Original subtitles

In just two weeks,

the German Army storms across France and Belgium,

pushing hundreds of thousands of British and French soldiers

to the sea at Dunkirk.

They have revolutionized warfare.

They've realized that speed of movement is now the key,

so you create these armored formations that move fast.

They are harnessing new panzer techniques with radio technology,

and the support of the Luftwaffe. That's the new thing.

A brutal aerial bombardment…

fast-moving tanks…

a superhuman infantry.

This is Blitzkrieg, lightning war.

"Blitzkrieg", it means speed.

Maneuver Warfare.

A campaign which is focused on a very quick decisive battle.

Blitzkrieg is one of the most

extraordinary events of World War II.

Now, rare footage from around the world,

expertly restored in full color, tells the story

as you've never seen it before.

After their defeat in World War I, the fiercely proud German people

are utterly humiliated.

The punishing terms of the Treaty of Versailles

rub salt in the wounds.

The global industrial power

is limited to an army of only 100,000 men,

and loses territory.

The Germans feel very put-upon by the Treaty of Versailles,

because it essentially says that the Germans are guilty

of starting the war.

There's no question that most Germans felt outraged

by the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles,

the shrinking of the army to just 100,000,

and the loss of territory, and these massive reparations,

which everybody knew were gonna have serious economic consequences.

And the reason they objected was because it implied

that Germany was responsible for the First World War,

and this was their punishment.

How could their powerful nation have lost?

And why are they made to cede land to lesser nations?

The territorial losses are quite significant.

They lose territory in the East, to the Poles and the Czechs,

and they are forced to demilitarize their islands

so they can't use it as a launch pad for renewed invasion

of Belgium and France.

Feeding on the resentment, a populist rabble-rouser

taps into wounded German pride and promises to take back

what has been lost.

Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party start to build a mass following.

The German people see him as a savior,

a man to restore their once-great nation.

There was a feeling in Germany that most Germans felt

when the Versailles Treaty was passed,

that the provisions were unnecessarily draconian,

both the loss of territory, and also these massive war reparations.

And what the Versailles Treaty did, in effect,

is blame Germany for the First World War, whereas many Germans felt that, actually,

they were no more responsible than any of the other countries.

And so, this rankled.

Sieg Heil! Seig Heil! Sieg Heil!

Hitler correctly diagnoses that the Germans are suffering

a great deal of political and economic insecurity.

What they need most of all is a sense of unity

and a sense of economic security as kind of a floor underneath them.

And the Nazis provide this by talking about, you know,

state intervention in all sorts of areas to create employment.

Building the autobahns, things like that.

In the first years of Hitler's reign,

most Germans consider it a success.

Hitler manages to suspend

the regulations of the Versailles treaty step by step.

In violation of the treaty, Hitler builds up his army,

testing the tolerance of the Allies,

gambling that no one wants to start another war.

He introduces compulsory military service in 1935

and marches back into the Rhineland the following year

with 30,000 troops.

If you think about Hitler's long-term plan,

it's to consolidate his position on the European continent,

defeat the Western powers, France and Britain,

and then he's gonna turn his attention to the east,

which he sees as the natural field for German expansion,

a place where that he can then build out the German population,

gather in resources, and defeat the monster of Bolshevism,

which he sees as being kind of the blood enemy of fascism.

When the Nazis brazenly march into Austria

on the 12th of March 1938,

they are greeted with open arms by the Austrian people.

The Western Allies do nothing.

The Western Allies pretty much stood by and let it happen,

and one of the reasons they did that is because they felt

that the Austrians probably wanted to join with the Germans,

therefore they weren't actually being forced.

The breaches of the Versailles treaty are always grave,

but the Allied forces never react.

Many of them think that they perhaps humiliated Germany

too much with the Versailles treaty.

They can understand that Germany wants to be a major player again.

On the other hand, the Allied countries don't want to risk another war.

From the First World War, they know that a war would mean

thousands, if not millions, of casualties, and they want to prevent that.

With Austria now in German hands,

Hitler makes public his goal to incorporate areas of Czechoslovakia

into the growing German footprint.

