(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Early morning,
September the 1st, 1939.
German troops cross the Polish border.
And with that act of aggression,
they bring to an end the last
hope for peace for Europe.
World War II has begun.
For the previous 10 years,
the League of Nations
had been trying to preserve
the increasingly fragile peace,
through constant call
for world disarmament.
But those calls had fallen on deaf ears,
as a number of nations had been invaded
and overrun by Germany, Italy, and Japan,
the so called axis powers.
Now it was the turn of Poland.
Her allies, France and Britain,
gave Germany an ultimatum
to withdrawal her troops.
But Hitler simply ignored them,
and his tanks roared across
the Polish countryside.
(tank engine rumbling)
The world was stunned.
There was none of that patriotic fervor
which the outbreak of
World War I had witnessed,
not even in Germany.
The horrors of that first world
war were still remembered.
And now there was the added fear
of the massive destruction
of cities from air raids.
Germany had for years laid claim to parts
of Poland's territory.
That was Hitler's excuse for his invasion.
France and Britain alone seemed
prepared to support Poland against him.
Fortunately, for them, Hitler's ally,
Mussolini, dictator of Italy,
was content to stay out in the sidelines.
But France and Britain had
hoped for Russia's support.
Instead, Russia had just recently
astonished the world by signing
a nonaggression pact with the Nazis,
the old enemies of Stalin
and his government.
To make matters worse,
the Russians themselves
invaded Poland in the east,
on the pretext of historic
claims to their territory.
(bombs booming)
In attacking Poland,
Hitler thus knew he had
nothing to fear from America or Russia.
But he had to move fast to take Poland
before France and Britain
could actively oppose him.
The military answer lay in
the technique of blitzkrieg.
The notion of blitzkrieg or lightening war
had been conceived by the
Germans during the 1930s,
and even put into limited practice
during their involvement
three years earlier
in the Spanish Civil War.
Blitzkrieg was based on surprise attack.
Two main elements were involved.
The weapon on the ground was the panzer
division of high speed tanks,
and the attacked in liaison
with a dive bomber from the air.
The most famous of these
were the terrifying
Stuka Ju 87 dive bomber.
The Stuka's part was to pound away
at the enemy on the ground,
carving a path for the tanks to
thrust in and divide enemy troops.
Those troops once isolated,
could then be quickly mopped up
by the German infantry
following the tanks.
But there was a problem.
The infantry on foot could fall
too far behind their speeding tanks.
Through her position
at the heart of Europe,
Poland had long and numerous
frontiers to defend.
To the east, lay Russia.
And in the west, Germany.
Parts of the north was East Prussia,
a part of the German Reich.
There were also German forces
in Slovakia to the south.
The defense of such a long
multinational frontier
placed large demands upon the Polish army,
an army relatively ill equipped.
Their air force was less than
a fifth the size of Germany's,
and their weapons mostly obsolete.
Almost within minutes of the
start of the German invasion,
Germany also attacked by
sea, as her battleship,
the Schleswig-Holstein fired
on Poland's fortress in Danzig harbor,
a city which the Germans
regarded historically as theirs.
A main aim of the Blitzkrieg
was to destroy Poland's air force
as far as possible on the ground.
When Polish aircraft did
manage to get into the air,
they fought with ferocious courage.
But their air force was simply no match
for the bite of the Luftwaffe,
Germany's air force.
The German bombers pounded railways,
roads, and bridges incessantly,
cutting off communications,
hindering Polish troop
movements everywhere.
Each time the Luftwaffe
softened up resistance
to air attack, the German tanks moved in
to encircle the polish infantry divisions.
Then as the German infantry mopped up
the isolated Polish troops,
the German tanks pressed further on.
These tactics rapidly
resulted in large numbers
of Polish prisoners of war.
In spite of their courageous stand,
the Poles were unable to
stem the enemy advance.
(tanks firing)
The Germans reached the Vistula River
on the outskirts of
Warsaw just 15 days later.
Even now, the Poles held out,
hoping that Britain and France
would attack Germany itself from the west.
And indeed, the French did advance
a short distance into
actual German territory
in the neighboring Saarland.
But the French generals were unwilling
to push much further from the protection
of the Maginot Line defenses.
Meanwhile, the Polish
people stood their ground
against overwhelming odds.
In fact, the Pole held out so successfully
that the Germans were unable
to take Warsaw on the ground.
So they turned to their air force
to soften up the resistance.
(airplanes buzzing)
The people of Warsaw now faced
the horrors of aerial bombardment,
which had become so terrifyingly
familiar to earlier victims,
such as the citizens of Guernica in Spain,
and the teaming populations of Shanghai
and Nanking in China.
But the people of Poland's
capitol still carried on.
(bombs exploding)
So far, the Germans had
overrun the Polish Corridor,
which used to separate them
from the territory of East Prussia.
Now southward from East Prussia itself,
encircling German thrusts and
isolated Poland's capital,
while southern Poland now also faced
attack from German troops in Slovakia.
But the final blow came with the sudden
attack in the back from Russia,
as Russian troops poured across
her border from the east.
