Luftwaffe

in a deadly battle for air supremacy.

a secret message was hand delivered

to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin

by Sir Stafford Cripps, British Ambassador in Moscow.

The telegram came from Winston Churchill.

The Prime Minister had a warning for Stalin.

British intelligence had detected

massive German troop build‐ups on the Soviet border.

It could mean only one thing,

that Hitler planned to invade the Soviet Union.

[gloomy tune]

Stalin, paranoid as ever,

dismissed it as a "capitalist trick."

Roosevelt also had intelligence about the attack

and told Stalin it was as certain

as that the night followed the day

that as soon as Hitler had conquered France,

he would turn on Russia.

Both Churchill and Roosevelt warned Stalin in 1941

that an invasion was going to happen.

Stalin disregards these warnings.

Why does he do this?

It's because he doesn't trust either Roosevelt or Churchill.

Stalin was an ideological person.

He believed in a major clash

between communists and capitalists

as being inevitable.

This had informed his thinking for two decades.

Churchill, in particular, was the leader

of the world's preeminent imperial power.

And they'd been portrayed in Soviet propaganda

as the main enemy throughout the 1920s, going into the 1930s.

So, it's not surprising

that Stalin disregarded their warnings in 1941,

and he decided to go with his gut instinct,

which was to do nothing about the invasion.

And that proved to be a catastrophic mistake.

[narrator] But Stalin continued to ignore the allies' warnings.

He even ordered his men not to fire

on Nazi surveillance planes that crossed the border,

preferring to believe Hitler's ludicrous explanation

that the pilots had simply got lost,

rather than entertain Churchill and Roosevelt's warnings

that Hitler was about to turn on him.

[Folly] It's interesting that before the German invasion,

about a week before, Churchill and Roosevelt

had exchanged correspondence about the possibilities

of a German attack,

which they both had been receiving intelligence,

was going to happen.

And Churchill at that point had assured Roosevelt

that he wasn't thinking of alliance

with the Soviet Union,

and he knew that that would be very difficult

in the United States too.

But Roosevelt, like Churchill,

appreciated the addition, to the Allied cause,

of Soviet power.

And he too, like Churchill,

was prepared to provide support for the Soviet Union.

[narrator] Two years earlier, in the summer of 1939,

Britain, France and the Soviet Union

had been deep in talks over the growing aggression

of Nazi Germany.

A shared response was called for,

a united front against a common enemy.

What they didn't know was that the Soviet Union

was also holding talks with Nazi Germany.

As far as Stalin was concerned,

the arrangement with the British and French

was much more risky, because the risk was

that Germany would attack Poland,

and the Soviet Union would now be in the front line

in a war against the Germans,

without any guarantee

that the British and French would do anything at all.

He saw Hitler on a march across Europe

and, initially, Stalin's plan

was to make a pact with the Western powers,

but Western powers ultimately did not trust Stalin.

Stalin loses patience

and sees a deal can be made with Hitler.

And he manages to spread soviet influence

into Eastern Europe.

[narrator] On the 23rd of August, 1939,

German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop,

arrived in Moscow to complete a stunning deal

with his Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov.

The Molotov‐Ribbentrop pact

agreed that neither Germany nor the Soviet Union

would attack the other for a decade.

Nor would they support any other country doing so.

Hitler had suggested the deal last a century,

but Stalin said ten years would do.

It was hardly a marriage made in heaven.

For years, each side had demonised the other.

The Soviet film industry constantly pumped out

anti‐Nazi propaganda.

And Hitler had called the Russian people

a "mass of born slaves"

and had declared it Germany's mission

to rid the world of Bolshevism.

Equally, the Soviet dictator didn't trust Britain or France.

And he did not share their belief

that war was avoidable.

So, if a conflict was coming, he wanted to make sure

that Germans were bogged down in Western Europe

for as long as possible.

[sombre tune]

The Russians were completely unprepared for war.

In his rampant paranoia,

Stalin had purged thousands of officers from the Red Army.

It was typical Stalin behaviour.

And so, the Red Army,

at the point of their invasion by the Nazis,

were very much decimated in their senior command.

[Whitewood] 30,000 military personnel

were affected by this purge.

There were thousands of arrests,

there were hundreds of executions.

The main reason why Stalin did this

is because he mistrusted his military.

He believed there was a spy scare

and espionage agents within officer corps in 1937.

[narrator] Stalin hoped this pact with Germany

would give him more time.

But there was another part of the deal

that was kept secret.

One which made the pact even more attractive

to the Soviet dictator.

A private agreement between them which would seal the fates

of millions of innocent civilians.

[sombre tune]

Following the victory he confidently predicted,

Hitler had promised Stalin that Eastern Europe

would be divided between Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence.

They would rule the continent together.