It's a country rich in natural resources like iron.

The statements alarm the Allies, but still, they want to avoid conflict.

In September 1938,

the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

flies to Germany three times

to attempt to dissuade Hitler from invading Czechoslovakia.

I used to repeat…

"If at first you don't succeed,

try, try, try again."

That's what I'm doing.

On his third visit,

he joins French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier

and Benito Mussolini of Italy,

at what becomes known as the Munich Conference.

They agree with Hitler that Germany can annex

the German-speaking Sudetenland, but not make an attempt

to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia.

The following morning, Chamberlain signs a separate agreement with Hitler;

a peace deal between Britain and Germany.

Chamberlain is greeted as a hero.

Chamberlain returns to Heston Airport in London

and waves this piece of paper, sort of talks about peace in our time.

And this is a separate deal that he has done privately

with Hitler.

This morning…

I had another talk…

with the German chancellor, Herr Hitler.

And here is the paper…

which bears his name upon it, as well as mine.

He's averted war. There's absolutely no question

that Hitler is absolutely chomping at the bit

to go in all guns blazing into Czechoslovakia.

That has been avoided.

We regard the agreement signed last night,

and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire

of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.

As Chamberlain delivers his speech,

German forces prepare to march into the Sudetenland.

March 1939, Hitler invades the rest of Czechoslovakia.

It is clear that Hitler's plan isn't just to regain territory…

but to expand Germany's borders further east.

Hitler's intention, ultimately, is to create a huge German empire

in Central and Eastern Europe.

Are they prepared to go to war? So, he's just got to keep pushing,

slowly but surely, and one after another

these crucial countries, Austria, Czechoslovakia,

slowly the dominoes will fall, and he's gonna be able

to carve out for himself this huge new empire,

this living room for the German people.

France and Britain become increasingly anxious

that Hitler's next move will be Poland.

They draw a line in the sand; if Hitler invades Poland,

they will declare war.

Hitler doesn't believe them.

The German chancellor is more worried about how his avowed enemies,

the Soviets, will react.

August 1939, Hitler declares a non-aggression pact

with his ideological enemy, Stalin,

in which they agree not to attack each other.

While the Western Allies struggle to understand this unlikely alliance,

on September the first, the two countries reveal their hands

when Hitler invades Western Poland.

The Polish army on their horses are no match for the German panzers,

but they put up a valiant fight.

Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union invade Poland

from the east.

It's a very cynical deal.

What the Russians are gonna get out of it is a free hand and a lot of the east,

including the recovery of some of the territories that they'd lost

at the end of the First World War.

And what the Germans are gonna get out of it

is a free hand to invade Poland

without worry that the Russians are gonna react against that.

In fact, they've done a deal to divide the country up between them.

True to their word, on the third of September 1939,

Britain and France declare war on Germany.

It's a move Hitler didn't see coming.

When he actually hears that the United Kingdom's

declared war on him in particular, he's horrified,

and he says to one of his advisers, "What next?"

Because all along, he hadn't believed

that they would actually go to war over an issue in Eastern Europe.

The next day,

troops from the British Expeditionary Force, the BEF,

set sail for France

to join forces with the world's most powerful army.

They move up to the Belgian border

where they prepare for any German attack.

Royal Engineers Private Percy Taylor Beaton,

who was called up in London and was soon on a boat

bound for Cherbourg in France.

People cheered, and they made a fuss and that.

There was bags of tears and things like this at people going away.

The people in the streets, you know, when they saw us and that they cheered us,

you know, when the coach left Bethnal Green,

the people there, they turned out in their thousands,

and they were cheering us and waving us off.

Everybody didn't think about the war, I don't think.

They thought "Oh, it's gonna pass over."

And then of course, once we got to France, it was like a holiday at the beginning.

Hardworking holiday, it was.

In fact, Hitler is far from ready

to fight the combined British and French armies.

It takes his army over 20 days to defeat the Poles.

Polish resistance has given Hitler's armed forces

a major battering, and they have lost a substantial number

of their armored vehicles.

