從太空俯瞰二戰【英字 available】(歷史頻道) (從太空俯瞰二戰【英字 available】(歷史頻道))

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December 7th 1941,
the turmoil of WWII enters its 27th month.
Japanese troops storm Shanghai.
German army stand at the gates of Moscow,
leaving 3.5 million casualties in their wake.
Nazi Germany has mainland Europe in its grip
Under siege, Britain hangs on by a thread.
3,000 miles away,
the United States remains in peace.
76% of her citizens support neutrality.
At 7:58 a.m., the peace is shattered.
360 Japanese war planes descend on Pearl Harbor.
WWII has come to America.
This is America's war as never seen before
from the unique vantage point of space,
Witness the key battles unfold,
and the military strategies behind them in stunning detail
revealed other political Alliances, the global battle for resources,
and the astounding awakening of American military and manufacturing might
that will determine the outcome of the greatest conflict ever fought.
The unprovoked Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
will send shock waves across the globe.
But the America has feared the strike for months.
Since 1931,
Japan's Imperial ambitions have grown bolder and bolder.
First Manchuria is invaded,
then China itself.
When France falls to Nazi Germany in 1940,
Japan seizes control of French Indochina
The U.S. response is rapid.
Japan's financial assets are frozen.
and an oil embargo is imposed.
The message is clear:
withdraw from Indochina or be economically crushed.
After the embargo, Japan was faced with two choices:
stop territorial expansion, give in to the demands of the Allies,
or go to war.
Japan chooses war.
in the words of Prime Minister Tōjō,
it is either glory or declined.
it is imperative that they made the first decisive strike.
The Japanese knew they were never going to go
toe to toe with the United States in a long naval war in the Pacific.
They knew they didn't have the economic might and military might
For those calculations that they could (?)administer a knock out blow
to the capital ships of the US Pacific Fleet.
You could destroy the Pacific Fleet.
The ability of Americans to respond to anything for
many months would be taken away.
So the strikes of Pearl Harbor was not just a strike at a symbol of American power.
It blast American power in the Pacific.
What American intelligence cannot see is revealed from space.
Admiral Yamamoto's fleet
departs Japan on the longest assault in history.
Avoiding shipping lanes and land mass,
they arrive on-scene 275 miles from their target.
it's the perfect vantage point,
beyond the range of America's defensive radar
but at the optimum strike distance for its force of
414 cutting-edge aircraft
--- the jewels in the crown, the Mitsubishi Zero.
It's faster than anything they had used before.
It's incredibly maneuverable and has extreme range
but while the technology was pretty good,
what mattered at Pearl Harbor was the men behind it.
It was the pilots.
The Japanese pilots had already been at war for years.
So they're well-trained crews.
You add on top of that
they had been planning on that attack for a long period of time
So they had been running wargames
stimulating and going through the action again and again.
So basically, many of them talked about how they could have done it if going in blind.
At 7:55 a.m.
the first wave of bombers swoop from the sky.
On the deck of the USS Arizona is Don Strap.
We knew right away that they were Japanese planes, and
we knew that they were bombing for ___ and something was really wrong.
Planes were strafing and dive bombing and
it's a ... horrible experience and a horrible sight.
There was a high altitude bomber dropped like(?) a 2,000 pound bomb.
and made it just devastating to everything in its path
(?)The concussion and
the smoke and fire (?)was horrendous.
It just was like you lost your home.
Of the battleships at anchor,
the Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and California are sunk,
the rest severely damaged.
In 68 minutes, Japan has crippled the heart of American Pacific Fleet.
From the Japanese perspective, the attack on Pearl Harbor
succeeded beyond the most
optimistic expectations. When you consider the losses
that the Japanese suffered in this attack, it is essentially nothing.
The Japanese lose 64 men to 3,649 U.S. casualties,
a human damage ratio of 57:1.
The Japan's margin of victory hides 2 major flaws in the attack.
But the Japanese failed to systematically attacked the oil fields
the oil storage tanks at Pearl Harbor.
If they'd spent one more sortie taking out those oil tanks,
they'd have crippled the whole Pacific Fleet (?)which would have
the fuel supplies to keep going.
More significant other ships the Japanese failed to target.
The American aircraft were absent from Pearl Harbor
at the time of the Japanese attack.
And as things evolved very quickly, it became clear that aircraft carriers
destined to become the most significant naval assets for either side
in the Pacific War and the American carriers were untouched.
Oil supplies and air domination,
2 factors that will dictate the fate of WWII,
and Japan fails to damage either.
Instead, it has waken the full wrath of the sleeping of American Giant.
Pearl Harbor infuriated the American people
and also infuriated American military.
Massive casualties, destruction of most the Pacific Fleet
If you want to do one thing to unite a country
that before this it has been rather divided
about what to do about the war, Pearl Harbor was that.
This was like a lightning rod throughout the American population.
No longer was President Roosevelt limited in his options.
He had the United States population that was angry and unified
and desired revenge against Japan.
Her era of isolationism is over.
America is at war.
And begins its rise to become the most powerful nation on the planet.
Washington calculates victory will cost 300 billion dollars,
4.4 trillion in today's money,
over one and a half times the total U.S. federal budget.
The government can raise half through increased taxes.
For the rest, it must turn to the public.
To raise 300 billion dollars was then (?)viewed as insurmountable challenge
because basically
we had to get half the population of the United States to buy bonds.
And what we were saying is we were in WWII,
We were in this to win.
It's a fight of good vs. evil.
And you, on an individual level, are going to make a difference.
To guarantee success, the ad men of New York,
recruit America's most potent propaganda asset.
We had a Hollywood machine.
America has mass market in movies.
They knew the power of Hollywood. They knew the power celebrities.
Over 300 movie icons joined the stars over America campaign.
Criss-crossing the nation,
Chicago, 2 huge celebrity rallies sell over 15 million dollars in bonds.
New York, a three-way baseball game generates 56 million dollars.
By the end of war, bonds campaigns raise 187.5 billion dollars.
To get everybody online behind one goal
and make the transaction is huge.
America and its beleaguered Allies are going to need every cent.
Four days after Pearl Harbor,
Nazi Germany declares war on the United States.
She now faces 2 vast and battle-hardened powers on 2 fronts.
When America went to the war,
It looked as if the military aggressors were going to win.
Seen from space,
America's peril is clear,
Her fleet is in disarray
and her Pacific assets
at the mercy of rampant Japan.
On the other side of the planet,
her strongest military ally Great Britain is buckling under siege from
Nazi Germany.
America is at the epicenter of the greatest conflict in history.
Roosevelt must make the biggest call of any U.S. presidency:
Which enemy to engage first?
Frank Delano Roosevelt decided that Germany was the one that
could take down our closest friends around the world
and they had to make sure that Britain survived.
Keeping Britain afloat was essential
to the long term prospects of victory.
It stood as a large aircraft carrier
that would enable an invasion onto the continent.
If Britain fell under Nazi domination,
the challenge would be almost insurmountable.
For Roosevelt, the future of great Britain
is the future of the war.
But after 17 months of fighting alone,
its survival rests on a knife edge.
Isolated, Britain's only hope is to keep her supply routes open,
a fragile lifeline German Admiral Dönitz seeks to destroy.