Poland now faced inevitable defeat.
(guns firing)
With most of the Polish
forces concentrated
on the other side of
the country to the west,
against the part of Germany,
the Russians met little resistance,
and were able to advance
at great speed into Poland.
Meantime, the German army swept
on eastwards almost unopposed.
Within two days of Russia's attack,
the two invading armies
met at Brest-Litovsk,
the historic site where
they had met before
during the previous world war,
when Russia had signed a
peace treaty with Germany.
Even now, the conquest of
Poland was still not final.
The Germans and Russians got down
to what they expected to be a simple
mopping up of the Polish
army's last remnants.
But it was proving more
difficult than they had expected.
The Poles not only held out,
they were fighting back.
The Germans have still not
been able to take Warsaw,
and dropped leaflets over
the city demanding surrender.
But the Poles ignored them,
so the bombing went on.
(airplanes buzzing)
By now, all public
services were destroyed.
No gas, no electricity, no water
except what they could take
from the River Vistula.
As food supplies ran out,
and the danger of disease increased,
the city was finally forced to surrender.
And on the 27th of September,
less than one month from the
day they crossed the border,
the Germans triumphantly
entered Poland's capital.
Some Poles escaped to France and Britain
to form their own fighting units.
In Paris, the Polish general, Sikorski
even set up a government in exile.
In Poland, yet another week went by
before the nation finally surrendered
on October the 5th, 1939,
after an unbelievably valiant struggle
against two major and ruthless powers.
In 1919, Poland had become an
independent sovereign state.
Now, a mere 20 years on,
her freedom came to an end.
(celebratory music)
She was now partitioned.
The Germans took over the west,
The Russians occupied the
eastern half of Poland.
It didn't take long for the Nazis
to impose their brutal
tyranny over western Poland.
It was the same in the
east under the Russians.
But the full extent of Soviet brutality
wasn't realized until later,
after the Germans invaded Russia.
They discovered the bodies
of 4,000 Polish soldiers
in a mass grave at Katyn
in western Russia in 1943.
The Poles had been
murdered and buried there
by the Russians during their
occupation of eastern Poland.
(dramatic music)
With the defeat of Poland now behind him,
Hitler was able to turn to his main aim,
to attack and occupy the small
neutral states of the low countries,
and from there, undertake the invasion
of Germany's age old enemy, France.
His confidence was increased
by the fact that France and, indeed,
Britain had not been ready to provide
military support for the Poles.
In fact, with the fall of Poland,
France had even brought
her troops back home
out of Germany's Saarland territory,
which they had briefly invaded
and occupied earlier on.
With that move, the French had now
retreated to the security
of their Maginot Line.
With this inherent psychology
of defense rather than attack.
Britain, for her part, was
even more ill prepared for war.
She had done little to equip her army
with modern weapons during
two decades of peace,
and in no position to send
adequate forces to the continent,
apart from a few divisions to France
after declaring war on Germany.
(ship horn blows)
(dramatic music)
The problem with the
Maginot Line was that it
had been built only along
France's border with Germany
to defend them against direct
attack from Germany itself.
But what if the Germans should be
so unsporting as to
overrun neutral Belgium
and attack France from her
undefended norther border?
So, somewhat late in
the day, work actually
started on extending the
Maginot Line westward
along the Franco-Belgium
border from Luxembourg
towards the channel.
(dramatic music)
Fortunately for the allies,
the winter of 1939-40
was unusually bitter,
and both the allied and German armies
could do little more than sit it out.
In fact, the Blitzkrieg was
then being called the Sitzkrieg,
the period more generally
known as The Phony War.
However, it provided a
vital breathing space
for Britain and France to
hastily improve their defenses.
In Britain, the great
evacuation of school children
from the cities had been
successfully carried out,
and the children were well
established in the countryside.
(train cars rattling)
Gas masks had been issued to everyone,
and it was now compulsory
to carry them personally everywhere.
Both the Luftwaffe and allied air forces
had so far held back from bombing
each others' civilian population,
aware that that could
be a double edged sword.
The RAF had confined its aerial sorties
to attack some military targets only,
such as warships of the German fleet.
And those attacks had
not been very productive.
As for civilian targets,
the main RAF activity
was the dropping of propaganda leaflets.
By the end of the winter,
the bitter weather
had frozen practically
all military activity
except perhaps at sea.
The German submarines,
the untersee or U-boats,
were unaffected by winter weather,
and were starting to take
their toll on allied shipping.
In fact, in one of the
first incidents of the war,
on September the 3rd, a German U-boat
sank the passenger liner, the Athenia,
in mid-Atlantic, killing
over 100 people on board,
including 26 Americans.
Britain immediately set
up the convoy system
and declared a total blockade of Germany.
But it all took time to organize,
and the Royal Navy was seriously
short of escort vessels.
As a result, the U-boat sank more than
100 ships before the end of the year.
Though these were mostly ships that were
sailing outside the convoy
system on their own.
(booming)
The U-boats sank not
only merchant vessels,
but also British naval ships,
including the aircraft carrier Courageous,
and the battleship Royal Oak,
in home waters at Scapa
Flow near the Orkney.