It becomes evident that Germany isn't equipped for this war.

The German forces do have tanks and tank divisions,

but they only account for a small part of the Wehrmacht.

We have not well-trained soldiers, we have no supply,

no ammunition, whatever.

Poland was the proof that we possibly are not able

to fight against a proper army, and France is a proper army.

France is the best-trained, best-equipped army in Europe.

How can we, as Germans, win?

No way. We're going to lose.

In reality, the Wehrmacht is an army

that will become very dependent on horses for transportation

and their whole logistics.

Only about ten percent of the German divisions

are motorized.

The French Army has a formidable artillery

and over 3,000 tanks on the northeast front,

800 more than the Germans.

Despite facing a weakened German Army

and holding an overwhelming military advantage,

the Allies choose to dig in, not to attack.

What you then get, after the outbreak of war in 1939,

is this long period known as the Phoney War

in which the Germans are deciding what to do next

and the Allies are waiting.

One of the reasons the Allies were acting on the defensive

is because the French had built this huge defensive system,

the Maginot Line, on the Franco-German border

to prevent the sort of bloodshed that had happened in the First World War.

While the Allies wait, Hitler assesses how to respond.

His sights had been set on the east.

Now, he had to deal with an unexpected threat from the west.

Hermann Göring leads the generals in a campaign

to convince him not to start a war with France,

so they present him with a plan destined to fail.

All the generals were against it.

They said "No, don't negotiate. Do something,

but we can't solve that problem

with military means."

And then they presented a rather boring war plan to Hitler,

and Hitler said, you know, "Look, what's that?

I mean, that's the same thing as 1914.

Where are new ideas? Where are fresh ideas?

Uh… This is not going to work."

German military leadership doesn't want to have that war.

Their vision, in the end of 1939,

Hitler is pushing for an attack on France,

and their perception is, "We're going to lose."

I mean, look, in the First World War, we fought four years against France

with a huge army, a much better-trained army, and we lost.

The original plan drawn up by Hitler's conservative generals

follows the playbook from the First World War,

to invade Holland and Belgium from the north

as well as Northern France.

It is a plan that plays to the strength of the Allies,

deliberately designed to end in disaster.

How can you persuade a dictator not to do it?

You can't say, you know, "You're an idiot and you have to negotiate."

But if you…

persuade him from a military side, "It's not possible,

we're going to lose,"

that was, in the end, somehow the plan.

Don't offer him a plan which might work.

But one ambitious general,

the Prussian aristocrat Erich von Manstein, falls out of step.

He suggests a plan with a far greater chance of success.

The conservative generals move quickly to shut him down.

Manstein feels very strongly that they will be able to take advantage

of the sort of disorienting effects of driving quickly into the French lines.

By attacking them much faster than they expect,

they'll be able to push the French back

and completely disorganize their command arrangements.

And sow so much confusion that they'll be able to make great progress,

and the infantry will follow, and they'll literally rip

the French Army apart from the inside.

With Manstein's plan shelved, Hitler makes use of the Phoney War

to secure a supply of iron ore for weapons.

His forces invade Denmark and Southern Norway.

The British spot the danger.

Germany, to secure its northern flank

and its route out of the Baltic,

decided to invade Norway and Denmark

on 9th of April 1940.

And the British in particular responded

by trying to land troops in Norway.

It's gonna give a lot of valuable resources,

iron ore and other resources in Norway to the Germans,

and they need to forestall this.

Ill-prepared to respond to the attack,

the Allies land troops in Norway,

but their operation is half-hearted and incompetent.

The Germans deploy their powerful new force,

the Luftwaffe, to great effect.

Its Stuka dive bombers wreak havoc with the Allied forces.

It's a kind of terrible humiliation for the Western Allies,

and by the beginning of May 1940,

all Allied troops have left Norway, and it's firmly in German hands.

Meanwhile, the persistent General Manstein

finds a moment to unveil his plan to Hitler.

He knows he will only get one chance.

Manstein sees an opportunity to change Hitler's mind,

and so he says, "Look, we need to do something different.