Britain depended on the import of 5 million tons of stuff every month.
German Admiral Dönitz argued very persuasively:
"We can subtract a million tons a month, we will bring Britain to its knee."
Dönitz's lethal weapon is the U-boat.
Capable of traveling thousands of miles submerged
and armed with a deadly cocktail of deck guns, mines and torpedoes,
it is the perfect weapon to starve Britain into submission.
When they attack, they're sending over 9,000 tons
of supplies to the bottom of the ocean.
With one munition, one torpedo
when it detonates, it creates this void underneath the vessel
that cracks(?) the vessel to collapse.
it's the difference between
being stabbed and someone breaking your back.
It's a killer.
Churchill introduces naval convoys
to protect the merchant fleets.
Dönitz's response is devastating.
Admiral Dönitz introduced this thing called the Rudeltaktik,
wolfpack attack tactics. A Rudel is a pack of animals.
and instead of the approaching singly as submarines done in the past,
the Germans would have their U-boats stringing out in these long patrol lines.
and then they would use radio signals to congregate the pack
and overwhelm the defense of the convoy.
The results are devastating.
When you get caught by a pack of these,
you might lose half or more of the convoy.
In 12 months,
900 ships are sunk.
Only 29 U-boats are destroyed.
It's a war of attrition. Britain is losing fast.
Winston Churchill knows it's one big thing.
In 1940 that for Britain to be able to fight this war,
you need American help and you can't do it alone.
Churchill tirelessly lobbies Roosevelt for American support.
Though officially neutral, Roosevelt cuts a deal.
The U.S. gives 50 destroyers to Britain
to keep it in the fight,
but at a price.
In return,
Britain hands over 8 of its overseas bases to America,
and dismantles its preferential trading system with its colonies.
It's a very mixed deal for Britain because on the one hand, it helps Britain fight the war.
They couldn't have done it without American support materially.
On the other hand, it accelerated the collapse of the British empire.
It makes the Empire more and more unaffordable
which to Winston Churchill
(?)that's a very painful deal that one the public has to be mind.
December 1941,
America enters the war.
Its first act of aggression is to join Britain in the battle of the Atlantic,
a strategy that meets with disaster.
When America enters the war,
the battle of the Atlantic actually takes a turn,
worse for the Allies.
The amount of Allied shipping that sunk
goes up by these astronomical amounts.
By mid-1942,
2,703 Allied ships are sunk,
a U-boat kill ratio of 36 to 1.
It's an unsustainable rate of loss.
Even with America fighting alongside,
the liberty of Britain and the freedom of Europe
hang by a thread.
Mid 1942,
Britain remains in a stranglehold of the German U-boat menace.
American ships coming to its aid are being destroyed at alarming rates.
To reverse their fortunes,
the Allies must gain the upper hand in the intelligence war.
The most critical factor in the Battle of Atlantic
was the exchange of information between the Americans and the British.
(?)It maximized by the technology of electrical capability on both sides.
The precedent for this vital collaborations is the Tizard Mission,
15 months before the Pearl Harbor attack.
With Nazi invasion seemingly inevitable,
Henry Tizard, head of the British aeronautical committee,
persuades Churchill to gift America every scientific innovation Britain holds
in exchange for access to U.S. production lines.
The blueprints are packed into a single trunk.
Embarking from Britain, it reaches Washington D.C. in September 1940.
That box was described by one American official
as much an important cargo that ever reached ashores(?).
The trunk contains the memorandum on the feasibility of the atomic bomb,
designs for jet engines,
rockets,
superchargers,
gyroscope gun sights,
submarine detection devices,
self sealing fuel tanks,
plastic explosives,
and perhaps the most important invention of the WWII,
a working magnetron #12.
--an advancing (?)__ radar technology a thousand times more effective
than the best American counterpart.
This was revolutionary. You can put it into an aircraft,
you can put it on a ship,
then you can take that technology
and take it anywhere on the battle space.
American assembly lines begin mass-producing the device
that will change the course of the war.
Its first challenge:
to close the deadly mid-Atlantic gap.
From space,
the bone yard of Allied shipping is startlingly revealed(?).
You can fly missions from the United States. You can fly missions from Britain.
But you can't quite close everything.
You've got the middle land --- a gap in the middle.
The U-boats realized that and concentrated in that area.
By April 1943,
3,450 Allied ships have been lost.
But new carriers are launched.
loaded with long-range aircraft
fitted with the magnetron #12.
And the gap begins to close.
It turns the Atlantic from this wide mass
in which the U-Boat can hide in to know,
"I can find you out there."
As British codebreakers cracked the German enigma code,
the final piece of the Ally resurgence falls into place.
And the tactical and technological advantage
is exploited in the convoy battle known as ONS-5.
Among all the convoy battles, one of the most important ones was ONS-5 in April '43.
It's important really because it demonstrated the area
how far the Allies'd gone.
42 ships of the slow bond ONS-5 convoy
leave Liverpool for Canada.
For Dönitz, it is a perfect target.
Dönitz's feeling this freight(?) has a urgency
like he needs to sink more, more tons of shipping
and he actually presses his luck in this battle.
The first wave of U-Boats sinks 13 Ally ships.
But as thick fog falls, the advantage switches.
Armed with the German codes and advanced radar,
the Allies strike back with impunity.
Dönitz (?)quite __ and he shouldn't bring in more U-boats than he should
which are then in fact shot out by the convoy.
After the battle, Dönitz says (?)Battle of the Atlantic is over
because he sees how expert
the British and Americans
have become in(?) detecting U-boats, chasing them down, and killing them.
With ONS-5,
the Battle of the Atlanta is all but won.
And the astonishing transformation of American industry
can start to dictate the fortunes of war.
With the money and the might to out- produce the Axis,
America embarks on an unprecedented industrial and social revolution.
You had a War Industrial Board and they looked around the United States
and said this particular place is going to be where we're gonna build tanks, we're gonna build planes here.
And so the population went there.
It's as if in WWII somebody had picked up
the North American continent at the eastern seaboard
and raised it and tipped it, and everything
people, money, machines, everything
just slid westward across the continent.
The population of California swells by 53%,
Oregon by 40%,
and Washington by 37.
19 million women become the core of the American labor force,
working in war factories, transportation and agriculture across the nation.
Manufacturers of all sizes become a critical part of the war effort.
Typewriter manufacturers, can goods manufacturers,
they are all converted, they're all mobilized, if you will, to support the war effort.
Car factories turned into making bombers and
refrigerator factories turned into making armored cars
(?)Not for nothing it's called the production miracle.
American industry produces 87,000 ships and landing craft,
100,000 tanks and armored vehicles,
300,000 aircraft,
2 million trucks,
20 million rifles and small arms,
and 41 billion rounds of ammunition
enough to kill the population of the world 17 times over.
Yet America's decision to engage Germany first comes at a price.
The Japanese centrifugal offensive was a shock to everybody.
They seemed unstoppable.
Japan advances through the Pacific unchecked.
capturing American, British and Dutch territories
in a string of decisive victories.
Within 6 months,
they have near complete control of the Pacific Theater.
They captured territory for 2 main reasons.
First one was for resources.
Dutch's industries provided oil and rubber
which they're gonna need to keep the war machine going.
They also knew America will eventually respond.