Hitler, of course,

never had any intention of honouring the promise

but Stalin allowed himself to be flattered and beguiled.

And initially, he saw his faith rewarded.

they seized the west of the country.

Sixteen days later,

the Soviet Union invaded from the east.

Poland was divided and wiped off the map,

just as agreed.

[sombre tune]

The division of Poland and the creation of a buffer

to protect the Soviet Union

was critical to Stalin's sense of security.

For many years, Stalin had been interested in acquiring

what we know as buffer zones.

He was interested, of course,

in spreading Communism worldwide,

but the two things were not mutually exclusive.

Stalin could look to push Communism

further across Europe and also secure the Soviet state

with this ring of countries against the invasion.

The Russians and the Poles had fought a war in 1920‐1921,

which the Soviets had lost,

and so Stalin was quite keen for a bit of revenge.

[narrator] In Stalin's mind,

the Molotov‐Ribbentrop pact was working.

Trade between the USSR and Germany increased.

Soviet grain, oil and other raw materials

were exchanged for German industrial goods

and military equipment, including even a naval cruiser.

The trade agreement in the Nazi‐Soviet Pact

carried on.

So as the Nazis and their troops

were massing at the Soviet border,

the Soviet Union was still sending them goods,

and still trading with them and actually giving them

resources they needed to later invade.

[narrator] But Hitler had not changed his beliefs.

His hatred for what he called "Jewish Bolshevism" remained.

As did his contempt for Stalin.

Once the pact had been signed,

it made war more or less inevitable.

[narrator] But why was Stalin,

a man who had built a totalitarian state

based on suspicion and paranoia,

so easily seduced by Hitler?

His calculation was that Hitler would not fight a war

against the Soviet Union

while he was still engaged with Britain.

He believed that he saw Hitler's motivations,

believed that Hitler wanted to avoid a war on two fronts,

that Hitler would appreciate the economic aid

that he was getting from the Soviet Union,

and that Hitler would be prepared

to allow that relationship to continue

while it was benefiting him, and most particularly,

while he was still fighting the war in the West.

He was also somewhat deluded by German deception plans,

which were calibrated to convince him

that German build up in Poland

was all part of their build up to attack Britain.

[narrator] By mid‐1940, the Soviet Union

had control of the territories bordering the Balkans.

They were now within striking distance

of the Romania oil fields Germany depended on.

Even while waging war against France and Britain,

Hitler had one eye on the East.

But the Soviet Union, even when taken by surprise,

would be a formidable enemy.

German commanders knew they would have to move fast

and secure victory before Stalin could mobilise

his own massive, if inexperienced, forces.

Germany planned to attack the Soviet Union

along an 1,800‐mile front,

from occupied East Prussia, Romania and Poland.

It would be the largest invasion force ever assembled.

148 divisions, and 3.5 million troops,

equipped with 3,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces

and 2,500 aircraft.

One army group would strike north,

towards Leningrad.

A second group would strike south

into Ukraine and down towards the Black Sea.

A third group would head for Moscow.

Their aim was to take the city within just four months.

[thrilling tune]

But the Nazi plans were discovered.

The German government and military

communicated through a cipher known as Enigma.

They thought it was impenetrable.

But they were wrong...

With the help of Polish cryptanalysts

based at Bletchley Park,

British intelligence had broken its first wartime Enigma message

in January 1940.

The messages they intercepted in 1941

revealed three Panzer tank divisions

on the move in Poland

and movements of more German troops

towards other parts of the Soviet border.

[thrilling tune intensifies]

The German invasion of the Soviet Union

was imminent.

[Folly] Churchill had sent a message to Stalin

at the beginning of April, based on some of the material

coming from the Bletchley Park operation.

The problem was that they couldn't reveal

the source of that material because it was ultra‐secret.

So it rather reduced

the credibility of the information

when it got to Stalin,

who's getting a lot of information

from his own agents and from other people.

He thinks it's disinformation being spread by Churchill,

because if he was Churchill, he'd try and persuade

the Soviet Union to come into the war.

So he just chuckles to himself and thinks,

"I know what you're trying to do, Churchill,

and I'm not going to be fooled."

[narrator] More warnings followed,

giving detailed information

on the German units massing on the Soviet border.

Still, Stalin did not believe them.

He was about to pay a devastating price.

‐[vibrant, driving brass music] ‐[cannon balls firing]

[music stops]

On June the 22nd, 1941,

Nazi Germany and its Axis allies launched Operation Barbarossa.

The invasion along an 1,800‐mile wide front

took the Soviets completely by surprise.

I think the Germans invaded about 3:00 in the morning,

then at about 8:00 that morning

the orders to the Red Army were given

to take up defensive positions.

So, they were on the back foot.