Let's do this, let's take full advantage

of our Panzer divisions and the Luftwaffe,

and let's use the element of surprise. Do something they will never expect."

And so, Hitler endorses his plan. It seems much bolder.

It seems much more likely to bring a rapid success

than the more ponderous plan agreed upon by his general staff.

On the tenth of May, the British Prime Minister,

Neville Chamberlain, is forced to resign over the Norway debacle.

He is replaced by Winston Churchill.

Churchill's a maverick, he's got a checkered political career,

but he was the one, right the way through the 1930s,

who was insisting that we shouldn't appease Hitler.

We needed to stand up against him.

And now, finally, Churchill is given his chance to lead the British in war.

In his first speech to the House of Commons,

the new premier announces…

I would say to the House

as I had said to those who joined the government…

I have nothing to offer but blood,

toil, tears and sweat.

On the day Churchill becomes prime minister,

Germany launches a devastating attack on Belgium and Holland.

German parachutists capture strategic bridges in Holland.

The Luftwaffe bombs airfields.

The airborne troops drop to overwhelm its tiny neighbors.

It seems clear that Hitler intends to grab the Channel ports

and acquire bases from which he could eventually invade Great Britain.

They have to seize those Channel ports, because otherwise,

the German Navy is in a backwater.

They're in the North Sea and the Baltic, and they can't get out.

Whereas if they can get those Channel ports

and they can get the French Atlantic ports,

they can then have access to the open seas.

The Allies are well prepared for this move and respond quickly,

pushing their best forces into Belgium to meet the attack.

At this point, reconnaissance planes send back confusing news from the south.

They report a huge military traffic jam along the road to the Ardennes,

stretching all the way back across the German border.

The problem is, is the French refuse to believe

what they're being reported by reconnaissance pilots.

General Gamelin, commander in chief of all French forces,

said, "That's impossible. That can't be true."

And so, it was ignored.

It was a terrible mistake as Manstein's master plan unfolds.

The reconnaissance was correct.

The Germans had been amassing in the Ardennes, and now,

they plunge through the woods and thunder across the River Meuse

on the French border.

The French are gonna have just a skeleton force

on the Meuse beyond the Ardennes, because they're never gonna expect us

to come through here.

The invasions of Holland and Belgium

were designed to lure the Allies north.

They want to draw the cream of the Allied armies

in Northern France into Belgium, and also into Southern Holland,

so that the actual attack through the Ardennes

can come through behind them and cut them off.

This is our cunning plan. We are going to encircle them in Belgium.

We also secretly attack in the Ardennes, in this difficult area.

We will be crossing the Meuse and then dashing through the Channel

and encircling the British Expeditionary Force

and the French Army in Belgium.

We have to take the Allies by surprise.

This is always a major aspect of winning a war: surprise your enemies.

The operation will also use time, speed and daring

to make up for the inferiority of the German military.

It uses all of these modern technologies.

It promises a quick victory.

And it suggests that he might not only defeat the French Army,

but annihilate the entire British Army.

The new British prime minister, Churchill,

has been plunged into a nightmare as German tanks rampaged

towards the French border city of Sedan.

Had the French taken their own reconnaissance seriously,

they would've had the German Army at their mercy.

The military bottleneck had left the German artillery

incredibly vulnerable.

It turns into the biggest gridlock in the history of gridlocks.

Now, a French reconnaissance plane flies over and sees this.

Now, at that point, it would've been perfectly possible

to organize every single French and British bomber available

and go and bomb it.

It would've stopped the German advance in its tracks, that would've been

the end of the. war and the whole thing would've been avoided. I mean,

it makes me so cross every time I think about it.

I mean, it was just such a missed opportunity.

The Germans push home their advantage

with an astonishing display of speed.

Before the French can react, they charge towards the French border town, Sedan.

Infantry, tanks, and artillery show incredible levels of stamina,

outrunning the enemy defense forces.

Barely stopping, they reach Sedan in three days.

Many German soldiers haven't slept since the start of the campaign.

The French can't quite believe it.

The German tanks roll into Sedan without opposition.