As so, a lot of territories were going to be barriers
to set up against the Americans when they came back across.
April 1942, America strikes back.
Launching from the USS Hornet, 16 B-25s
kick start the next phase of war
by bombing Tokyo.
For the Americans, the raid is a chance of strike back.
Even though it didn't really do very much material damage,
but it made major impact on Japanese leadership.
The military was embarrassed
that they allowed their ... the emperor to be threatened like that.
The Japanese respond,
setting their sights on America's most westerly Pacific base.
From space,
their strategy is clear.
Seizing the island of Midway when extend their defensive perimeters
deep into American waters.
And their plan is
"Work on a surprise to the Americans. We are going to seize the Midway.
and then they're going to be forced to come out and fight us on our terms."
The problem for the Japanese is
the Americans already know they're coming.
The story of the American code breakers
is one of these lesser-known but that's one of the most important
parts of the story 'why America wins in the Pacific.'
From June 1939, the U.S. navy combat intelligence unit
under the command of Joseph Rushmore
has been attempting to decipher JN-25, the Japanese naval code.
Using punch card technology and mathematical analysis
they work around the clock.
In the lead up to Midway,
the decisive breakthrough is made.
They break the code.
They knew the Japanese were coming.
They knew where they were coming to Midway.
They even knew when they were coming.
U.S. intelligence
finally grasps the full-scale of the Japanese attack.
The situation is highly precarious.
For the weakened fleet
and up against the battle-hardened enemy force,
Midway is the moment of truth.
In anyway the Midway battle would work for America
was to have their carries in the right place
and to have the strength against Japanese just at the right time.
The Americans had got to get in the first major shot.
At 4:00 a.m., Japanese bombing of Midway begins.
What Admiral Nagumo can't see
is 275 miles away, safely outside the range of Japanese radar,
4 U.S. carriers are poised for a counterattack.
Only at 7:40 a.m.,
does the Japanese reconnaissance plane spot the U.S. fleet.
Battles often(?) decided by minutes and seconds.
At Midway, it's filled with important minutes and seconds.
When the late spotter plane finally finds American fleet,
Admiralty Nagumo sticks(?) with the dilemma doubt:
Do I outfit my aircraft for bombs to bomb the Midway as they already are,
or do I stop, take those bombs off and put on torpedoes,
so they go after America Fleet?
And whatever decision he comes upon
is going to be a major impact on the rest of the battle.
While they were doing __
there's along critical waiting point
with aircraft on the decks huge quantities of explosive around
for the Japanese, this was the riskiest moment.
It is the moment America has been waiting for.
41 Douglas torpedo bombers descend for the attack.
But the America torpedo bombers show up unescorted, completely vulnerable.
They're shot down like fish in the barrel
They just don't survive.
35 out of 41 planes are lost,
not a single bomb (按:torpedo) hits the Japanese fleet.
it seems that Japan has struck the decisive blow.
And all of a sudden,
the dive bombers're coming and the whole war changes.
A 2nd wave of the American dive bombers descends.
There's a Japanese fleet with no air cover
and decks're covered with airplanes, and torpedos, and bombs.
They are just tortures to be lived(?).
and Dive bombers were coming in
and 3 Japanese aircraft carriers are destroyed in minutes.
As the final Japanese carrier was destroyed
along with 250 elite Japanese pilots,
the balance of power has dramatically swung in America's favor.
We had 7 new carriers under construction.
They had 1 carrier under construction.
So they were never going to be able to replaces these carriers.
What it meant is they'll be thrown back on the defensive for the duration of war.
In a global theater of war,
control of the air is proving to be one of the determining factors for victory.
On the other side of the planet,
America's first strikes on Nazi Germany
are coming from the sky.
The major cities in Europe are the new front line of the war.
6 months on from Pearl Harbor
and the battle fronts of WWII are at a tipping point,
America and her Allies have stalled the momentum of German aggression in the Battle of Atlantic.
And halt Japanese territorial expansion in the decisive victory at Midway.
And in June 1942,
the first American bombers arrive in Great Britain.
They join a brutal battle for air supremacy
that has raged over Europe since the outbreak of the war.
Germany's Luftwaffe squadrons draw first blood
bringing Poland,
then the Low Countries and France
to their knees.
The fall of France in 1940
(?)really seemed they vindicate the superiority of Blitzkrieg.
There'd been concerns that the Germans maybe unstoppable.
With Nazi domination almost complete,
Hitler turns the Luftwaffe against his last remaining opposition, Great Britain.
It is imperative
that its Royal Air Force holds.
The states in the Battle of Britain for British are survival.
July 10th 1940, the Battle of Britain begins.
The Luftwaffe pounds British defenses and it's major cities.
The RAF adapts very quickly
and begins to shoot down more German bombers and fighters
than the Germans can replace.
1,900 German aircraft are destroyed in 113 days.
It is an unsustainable rate of attrition.
So they were forced to cancel the Battle of Britain
and began massing force to put the invasion of Soviet Union.
The Battle of Britain is Hitler's first major defeat of WWII.
Airpower is the new orthodoxy of the modern warfare.
Roosevelt orders vast squadrons of aircraft to be manufactured.
At Ford's Willow Run plant in Michigan,
an astounding 8,500 bombers are produced.
Over 127,000 bombers are made.
13,600 are transported to British airfield.
The assault on Germany
can now enter a new phase of intensity.
__ the air force in Britain had a number of impacts, number one,
guaranteed that the Germans were not able to launch a major attack against Britain.
They had the Battle of Britain there, just too many Ally planes there.
It also was a boost to British morale that Americans finally come in mass.
But the American airmen
are entering a new kind of warfare
where sheer weight of numbers is no guarantee of success.
The amount of weapons that are being thrown up to stop the bombers
is having an enormous toll.
The survivability rate is going to be 11 to 1 to the infantry.
It's actually safer to be an infantryman on the ground in European in a foxhole
than it is to be in this advanced machine flying high above.
After losing 1,135 bombers,
the RAF switches to nighttime raids.
But in the dark,
only 1.5% of all bombs fall within 3 miles of the target.
The American decided that's too inefficient
that you had to do it in day light where you can see the target.
They thought we'd got more ever defended bombers.
We think this would work.
American confidence is based on the B-17,
the most sophisticated war machine of its times.
The B-17 is an amazing aircraft.
They called it the Flying Fortress worldwide.
It has 13 fifty caliber machine guns
arrayed all around to give it a __ fire,
You have fire coming out the front
You have fire coming out the flanks
below, above, and in the rear.
It was believed that he could fly in broad daylight
unescorted by fighter aircraft
deep into the heart of the enemy territory
and unleashed an amazing amount of ordnance on enemy targets.
With unswerving faith in the B-17s,
the American Eighth Air Force plan a dual raid
to destroy the heart of German aviation production.
The Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission was seen as
a way to really prove that
precision bombing idea would work.
They seemed to have picked out the key industry that they can knock out
that would cripple German economy.
They had the battle plan they thought would get them to the target.
Two squadrons of B-17s,
commanded by Colonel Lemay and Brigadier General Williams,
prepared to attack simultaneously splitting German defenses.
Almost immediately, the plan begins to unravel.
It's a foggy day in England. Lemay got his guys up.
The other bomber division couldn't get up.