The Germans battle hardened in France,

Belgium knew what they were doing.

Well‐equipped at this point and a very large force indeed.

[narrator] Stalin was at his country estate

when news of the invasion came.

He did not emerge for a week, hiding away in his dacha,

drunkenly despairing that his government

had ruined "Lenin's legacy".

The Soviet dictator

had been privately warned by Churchill

that Hitler's betrayal was coming.

But Stalin had not believed it.

He's isolated, it seems like

he's been totally overwhelmed by events

and he leaves it to his deputies and his allies

to actually take it upon themselves

to respond to the invasion.

It's telling that it's Molotov

who gives the first address to the Soviet people

announcing the war.

[narrator] Now the Nazi Blitzkrieg,

which had conquered Western Europe,

was unleashed on the Soviet Union.

[sombre tune]

While Stalin wallowed in drunken self‐pity,

millions of his people were forced to flee their homes.

His armies were fighting for their lives.

The Red Army's inexperienced commanders

were no match for the battle‐hardened Germans.

Stalin ordered that his men stand their ground,

rather than retreat and regroup.

The result was encirclement and surrender.

[sombre, tense tune]

Huge numbers of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner.

Stalin sent desperate messages to London.

He pleaded with Churchill

to open a second front in the West,

so that Hitler would have to fight on two sides.

Britain had been quick to strike

an alliance with the Soviets after the invasion.

It was sending what supplies it could spare.

But it was in no position

to mount an invasion of Nazi‐occupied Europe.

I think what Churchill saw was an opportunity.

And that is that he recognised

that this was a moment to bring Joseph Stalin in

on his own side.

And as he famously said,

even if Hitler decided to invade hell,

he would at least make a favourable statement

about the Devil in the House of Commons.

He decided, pretty much instantly,

that Britain would align itself

with the cause of the Soviet Union.

There were many misgivings

about lining up with the Bolsheviks,

but he, on the very day,

decided that he would make a public broadcast

pledging British support for the Soviet Union,

and he does so in one of his greatest speeches,

it was actually a TV broadcast, he says that nobody's been

as big an opponent of communism as him,

but this isn't about communism,

it's about Russian people defending their heartland,

defending their women and their children,

and Britain will march alongside them.

[narrator] By mid‐July, the Wehrmacht had advanced

500 miles into Soviet territory,

had captured nearly 600,000 Red Army soldiers.

But this rapid advance came at a cost to the Germans.

The vast distances were stretching their supply lines

to breaking point.

And the scorched earth policy of Soviet defenders

left little behind that the invaders could use

in terms of food or shelter.

Already, time was running short

for the Germans to achieve victory

before the extreme Russian weather set in.

[tense tune]

By autumn 1941,

the Nazis had Moscow in their sights.

Taking the capital would not just be a symbolic victory.

The city was a major hub of industry and transportation.

But Hitler had other ideas.

To the despair of his generals, he changed his strategy

and redirected forces south, towards Kiev,

and north to Leningrad,

where the Red Army was putting up stubborn resistance.

Moscow could wait.

[Boff] In the autumn of 1941, he knew

that he had... only had the resources to do one thing.

I think from a military standpoint

actually he was probably right.

The important thing was to destroy the Red Army.

The important thing was not necessarily to get to Moscow.

The problem that he experienced, however,

of course was just that Russia's so big.

[narrator] The Germans who were heading towards Moscow,

slowed their advance as the Red Army dug in.

Autumn rains turned roads to mud.

And then the Russian winter set in.

It was one of the coldest of the twentieth century.

Temperatures plummeted.

And little winter equipment was reaching German soldiers

at the front.

Their coats were too thin.

They could not use their guns or vehicles.

Frostbite affected thousands.

The Germans were not ready

for the harshness of the Russian winter.

[narrator] Hitler had underestimated

not just the depths of the Russian winter,

but the depths of Russian determination.

[machine gun firing]

The snow would not last forever.

The fight on the Eastern Front was far from over.

‐[vibrant music] ‐[aircraft dropping bombs]

[vibrant introductory theme]

Next time, on Race to Victory:

The Soviet Union's desperate fight for survival.

This was now a fight for Mother Russia,

for the soul of Mother Russia.

And so they tackle too with a will

and accepted horrific casualties.

Many people think they know Stalin very well indeed

because in many ways he is obvious,

a vicious brutal dictator,

who cared little about sacrificing

huge numbers of human lives in the cause.

He is the man of course who said

"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is statistic."

[narrator] Whilst in Washington,

FDR continues to sit on his hands,

until a new foe

makes a devastating entrance to the field of battle,

in a totally unexpected location.

[Roosevelt] A date which will live in infamy,

the United States of America

was suddenly and deliberately attacked.

[narrator] The European war is about to become a World War.

[explosion]