The French defenses are unexpectedly confronted

by 60,000 rampaging Germans

in 22,000 vehicles and 850 tanks.

After three days on the march,

the Germans have no intention of stopping.

They prepare to cross the River Meuse in three places.

The plan is a textbook example of Bewegungskrieg.

A warfare maneuver the Germans are already well-known for.

The architect is Heinz Guderian,

a general who knows how to combine new technology

with the traditional German approach to warfare,

attacking the enemy with overwhelming force

and encircling them before they can react.

What Guderian is very good at doing

is harnessing new methods, the Luftwaffe as aerial artillery;

new mobile equipment, trucks, mobile artillery,

and of course, panzers, tanks, but also radio technology, too.

French Commander General Maurice Gamelin

orders that Sedan must be defended at all costs,

but he has prepared his troops for a repeat of the grinding attrition

of the First World War.

When they're suddenly confronted by the need to be mobile,

they don't know what to do.

No one expects the nightmare about to unfold.

Wave after wave of dive bombers pummel the French defensive positions.

Hardly a single bunker suffers a direct hit,

and only 56 casualties are taken, but the psychological effect

of the screaming bombers and the whistling bombs is devastating.

These German attacks

were an absolute catastrophe for the French defenders.

It becomes evident rather quickly

that the French morale is broken by these attacks

and the French do not manage to organize proper counterattacks.

I can only conclude that this is a legacy of the First World War,

those four long, brutal years of fighting in which enormous quantities

of Frenchmen have died, and there's a feeling among Frenchmen,

just a generation later, that they don't want to go through it again.

In the confusion, German infantry flood across the Meuse.

It's a dangerous move.

The German forces are isolated and open to counterattack.

By the evening of the 13th of May, although a certain number of Germans

have got across the river, they are very vulnerable.

No tanks have actually got across at this point,

and this is an opportunity for the French to actually counterattack.

But, shell-shocked, the French tank drivers

are slow to react.

By the time they finally sorted themselves out

and the attack is put in on the 14th,

Guderian's got enough armor over the river on pontoon bridges built by his pioneers

to actually knock out those French tanks.

What they don't have is any kind of tactical nous whatsoever.

The biggest failure of all for the French is that

they haven't thought about communications at all.

So General Gamelin, who is the commander in chief

of all French forces, is at the Chateau de Vincennes

just on the edge of Paris, and he doesn't even have a telephone

because he thinks it will be a security risk.

I mean, it's just insane.

The French are dependent on field telephone lines,

which get cut by Stukas, and on dispatch riders

who take ages to get messages through

because the roads are clogged with refugees.

The French believed it would take the Germans two weeks

to reach Sedan.

Not three days.

In three days and nights,

the fearless, relentless onslaught never stopped.

The soldiers performed like supermen.

It became increasingly clear that this German army

was unlike anything seen before.

What the French didn't know is that the German army

had a secret weapon.

The weapon was manufactured by the Berlin drug company called Temmler.

Pervitin is a powerful methamphetamine

known on the streets today as crystal meth.

Already sold as an over-the-counter pick-me-up in Germany,

the drug proves invaluable in the theater of war.

Pervitin is seen as the ideal drug to combat fatigue.

In the Second World War, it is used especially for the Panzer troops

and the night fighters.

Troops that are always close to the enemy

and have to remain active for a long time.

Pervitin had been used by German civilians, you know.

They'd get it in a pharmacy, and it would be used to be alert

and stay awake and get a lot of stuff done.

And as the war drags on, you'd start seeing Pervitin

being issued to German troops and airmen like candy.

Methamphetamine can dull feelings of empathy

and make you feel superhuman,

the very qualities needed to create a near-perfect soldier.

There are many reports that just before the attacks

started on May 10th, 1940, there were a lot of soldiers

who were depressed, who didn't want to fight,

who remembered the First World War.

So the morale of the Germans was quite low,

but once you take methamphetamine,

your morale actually becomes quite high.

The German tactic of Blitzkrieg

relied on overwhelming air superiority, super-fast tanks,

up-to-the-minute communications, and a tireless and fearless militia.