The decision was made that they couldn't land Lemay's guys. They sent them on.
When the Regensburg mission goes in on itself,
the bombers were sitting ducks,
not only for flak,
but for the Germans they were gathering from all over to halt and fence them.
The Schweinfurt leg then comes in,
-- enough time after the Regensburg leg __, so the Germans can refit and rearm.
And it goes through the same ___.
60 US bombers are destroyed,
double the losses ever suffered in a single raid.
The problems for the Allies was that
we took the marketing of the Flying Fortress seriously.
We took the idea that it can protect itself with its own machine guns
and not have to worry about escorted seriously.
And that didn't work.
The flaw is startlingly clear from above,
the lack of fighter escort protection,
the fighters have limited range,
and can only protect the bombers part way to their targets,
leaving them dangerously exposed.
Then we get the real game changer. We get the P-51,
P-51 was an amazing fighter on so many different levels.
But the real key is it had an amazing range.
It went with the American bombers all the way in, all the way out.
That meant we could take down the German defenses.
We could create true air dominance.
And that's when you see
the Luftwaffe essentially swept from the skies.
Once the Luftwaffe is destroyed,
we have pretty much free reign over the German skies.
We really start to take down the oil industry.
Oil, the single most essential commodities of WWII.
The possession of large supplies of oil
was the only way to victory.
Without oil, mechanized armies could not fight.
From space, the battle for the world's oil reserves is revealed.
America is self sufficient.
It's oil fields are the cornerstone of Allied military strength.
In contrast, Germany's stockpile of 20 million barrels
is rapidly running out.
One of the weaknesses of the German war effort was couldn't it access to
unlimited quantities oil? They then decided to use
synthetic oil and synthetic oil was really critical
for making (?)up that difference.
Synthetic oil, produced from coal and natural gas,
is the life blood of Hitler's mechanized forces.
As Allied air raids cripple Germany synthetic fuel production,
Hitler's best hope is to seize the Caucuses oil fields.
Deep inside Russia, the 2 sides clash
in the bloodiest fighting history has ever seen.
At stake is the outcome of WWII.
September 1940,
while America remains neutral,
Hitler has mainland Europe in his grip.
But in the skies over Britain,
the Nazis relentless westward advance is halted.
It is a defeat that forces Hitler
to turn his attention towards the ultimate goal,
the conquest and annihilation of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union represented the nexus
of everything that Hitler hated.
He saw it as a bastion of communism and Judaism
and if it were not defeated,
ultimately the Soviet Union would destroy Germany
and destroy the Aryan race.
But there's also just sheer pragmatism here.
The Soviet Union was the groß ___ Wirtschaft
the great economic space.
They needed the raw materials,
the oil, the food,
and by annexing the Soviet Union
it may be able to sustain a long war
and fend off any British-American attacks.
June 22 1941,
Hitler launches Operation Barbarossa,
the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Across an 1,800 mile front,
Hitler's army of over 4 million Wehrmacht troops
surges forward, destroying everything in its path.
This was the largest army
that it had been assembled in the history of the world.
And the Germans demonstrated an operational and tactical mastery
that the Soviet simply could not match.
And the barbarity is almost incomprehensible.
Following the front-line troops,
there were special action squads.
Their purpose was to identify and murder
political leaders and ultimately Jews in the occupied areas.
The slaughter of a million Soviets
is the merciless testing ground for the holocaust.
The SS accelerate the genocide of Jews
and others seen as undesirable.
Over 9 million are slaughtered.
This was industrialized mass murder.
This is something that ... that hadn't even appeared in the middle ages.
By the winter of 1941,
their brutal advance has brought them to the brink of victory.
Leningrad is under siege.
And German panzer divisions are at the gates of Moscow.
Seeking a devastating tactical and ideological blow,
Hitler turns his attention towards Stalingrad.
Stalingrad was an important target for Hitler
because he knew by taking it, he'll insult Stalin.
He also knew he will forced Stalin to try to take it back
and he would be able to wear down the Red Army.
But also it was an important city because it would permit him to pivot south
into the Caucuses and take all these oil producing regions
and let Germany self-sufficient in petroleum.
For both sides,
the stakes for the battle of Stalingrad are immense.
For Hitler, to fail at Stalingrad would be an enormous blow to the Nazi myth.
It would be an enormous blow to the war itself.
Similarly, Joseph Stalin was unrelenting.
He would not tolerate defeat. He would not tolerate pulling back.
To surrender or to give ground would be met by the utmost sanction.
The Luftwaffe drop a thousand tons of bombs on Stalingrad
before two and a half million troops clash.
The ferocity of the Battle of Stalingrad
was something straight out of hell.
It was not uncommon for battles to be raging
not over parts of the city, or city blocks
but literally for different floors within one building.
In some cases, Soviet reinforcements came forward without weapons
facing certain death.
and yet, again and again and again they came.
As the battle rages,
the Red Army launches Operation Uranus.
What Hitler's high command cannot see is revealed from space.
Over one million Soviet soldiers outflank the German position
before cutting through the enemy's rear.
Operation Uranus was a complete shock.
And suddenly Stalingrad was encircled.
Cut off from supply, the Germans
are plunged into the harshest of Russian winters.
In sub-human conditions, they begin to disintegrated.
It was freezing cold. Food supply began to decline.
Guns jammed. It was a nightmare.
It's difficult to convey in simple words
what life experience was like
After five months under siege,
Hitler's once-mighty 6th Army capitulate,
the first German field army to do so.
Nearly 2 million have fallen.
But for the Soviets, the tide is turning.
The boost of Soviet morale can scarcely be overstated.
German prisoners were marched through Moscow
and this proved that the Nazi soldiers were not supermen.
instead, they saw German soldiers who quit, who surrendered,
who could not match the determination of the Soviet soldiers.
For Hitler, the defeat of is devastating.
instinctively, he strikes back.
Adolf Hitler attempted to regain the strategic initiatives.
to close a gap, a bulge if you will,
center around Kursk.
Seen from above, Hitler's objective is clear ---eliminate the bulge,
concentrate his forces and regain the initiative.
For the Allies, it is critical that its newest military partner holds.
The eastern front is vital for the Allies because
it absorbs the bulk of Germany's fighting. powers.
To put it very brutally, the Soviets do most of the fightings and most of the dying on that.
President Roosevelt
commits over 11 billion dollars of Lend-Lease supplies to Stalin.
Yet traditional trade routes through Europe are blocked.
Getting U.S. aid into the Soviet Union
is one of the greatest Allied logistical challenges of the war.
There were 3 routes that we could use:
one was the North Atlantic route
into the northern Arctic ports Archangel and Murmansk,
stormy seas, icing(?)
hard to get to.
And there was one across the Pacific to Vladivostok.
But everything had to be unloaded in Siberia
and then trucked into Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway
which is slow and time-consuming.
And then there was one around the Cape of Good Hope,
up into Iran and into Southern Russia that way.
The Persian Gulf route is crucial to Russian success.
But making it viable is a monumental task.
We had to build a supply chain from scratch.
There was no infrastructure.
The harbors were not there.
We had to construct those.
Allied engineers build wharves, jetties and piers.
Simultaneously, 450 miles of roads are constructed,
and 2,000 miles of railway modernized.