For the first time in military history,

an army did not have to rest at night,

but could go on for three days and three nights.

So without Pervitin, this obviously wouldn't have worked.

It really helps a person to become a fighting robot.

Imagine this on the scale of a couple of hundred thousand people,

heavily armed, storming into enemy territory.

It just becomes a completely crazy situation.

The side effects of Pervitin is that it does make you a little bit reckless.

It gives you what's… You know, Dutch courage.

On the 13th of May, when they're crossing the River Meuse…

Because these guys have just got to keep going.

The fighting goes on until dusk and beyond.

How do you keep them going? Well, you know, popping a Pervitin tablet,

just on that one occasion, is possibly not a bad idea.

I mean, it's better to suffer the aftereffects of Pervitin than be dead.

To the north, the decoy assault is gathering pace.

The Germans bombard the Port of Rotterdam,

killing around 1,000 people.

So shocked are the Dutch by the number of casualties

and the gutting of the center of Rotterdam

that it actually encourages them to give up.

So already, in just four days, the Dutch are knocked out of the fight.

With the French defenses smashed at Sedan,

Guderian is ordered to halt his advance and wait for the infantry to catch up.

He ignores them.

Flanked by his officers on motorcycles, he charges out in front of his tanks

through the French countryside.

Guderian is very dynamic. He's smart, he's well read,

he's hugely experienced,

and he's not afraid of trying new things.

And he's not one who's shy of making decisions either.

Do I just ignore my superior officers' orders

and go for it, and potentially win Germany

this amazing victory,

or do I hold fire and wait for the infantry just to catch up,

thereby potentially losing momentum and all the rest of it?

And he thinks, "To hell with it. I'm gonna go for it."

The prime minister of France, Paul Reynaud,

is shocked by the speed of the German advance.

He calls Britain's new prime minister with terrible news.

Reynaud, you could tell, was in a terrible panic.

He contacts Churchill, he speaks to him on the telephone,

and he basically says the battle is lost.

Already, in just five days, "I think the battle is lost.

The Germans have broken through in such numbers

that I don't think we can stop them."

The Germans are closing in on the French capital,

and Churchill fears that the French are unable to respond quickly enough

to mount the rapid counterattack that is needed.

Churchill saw that everything was collapsing,

and that very moment, it was important

that the French are continuing to fight

and reacting and fighting and fighting and fighting,

and counter-offensives, and again and again,

and not being in this totally mental breakdown.

On the 16th of May, just six days after taking office,

Churchill flies to Paris to try and stiffen French resolve.

What he's determined to do

is to somehow keep the French in the fight,

because if the French fall out, it's Britain alone.

On the 20th of May 1940,

just ten days after setting out from the German border,

Guderian's decision to ignore his superiors is vindicated

as he reaches the Atlantic Coast.

Well, that actually takes quite a bit of courage to make a decision like that,

you know, because if you get it wrong and it's not a success

and it ends in defeat, you're in big, big trouble,

particularly in a totalitarian militaristic state like Nazi Germany.

But, you know, he has the courage of his convictions, and he goes for it.

And of course, it's absolutely extraordinary, unprecedented in history.

Hitler's great gamble on Manstein's plan has paid off.

The bulk of the Allied forces are now trapped in narrow corridor.

It means that those Allied armies further north,

including the whole of the British Expeditionary Force,

have been cut off from their lines of supply.

So, those troops in Belgium

who are surrounded, of course, on all sides now by Germans

who are fighting also in Belgium and also in Holland,

are completely surrounded by German forces,

and their only way out is either by cutting through them

or being rescued from the Channel coast.

It will take Guderian no more than a few days

to block off that last escape route to the coast,

and thus encircle a million Allied soldiers.

Having become trapped in his pocket, the British start to make plans

to evacuate their troops by sea, and Churchill settles on Calais

as the best place to bring in large ships.

So, he sends three elite British regiments to hold it,

and they're all sacrificed; the Germans annihilate them,

and they lose Calais.

The loss of life is daunting, but the distraction

buys the BEF time to make other plans.