With all routes now open,
the U.S. pump 16 million tons of Lend-Lease into Russia,
including our(?) gasoline,
ammunition,
an entire military telecommunication system,
14 million pairs of boots,
and enough food to offered every Soviet soldier
one (?)square meal a day for over a year.
But most significant are the half a million Studebaker trucks
supplied by the factories of Detroit.
Studebaker truck was a real game changer
because it gives the Soviet Army
the ability to operate on a massive scale
with a far front logistics.
The other thing that these trucks gave them
is an advantage literally within the battle itself.
The Russians had a lot of artillery.
You match that artillery with the trucks
and suddenly they've got these flying anti-tank batteries
to literally exhibit and (?)cross different parts of the battlefield.
To give the Soviets the tactical advantage at Kursk,
the Allies supply one final thing
--- intelligence of the German offensive plans.
Soviets knew they were coming
and so they created defenses of the scale
that really hadn't been seen before in the war.
When people talked about the Maginot Line in France,
this thing was Maginot Line put on steroids.
From space, the full enormity of the Soviet defenses becomes clear.
Three defensive lines
contain a fast interconnected web of thousands antitank guns,
pre-sighted artillery zones and over 400,000 mines.
It is the largest defense network ever constructed over 50 miles deep.
July fifth 1943,
over 2,000 tanks and 2 million troops engage.
The level of intensity at the battle of Kursk was extraordinary.
Large numbers of tanks and soldiers
were fighting the most brutal degree at the very close quarters.
There was brutal hand to hand combat, flame throwers,
thousands of tanks, covered with artillery raining down.
All of this would combine to create a scene
that would resemble hell on earth.
After eleven days, the German offensive collapse,
only a third of the way to their objective.
Hitler's attempt to crush the Soviet Union has failed.
Hitler's worst nightmare had come to pass.
Germany would now be faced
with the war on two fronts and the war of attrition.
Stalin gains the initiative on the Eastern Front at a huge costs,
over 9 million Soviet casualties.
In contrast, America has yet to put a single soldier
on the battlefields of Europe.
Stalin was deeply frustrated with Ally
dangling about opening a second front.
He assumed there was a conspiracy
that Churchill and Roosevelt
were going to fight to the last Russian.
Then the British and Americans would cross the channel
and harvest all the spoils of war
that Russians having won with their own blood and treasure.
Prior to a full-scale invasion of Europe,
Roosevelt elects to blood his troops in North Africa.
The North Africa campaign was a testing ground
for the American army
which yet to face the German military in a significant way.
Overconfident and inexperienced,
the U.S. military is about to receive a baptism of fire
that will shack it to its core.
The disaster Kasserine Pass was a seminal event.
As the American Pacific drive towards Japan accelerates
and as Stalin in the east
the Allied bombing campaign in the west
continue to weaken the Third Reich,
America prepares to test its troops in North Africa.
They will join the desert campaign that has been raging for over two years.
June 10th 1940,
Italy, under Benito Mussolini, joins the Axis.
And with Germany, plans to force Britain from North Africa.
North Africa was a vital front for the British in WWII
because it was the vital hinge of the British Empire.
A German and Italian victory
will open up the untapped reserves of the Middle East
and seizes the Suez Canal
that connects Britain to its Empire.
The Suez Canal is used to protect our cost.
The bottom line if you move a large quantities of equipment,
you got to use the sea lanes.
and that's true(?) today is, it was then.
September 1940, the Axis invades,
For two years, they drive the British back,
But the advance is halted
as German Field Marshal Rommel is defeated at El Alamein.
To capitalize on this victory,
Churchill lobbies Roosevelt for support.
But the majority of Presidential advisers have their doubts.
Initially, most Americans senior military personnel
thought the campaign in North Africa
as a diversion from the main effort,
essentially a waste of time.
Decisively, Roosevelt overrides his counsel.
FDR's decision to send American forces out North Africa
probably the most important strategic decision of WWII.
It really gave us a place where we could land the U.S. Army
bring it to the battle against secondary German units,
not the units we encountered in Europe.
And so it was a brilliant move.
Since the Pearl Harbor attack,
a vast American army has been amassing,
hunger for their first taste of war.
People were lined up at the recruiting stations.
(?)All voiced up in arms. I graduate in February
and i was in uniform in March.
This country had been violated that's what we thought.
And everybody just wanted to get busy and do something about it.
Volunteers and inductee from the draft swell the ranks
as America rises to become the largest military power in the world.
Before the war,
the total strength of the U.S. Army including its air corps
was well below 200,000.
There would be over 40 fold increase in the space of six years.
During the war, the armed forces had encompassed
16 million men under arms.
That's 13% of the entire population.
With this vast army assemble,
America is primed for Operation Torch,
then the largest amphibious invasion in history.
Torch actually was very important with us for these days.
It was a huge uh... operation.
Uh... it was logistically extremely complex
Torch was a monumental challenge for the U.S.
because we hadn't won the Battle of Atlantic yet.
We have to escort troops, ammunition, supplies
from the United States direct to North Africa,
escort troops from Great Britain down to North Africa,
through waters patrolled by German submarines.
Then we have to land on a hostile shore.
November 8th 1942,
73,000 Allied troops disgorge onto the beaches.
And immediately the problems begin.
Forces on the landings of North Africa
There is a great saying that everything that can go wrong in an amphibious landing
and virtually everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
On the landing craft you didn't run out of the front
right onto the beach, instead
you had to jump over the side.
That of course is not the most efficient way
to get in there. it's the most dangerous. Its the slowest.
A number of our craft get stuck on sand bars.
When they drive them out, the electronics get fried.
(?)Fortunately, they'd fight the Vichy France. She would fight half heartedly.
And had they been attacking the Germans in 1944,
the Japanese in 1944,
experience would have been a lot uh... a lot worse.
As French Vichy troops loyal to Hitler capitulate,
U.S. forces head for Tunisia
and there the first clash with the full strength German war machine.
They're really blissfully ignorant of the realities of modern war.
I mean They've got their trucks. They've got their tanks. They've got their rifles.
They've got their very complicated chain of command,
from army to corps, division, brigade, regiment, battalion.
They think that (?)those are fine.
U.S. forces engage Rommel outside town of Faid.
Making an initial breakthrough,
they pursue retreating panzer divisions.
From space,
Rommel's master tactic is revealed.
The panzers are decoy,
luring U.S. forces into a trap.
They fall prey to the techniques of double envelopment by the Germans.
With some very good weapons like the German 88,
The 88-mm gun
was literally a world-class antitank weapon.
Not only could it shoot at further distance,
but it had and incredible (?)kill rate.
It's basically just lethal.
This thing is diabolique.
In many cases,
Americans either surrendered
or dropped their weapons and brand.
The American performance,
to put it charitably, was dismal.
U.S. forces are push back into Kasserine Pass
where under constant attack.
The untested units fall apart.
To raise our forces to 60 million people in a hurry,
It means that at the initial stages of armed conflict
you're going to have troops in the front line.
You have no taste of the battle before this moment.
Dwight Eisenhower, for example, becomes the supreme Allied commander.
Before WWII, for North Africa campaign,
he had never heard a bullet fired in anger in his entire life.
He had no ... no actual combat experience.
Further disaster is averted
when reinforcements from the British 1st Army arrive.