The decision to send the troops to Calais is actually a key bit of the story,

because without that blocking force,

which was ultimately captured by the Germans,

the rest of the BEF and the French armies fighting alongside it

are not gonna have enough time to get to the coast at Dunkirk

to construct a defensive perimeter that will allow them to be rescued.

Just as it seems that hundreds of thousands

of Allied soldiers are within hours of being slaughtered or captured,

Hitler makes a highly controversial decision.

When the German forces have almost

driven the Allies back to the Channel harbors,

Hitler suddenly orders them to stop.

The German tank officers thought,

"I mean, are they crazy? Are they mad? We are going to win.

Yes, we are exhausted, yes, we are short of supplies but…

speed is our lifeline.

Stopping is not an option."

But then they got the clear order,

so yes, they stopped and they were asking themselves,

"What the hell's going on here? That's ridiculous."

One of the reasons was surely that the Generals

had acted independently in the days prior and flouted Hitler's authority.

Hitler wanted to show that he was the supreme war commander

and they had to obey him.

The man behind the decision

is Luftwaffe Commander in Chief Hermann Göring.

He convinces Hitler that the honor of annihilating the Allied soldiers

should fall not to the German Army, but to the Nazi-dominated air force.

Hermann Göring was a very influential Nazi,

and he'd been touting the Luftwaffe as the arm, the weapon of the future.

And he was like, "Look, let me unleash the Luftwaffe.

These are sitting ducks on the beach, I can destroy them from the air

and you can use the army, you can move south and destroy

the rest of the French army, take Paris and pursue them

across the Loire if that's the direction they take.

And the Luftwaffe can do this, you know, without wasting the field army."

Back when they took this weapon from the Germans in Versailles,

they did not expect Germany to rebuild this weapon,

stronger and more powerful, under Adolf Hitler's leadership.

But Göring's plan soon starts to unravel.

Very conveniently for the British, there was ten tenths' cloud cover

for most of the evacuation period, which is made worse by the fact

that the Germans have already bombed the oil refinery at Dunkirk,

and vast clouds of black smoke are pitching 15,000 feet into the sky.

So basically, you can't actually see anything.

The poor visibility makes it very difficult

for the Luftwaffe to dive bomb,

and even when the clouds start to disperse,

the Stukas struggle to hit their targets.

From 6,000 feet when you're starting your dive bombing,

a destroyer crammed full of men just looks like a pencil

and it's kind of wobbling around all over the place,

and it's incredibly difficult to hit something that has been moving

from that distance.

Göring's planes also find themselves

facing an unexpected weapon.

Among the squadrons sent to defend the evacuation

by the RAF's fighter command in the south of England

is a brilliant new fighter plane:

the Supermarine Spitfire.

For the first time, the fighter command

was able to break the German air superiority.

They're sending Spitfires and Hurricanes from Southeast England over to Dunkirk

to cover the evacuation and actually, they do a pretty good job.

They suffer as well, but they're pretty effective

and they shoot down dive bombers… German dive bombers in their droves.

The Luftwaffe bombs a number of Royal Navy ships,

but it fails to annihilate the British and French forces on the beaches

or their rescue boats as Göring had hoped.

Royal Engineers Private Cecil Ingram recalls the evacuation.

It was a mass of soldiers…

and we were being dive-bombed the whole time,

so you were trying to make yourself as safe as possible by sort of,

burying into the sand as far as you could go.

You were lying low.

You could hear and see these Stuka bombers coming down

and the horrendous noise as they revved up and dived down.

To be honest, I was quite scared…

because you didn't know what was happening.

It was… You know, communications had completely broken down.

I think the word to use, it was "chaotic".

So, I eventually got up, walked into the water

with my rifle aloft, very wet.

I managed to get onto a naval ship.

My feet were bleeding.

I spent the journey over to England lying on the deck of this ship.

Royal Army Service Corps Private Stanley William Priest

survived a German air attack over the Channel.

We entered Dunkirk during an air raid

and there were several severe air raids. A direct hit would have killed 100.