And with Field Marshal Montgomery approaching from the east,
Rommel retreats.
Frank Gervasi witnesses the aftermath.
We got to Kasserine Pass.
and we had patrols going up.
You still smelled the flesh
through(?) the burn out tanks and
human beings in there. It is bad.
We took a __ of beaten(?)
Don't forget we were against Germany's best, Rommel's __(troops?)
We had the equipment, but we didn't have the experiences.
America suffers 6,500 casualties.
Its first land battle in WWII is a disaster.
Kasserine was a tremendous defeat for the United States.
just no way that should occur(?) that. On the other hand,
Kasserine is the best thing ever happening to the US Army.
Better get your butt kicked there
than get your butt kicked at Normandy.
There are some changes made in policies
in how we'll get operated but there's also some key leadership changes.
Got Eisenhower earning his spurs(?).
Got George Patton.
And lessons learned in North Africa
could to be applied for the rest of WWII.
The new U.S. Army doctrines insure a dramatic turnaround.
First, Tunisia falls,
followed by Sicily,
preparing the way for the Allied invasion of Italy.
And on the other side of the world, the Pacific War
enters a new phase of ferocity.
The carnage was phenomenal.
From the ashes of Pearl Harbor, the American war machine
is approaching full potential,
engaging her enemies on 3 continents.
In the Pacific,
troop numbers grow by 457%.
Its fleet triples in size.
With this vast force assembled,
America's final drive towards Japan begins.
American strategies at
dual prong approach with Admiral Nimitz
for the navy marines going through the South Pacific,
General MacArthur with the most army forces coming through the Southwest Pacific,
both approaching Japan from different axis.
Admiral Nimitz's flotilla is the largest in history,
the perfect weapon to destroy Japan's defensive strongholds.
It is this massive fleet
of aircraft carriers, destroyers,
fast battleships, backed by this long logistics train
of supply ships, oilers, hospital ships, you name it.
This thing was the validity(?) and industrialization personified.
The flotilla targets Saipan,
one of the Mariana Islands.
It's airfields can become the launch pad
for a sustained aerial bombardment of Japan.
Emperor Hirohito demands his 32,000 troops station there to defend at all costs.
For the Japanese, defeat was not an option.
Retreat was not an option.
If it meant losing everything and everyone,
they would do it in pursuit of victory.
June 1944,
8,000 U.S. marines hit the beaches under intense Japanese fire.
The marines enter a nightmare.
At the end of the day, the Japanese have won job which is inflict
heavy casualties on people attacking them.
If you're in the front line,
you can be one of the casualties.
Facing fanatical resistance,
a further 80,000 troops land.
All depend on naval support.
But what U.S. commander Admiral Spruance cannot see
are 55 Japanese ships rapidly approaching.
For the Japanese, this really was going to be their last shot.
They had to have success here in this particular battle.
They were not gonna build and ever field this kind of force again.
Responding to dangerous,
Spruance splits his force,
dispatching one half to engage the Japanese fleet,
As the 2 forces clash,
U.S. technological superiority dominates.
Most notably, 480 newly developed Hellcats.
Hellcat's just an incredible weapon.
It's fast.
It can take hits and still keep going.
It's well armored.
And on top of that,
it's now flown by
elite pilots.
The Japanese lost most of their well-trained pilots on the battles.
They couldn't replace them.
They didn't have the fuel to train.
Their aircraft weren't as good
and that's what really creates the Turkey Shot of the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
Over the next 8 hours,
429 Japanese planes are destroyed,
compared to 29 American,
a kill ratio of 15:1.
The scale of the slaughter between the American pilots and Japanese
is significant enough for WWII. After the Battle of Marianas,
the Japanese aircraft carrier forces is no longer a factor in the War of the Pacific.
On land, American troops continue
to face ferocious resistance.
The Pacific War was a bitter and cruel war.
But at Saipan, it became more and more evident
how deep was the
Japanese ferocity or the ferociousness
(?)that Japanese capacity to resist
On these hair raising stories
about how the Americans had to lower drums of gasoline
and exploded them in the caves which the Japanese were hiding
because they could knock(?) these people to come out and surrender
The suicidal fever is not confined to soldiers.
8,000 Japanese civilians leap to their deaths.
The American witnesses could not believe their eyes.
They were seen in this mass suicide of Japanese civilians
including women and children,
women mothers killing their own babies
uh... rather than surrender to the Americans.
When Saipan falls,
over 3,400 Americans lie dead,
alongside 4,600 Japanese,
half of who are civilian suicides.
it's a mere taste of what's to come.
January 1945,
American Air Force General Curtis Lemay
arrives at the conquered air fields of the Marianas.
The war in the Pacific is about to ruthlessly escalate.
Curtis Lemay believed
there should be no hesitation and no moderation
in bringing destruction to the enemy.
And the surest, most effective way to do that
would be through massive unrestrained strategic bombing.
He was going out to destroy the industrial power of Japan, and ...
the keen link for all those fires he was lighting (?)to build on,
In fact, to burn down the factories,
happens to be houses where people in them.
March 9th,
over 300 B-29s reached Tokyo.
They systematically
lay down 1,665 tons of M-69 incendiary clusters over the wooden city.
it remains the most destructive aerial raid in the history of mankind.
The Japanese later called
the early fire raids 'The Night of Black Snow'
because of the
debris and the impact of this particular raids on their lives.
Master bomber who was watching the raid
that he could see the fires 150 miles away.
You had asphalt melting in the streets.
You had glass melting out of buildings.
A lot of the aircrews were really shaken by the results.
Tail gunners reported watching people burning to death.
Burning rivers covered with napalms.
Japanese doctors wrote about
watching the debris floating in rivers afterwards
they couldn't tell if it was bodies or sticks of wood.
16 square miles are erased to the ground.
The inferno claims 90,000 civilian lives
and leaves over one million homeless.
On the other side of the Atlantic,
Allied forces converge to prepare
for equally decisive breakthrough in the liberation of Europe.
For the Allies, the D-Day landings represented
the success or failure of the entire war.
But the outcome really rested on an ___(?),
November 1943,
Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill
meet in Tehran to plan Operation Overlord,
the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Churchill warns of the challenges that await them.
The British had learned first-hand
how capable, how effective the fighting force Wehrmacht was.
Britain's experience is chastening(?),
evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940,
driven from Norway and Greece.
Yet despite the dangers,
the Allies determined to risk everything
on a full-scale cross Channel invasion
into the teeth of the Nazi defenses.
In order for D-Day to succeed,
it required 4 distinct events to happen.
First, the Allies needed the momentum of manpower
and equipment to make it to the beach
and continued to reinforce the beachhead once the landings were secure.
Secondly, it was air supremacy.
The Allies had to prevent the Germans
from reinforcing their positions on the beachhead.
also the Allies needed a majors Soviet offensive.
So the Germany would be sandwiched between two invading armies.
And finally, the element of surprise.
If the Germans had been aware that the invasion was coming,
it would've certainly failed.
To win the intelligence war,
the Allies launch Operation Fortitude.
Operations Fortitude ___ to the present-day
is (?)arguably the greatest deception plan in modern warfare.
In an audacious act of misdirection,
a decoy army of eleven ghost divisions,
(?)___ headed by General Patton,
assembles opposite Calais.
They had to really trick the German high command to thinking
that Calais, the shortest route(?) across the channel,
was the way the invasions going to be mounted.
It had dummy tanks, dummy airstrips, dummy hangars,
And they let the Germans come and see.
They got fly over these areas, saying: 'Here is a huge army.
This is clearly where they are going to put their main effort.'
With Fortitude blinding the Axis,
the real invasion force secretly assembles.
9 and a half million tons of supplies,
4,000 amphibious vessels,
and over 1 and a half million troops,
the man charged with the immense logistical challenge of the landings
is British naval mastermind Sir Bertram Ramsay,
Sir Bertram Ramsay's plan was meticulous,
was complex, was rehearsed,
and it was thorough in every way.
The plan is astonishing.
Almost 7,000 vessels will be loaded with men and supplies
and moved in secret to the assembly points.
At a predetermined time,
they will navigate through narrow channels clear of mines
towards enemy shore through unpredictable seas.
Simultaneously, naval screens
will be mounted to protect against Axis counterattacks.
The scope and depth of it is(?) just off the scale.
Me personally I've been involved in planning
for a things like uh... Desert Storm
Operation Iraqi Freedom, the early pieces of it. And even that,
with big computers and lots of smart guys,
the work was daunting then.
Getting the Allied forces to the beach heads
is just the start.
Awaiting them is Hitler's Atlantic Wall,
a defensive network1,600 miles long.
And considered by the Fuhrer as unbreachable.
It's this combination of everything
from millions of mines,
specific defenses
designed to rip the bottom of the landing craft.
Then you get to machine-gun bonkers with interlocking fires,
6" cannons, you name It.
It's just a nasty, nasty piece of work.
You know there were trained troops who had been there for you,
(?)sighting every avenue or approach off the beach
You know there could be a massive counterattacks.
Germans are masters of that.
So there's just so much uncertainty.
The window of opportunity is desperately narrow.
Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower sets the date,
June 5th 1944.
Once Eisenhower made the decision,
it was irrevocable. There was no plan B.
This was it. Go for broke.
Either the invasion would succeed(?) or
the invasion attempt would have to be put off indefinitely.
Dwight Eisenhower sat down and wrote a little note,
"Taking blame for the failure of the landings."
That he was appeared to deliver(?) if it did fail.
No one on the Allied side saw this is a sure thing.
As the Allies bombed
the French infrastructure connecting Normandy to the east,
3 million servicemen are locked away from the population.
Coastal towns are locked down.
The fate of the war hangs in the balance.
After an agonizing 24-hour delay due to the bad weather,
Overlord, the most important Allied operation of WWII, is set in motion.
Before the armada embarks for Normandy,
the Allies launch one final master class of deception,
To convince the Germans that Calais is the invasion site,
British bombers circle at low altitude,
dropping tons of metallic chaff into the air.
This created a huge radar registry for the Germans
and this phantom army that has been
constructed in their minds
through documents and fake bases
now it starts to come alive.
Totally through the German defense planning,
It ___(?) into disarray.
With misdirection campaign underway,
the invasion force heads towards its targets:
5 beachheads,
and a cliff top gun emplacement at Pointe Du Hoc.
Ahead of the transports, an aerial then a naval barrage
pound the costal defenses.
Despite the assault, the men on the landing craft
come under ferocious German fire.
It was confusing.
The German planes were(?) gone right over us.
There were these bombs and guns (?)going on with everything else(?).
(?)Some of them __ I got
hit by bombs already.
Now you can see is like ... you don't know who they were
(?)see guys dead there in the water
(?)some are limbs or upper arms
There're mortars(?). They are firing on the boats
Some guys were crying a little bit.
Some guys was(?) even urinating.
We were all nervous.
Everybody was.
But there is nothing you can do about it.
You know what you had to do. Then it had to be done.
Charles Barley and Michael Brillo
are among the first to hit Omaha,
the most heavily defended German position.
A lot of guys __ __ __ get out of the boat
and they were killed instantly by those things.
We got into the water.
The water was up to my stomach.
I said to myself, I said, 'Good by Charles, you are gone.'
And then it was really a terrible feeling in the water.
(?)You see there're bodies lying around. You couldn't identify them.
It's really nasty, really bloody.
Those fortunate enough to make off the boats,
(?)the scene they would've confronted is almost unimaginable.
(?)They would have been suffering still from seasickness.
(?)They would've heard the whirling of the bullets above their heads.
They would see in front of them dead and dying American soldiers.
But it was more than chaos.
it was deadly chaos.
As the Allies continue to land
against merciless German fire,
the casualty rates soars.
But after 15 hours of fighting,
all beachheads are taken,
with Pointe Du Hoc falling the following day.
The Allies suffer 10,000 casualties.
But it is bloodshed achieving the almost impossible.
They have a foothold in Nazi-occupied Europe.
For Hitler, this was the nightmare come to pass.
We basically, you know,
signed the death certificate of Nazi Germany on June 6th 1944.
After weeks and weeks of being
bottled up in the Normandy beachhead,
the breakout that occurred exceeded expectations.
The success is down to the network of supply lines
chasing the front line soldiers.
Connecting France with the war depot of Britain
are artificial Mulberry harbors,
landing two-and-a-half million men,
4 million tons of supplies,
and 500,000 vehicles within the first 10 months.
Fueling the offensive is Operation Pluto,
70 miles of undersea pipe lines
pumping up to a million gallons of fuel per day into France.
Those tons and those millions of gallons of fuel
were on a scale that probably won't be replicated in the future.
So what they accomplished might be unique in human history really.
From space,
the speed of advance is astounding.
August 19th, Paris's liberated,
followed by Rouen(?), Verdun,
Antwerp and Brussels.
By September, the Allies reach the Siegfried Line
on the cast(?) __ the German fatherland.
Hitler launches his final desperate counterattack,
the Battle of the Bulge.
Despite heavy losses, the Allies prevailed.
And Nazi Germany stands on the abyss.
Hitler's gamble on the Ardennes
basically insurers the end of the Reich.
This is his last operationable force he had,
where he can try to influence the pace of either front, east or west.
Once he threw that force way,
the American-Soviet conquering of the Reich in the next year was inevitable.
The war in Europe nears its climax.
On the other side of the planet,
the drive towards Japan is also approaching it's bloody conclusion.
But every island invaded
is coming at increasingly higher cost.
At every stage of the ferocity
and the intensity of the Japanese defenses increases,
what they thought was suicidal defense tactics in Saipan
are redoubled at Iwo Jima.
February 1945,
60,000 U.S. marines storm the island of Iwo Jima
where a battle of unrival brutality begins.
The fighting on Iwo Jima
stands it's arguably the fiercest fighting
that U.S. military personnel had ever experienced.
There's no amount of punishment which could be inflicted on the Japanese
that would cause them to lose their will.
Essentially they've decided that they are going to die there.
When you have that kind of suicidal fever, it means
the sort of tactics you might have used previously don't work.
And so we start using flame throwers,
napalm, tanks up-close.
a style of battle
that raises the level of violence
even pass what we've seen in earlier parts of WWII,
just hard to imagine.
When Iwo Jima falls,
Japan suffers 20,000 casualties,
compared to 23,000 Americans.