And we saw some planes approaching, and they machine-gunned the boat,

killing 60 or so and wounding many others, including myself.

I took shelter in a little alcove.

The bullets were passing an inch or two from my feet,

so had I been on deck, I'd almost certainly have been killed, or…

But I lost a finger, and I got a bullet to my shoulder.

The best Churchill was hoping for

was to save 45,000 soldiers from death or capture.

But thanks to the navy, the little ships and the RAF,

almost 340,000 were rescued.

They got together enormous numbers

of sea-going craft run by civilians,

and these people sailed voluntarily across the Channel

at risk of life and limb to coordinate with the Royal Navy

to rescue a huge proportion of the troops at Dunkirk.

Göring is humiliated.

Having failed to stop the British evacuation from Dunkirk,

Hitler now turns the army towards Paris.

In an effort to prevent their beloved capital city being reduced to rubble,

the French flee, leaving it to be captured, undefended.

There's no doubt that the French were aware

of the German use of bombing

at Rotterdam and also previously against the Poles at Warsaw

and the terrible damage that was done to those cities,

and they did not want the same thing to happen

to all the architectural jewels in Paris.

They declare it an open city and move the government further south.

The Germans march in on the 14th of June.

The French Government moves first to the City of Tours,

and then to Bordeaux.

Prime Minister Reynaud is replaced by 84-year-old First World War hero,

Marshal Philippe Pétain.

Pétain is a bit of a defeatist.

He's pretty convinced that the French have lost the battle.

The most important thing to do now is to avoid revolution,

avoid the French Army from collapsing completely,

and the best way to do that is to negotiate an armistice.

The north of the France and the Atlantic seaboard

are now occupied by the Germans.

The south is designated as the unoccupied zone

and run as a puppet regime by Marshal Pétain

from the spa town of Vichy.

Pétain's authoritarian regime replaces the French motto,

"liberté, égalité, fraternité,"

with a new slogan, "work, family, fatherland."

Hundreds of thousands of French workers are deported to Nazi Germany

to work as forced labor for the war effort.

They replace Germans who were being enlisted to fight

on the Eastern Front.

The speed of the German victory was astonishing.

Blitzkrieg was a brilliant success.

German generals always had in mind,

"I want to have the perfect battle," so war is an art.

The Germans attack with an inferior army.

Inferior in numbers, inferior in quality,

but superior in their mentality.

We, as generals, just want to have the perfect battle.

And so, the whole war plan in 1940

aimed for the perfect battle.

And it was possible, because the British and the French

did every mistake and made every mistake they could make.

The Nazis exploit their triumphant victory over the French

to create a huge spectacle for the newsreels

which finally expunges the humiliating experiences

endured in the First World War.

The German victory over France

was the biggest victory of German military history,

so it was really an outstanding event for Germany,

and Hitler was quite clever to create a propaganda coup

of how they were signing the armistice.

It was not just done somewhere in a hidden place, signing a document,

but it was really made up for the propaganda.

This time, it is Hitler's moment to gloat.

In a repeat of the November 1918 Armistice,

he orders the very same railway carriage

back to the same place at Compiegne

where the Germans surrendered in the First World War.

This time, it would be the French who would be paraded in disgrace

in front of the cameras.

He took the railway carriage out of the museum,

put it on the very place where it was used in the First World War,

and at that very place,

the French leadership has to sign the armistice.

And the symbol was, with that victory…

we, you know, somehow react on the defeat of the First World War.

There were cameras there, it was in all the press,

and only a few days later, interestingly enough,

he decides to take the railway carriage

back to Germany and to destroy the site of the 1918 Armistice,

which, of course, had always been a humiliation for Germany.

So now, we have won.

The war, which had started in 1914, we have won that war.

So, it's a combination of the First and the Second World War,

and we have won that.

And by this, we overcome the defeat of the First World War.

Now, we are not defeated, we won.

And this awful event of having been defeated

in the First World War, it's over, it's passed,

and it's Hitler who's done this.

It's Hitler.

He is, you know, the greatest war leader ever.

Re-sync & redact: BLU DUAINE blu.duaine@protonmail.com