The first time, U.S. casualties exceed that of their enemy.
As Allied forces prepare to invade Okinawa,
the proposed launch pad for the invasion of Japan,
the stakes for both sides are vast.
Japanese defenders of Okinawa knew
that they were not going to survive. They could not win.
But they hope that by causing enough casualties, creating enough horror
that it might either make the American decide not to invade Japan
or at least maybe get the Japanese a better peace offer some kind.
April 1st 1945,
the American armada approaches its target.
Its scale is unmatched in the Pacific War.
Okinawa was a military undertaking on a scale that rival D-Day
uh... the size of the invasion force, the size of invasion fleet.
1,200 warships
support 3 mass amphibious attack forces hitting the beaches.
More than 170,000 troops land eerily unopposed.
But unseen by American troops
are 97,000 Japanese defenders
ready to strike with unprecedented savagery.
They are taking the Japanese soldier
and using just his body as a weapon.
Japanese soldiers with 22 pounds satchel bombs
run under tanks.
And 6,000 defenders banzai charge marines
armed only with bamboo spears and side arms.
In our own time, we make that comparison with suicide bombers
but if you could imagine entire Japanese units have that depth of commitment
that they would actually suffer mass essentially suicidal death
rather than surrender their position,
that's a very formidable military opposite.
At sea, wave after wave of Kamikazes
crash into US ships
Kamikazes were...
especially terrifying to the Americans trying to shoot them down because
how do you deter somebody who is willing to die for something?
Their goal was to die,
and 18% of the Kamikazes hit ships.
404 U.S. ships are struck.
When Okinawa finally falls, nearly 100,000 Japanese soldiers
and 150,000 civilians lie dead.
The U.S. suffers 76,000 thousand casualties,
a 3rd of the entire invasion force.
The escalation is just terrifying here
and these are little islands
and now we're not talking about invading the whole Japanese homeland
where there are millions of defenders and even more millions of civilians.
The U.S. War Department estimates
that the invasion of Japan will result in 10 million Japanese casualties,
along with at least 1.7 million Americans.
Another solution must be sought.
As the Allies celebrate victory in Europe,
as Hitler and his Reich go up in flames,
America swears in a new president
and Harry Truman is destined to unleash a weapon so fearsome,
It will herald in a new dawn of warfare across the globe.
War has ravaged the world for nearly 6 years.
Germany and Italy are defeated.
Only Japan fights on in defiance of the Allies.
But the new weapon is about to make WWII reach its climax.
December 1938,
German scientists split the atom
releasing 200 million volts of electricity.
After Albert Einstein warns U.S. President Roosevelt
that Hitler plans an atomic program,
the race for the bomb is on.
America, in collaboration with Britain and Canada,
launches the Manhattan Project.
Entire towns and Industrial complexes
are constructed across the nation,
employing 600,000 people
and costing 2 billion dollars,
25.8 billion in today's money,
It is engineering on an unprecedented scale.
No other nation in the world could've done
the Manhattan Project like United States did.
You get all these theorists together
and they say there are 2 ways we can build this weapon.
It's a plutonium bomb and an uranium bomb.
They are different processes. They're both immensely expensive.
Anybody else would say which one do I want to focus on?
The U.S. said we'll make sure this works, so we gonna do both.
July 1945, the project bears fruit,
a uranium bomb, code-named Little Boy,
and a plutonium bomb, code-named Fat Man.
The atomic bomb is a technology
that historically is on the scale of introduction of gunpowder
Being taken the kind of lethality
that has been honed throughout WWII
and multiplied it by a whole new world of magnitude.
For the first time with a single event,
an entire city could be destroyed.
This represented a new era in warfare.
Returning from the Potsdam Conference,
U.S. President Harry S. Truman
must decide whether to unleash the atomic bomb on Japan.
If it'd come out a year later that
the president of the US had a weapon he could have used
that might have ended the war earlier
And instead he did not and we suffered 100,000 extra casualties.
He would have been ... run out of ...
At best run out of the town on a rail.
There was no way an American president responsible to his constituents
could've not used this weapon.
Truman, pass out to Stalin and his communist ethos,
can see the significance of a nuclear strike for the post war world.
In 1945, America faced a real paradox.
For a long time, of course, Roosevelt and Truman had been saying to Stalin:
"Please help us with the war against Japan.
Please invade Manchuria. Please defeat the Japanese Army."
But when it was realized that the Soviet Union might defeat the Japanese
then move on to occupy part of the Japanese islands
that's not what the Americans wanted him to do.
They wanted the task of rebuilding Japan.
I think this was one of the most important factors
influencing the American decision to drop the atomic bombs.
After a successful test in the New Mexico desert,
Truman gives the order to drop the bomb as soon as possible.
A number of cities were chosen as potential targets.
They were left untouched by the Incendiary bombing
because if you bombed the city,
you couldn't tell how much damage had been done by the atomic attacks.
They're also looking for on(?) this quite large population
because you could attack the city with large population
you again would be able to see the full impact.
When you look at that,
it is a really cynical decision for choosing a target.
(?)__ __ __ you're dropping the most dangerous weapon that'd ever been developed
On August 6th 1945,
the Enola Gay launches from the Mariana islands.
At 8:15 local time,
Little Boy loaded with 60-kg's of uranium
is released over Hiroshima.
43 seconds later, the world changes forever.
The blast creates a circle of devastation 1 mile wide
with fires over another 4.5 mile radius.
60,000 are killed instantly
with a further 100,000 dying from burns and radiation.
3 days later.
Fat Man is exploded over Nagasaki,
killing 80,000 civilians.
After the first bomb in Japan, there was a certain amount of disbelief.
After Nagasaki though, it's kind of hard to deny, that
Americans have some kind of new weapon here.
And it's just the start of what can be a long pattern of destruction.
September 2nd 1945, Japan capitulates.
WWII is over.
The nuclear age has begun.
A lot of people think that the moral ethical line of destruction in WWII
was crossed by the atomic bomb, I disagree.
I think that if there's any moral lines left all crossed
with fire raids against Japanese cities.
The whole question of the atomic bomb is,
what we continue to do what our weapons make possible
That is the ultimate dilemma we hit with atomic here
and nuclear weapons.
You ask who won WWII, and if by that you mean,
"What society what nation contribute the most
blood and treasure to eventual victory?"
It's not the United States. It's the Soviet Union.
Soviet losses in the war are over 25 million people.
American losses are 405,399 military dead
and a handful of civilians.
But if you ask the question who won WWII, you mean,
"Who ended up at the most advantageous position at the end of the war,
reaped the greatest fruit of victory?" Then the answer is certainly the US.
During the 6 years of war,
America grows from the 17th world military power to number 1.
Her overseas bases expand from 14
to over 30,000 spread across the globe.
Her GNP doubles
and she becomes the biggest creditor in the world,
commanding half of the planet's manufacturing capacity
and owning two-thirds of the world's gold stocks.
It dominates the world economy.
It controls the formation of the UN.
It launches the world on the path toward globalization that it wants.
But it can no longer go back to the isolationist
The isolation America's gone forever.
I'm not sure if it has actually sunk in even today
how much we have to be involved.
But as a result of WWII we're drowned in the world's ways
we cannot escape, whether we realize it or not.