The U-boat skipper, Gunther Prien,
became an overnight hero in Germany.
Because of Hitler's
relatively small U-boat force,
he had to use his modern
surface fleet as well
to attack British shipping.
One of the most dramatic of
the war's naval encounters
took place within the
first month of the war.
The battleship Graf Spee
was sinking British shipping
in the south Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
She was eventually located
by three British cruisers
operating in the Falkland Islands.
On the 13th of December, they fought her
off the Argentine Coast,
near the mouth of the river plate.
Although outgunned the
British ships forced her
to seek refuge in neutral
Montevideo Harbor.
Captain Hans Langsdorff believing that
a larger British force had now arrived,
and was waiting for him at
the estuary of the plate
scuttled his ship rather than allow her
to be sunk by his enemies.
A few days later he committed suicide.
This was about the only positive success
that French and British
arms enjoyed in 1939.
The cruise of two of the British ships,
Exeter and Ajax were fated as heroes
on the return to Britain.
(cheering)
Anglo French attention
also turned to Scandinavia
before the year was out.
Stalin feared that his most
northern neighbor Finland
which had thrown off the
yolk of Russian rule in 1919
would allow German forces in.
This posed a threat to
Leningrad, Russian's second city.
It also endangered the vital
Arctic Port of Murmansk.
(weapons firing)
He therefore demanded of the
Finns an exchange of territory.
Offering them a desolate Russian region
in return for Finnish
areas which would secure
Murmansk and Leningrad.
The Finns refused.
And on the 30th of November, 1939,
Stalin's forces attacked them.
Given Finland's massive
numerical inferiority
in man power and her
lack of modern weapons,
it should've been an easy Russian victory.
(weapons firing)
Yet the Finns held out.
Inflicting very heavy
causalities on the Russians.
The fact was that Stalin's
brutal purges of the 1930s
had so depleted the senior
ranks of the Soviet Armed Forces
that they were now commanded
by inexperienced officers.
Semyon Timoshenko, one of
the few senior officers
to survive the purges, now took charge
and attacked again in February 1940.
His land offensive and Russian air attacks
soon began to tell.
In early March, the Finns sued for peace.
They were forced to
surrender the territory
that the Russians had originally demanded.
The result was a mass exodus
of Finns from those regions.
The western Allies had
wanted to help the Finns
by passing troops through
the Port of Narvick
in neutral Norway, but Narvik
was vital to Germany too.
Since Swedish iron ore bound for Germany
also passed through this port.
The German Navy was also
attracted by Norway's fjords
as bases for its
operations against Britain.
Hitler therefore ordered
invasion plans to be drawn up.
Before his plans were completed,
the British destroyer, Cossack,
entered a Norwegian
fjord in February, 1940
and rescued British prisoners of war
from the German prison ship, Altmark,
which had taken refuge there.
This incident accelerated
Hitler's invasion plans
and his invasion fleet
set sail on April the 6th
to occupy Norwegian
ports before the allies.
The German fleet was spotted
by RAF aircraft the next day
and the British home fleet
left port to intercept
but a sudden gall blew up
and prevented the British
from intercepting the
German invasion fleet.
On the 8th of April, the
Germans began their audacious
attacks on Norway as well
as Denmark further south.
They landed in a number of
points on the Norwegian coast.
Other forces landed in the Oslo fjord
and parachutes were used to
secure stef-an-ga Air Field.
The unprepared and weak Norwegian forces
could do little in the face
of all these simultaneous attacks.
(weapons firing)
By the afternoon of April 9th,
the Germans were in complete
control of all seven
Norwegian ports where they
had landed that morning.
For the first time in more than 200 years,
the people of Norway saw
an invading army parading
through their capital city of Oslo.
The Germans began to
advance north to link up
with their other landing forces.
They quickly spread through the country.
Small patrols occupied
every strategic village.
Parachute troops landed
high in the mountains.
(explosions booming)
Air raids on towns sent
defenseless civilians fleeing
in total confusion.
Women and children, even able bodied men
poured on to any available
cart to get out of the city.
Since the outbreak of the war,
Norway had insisted on staying neutral.
Now that neutrality had
left them without allies.
Isolated and defenseless.
Before the British Navy or ground troops
could come to Norway's aid,
the Germans have gained
control of all her principle ports.
But British, French and fleet Polish units
plunged in and made several
landings on the coast.
(explosions booming)
On the 10th and 12th of April,
British destroyers entered Narvick Fjord
to attack the German war ships there.
During their engagement, they
sank nine German destroyers
at a cost of two of their own.
They also attacked from the air.
The attacks succeeded
in isolating the German
ground force at Narvick.
(explosions booming)
The Allies landed and took the town
holding it for almost two months.
They also took their first
prisoners since the war began.
But in the end, the German
overwhelming superiority
in the air proved to
be the deciding factor.
They isolated the Allied
landing from further support
and forced them to withdraw
from their beach head
positions under terrific
aerial bombardment.
Against all odds, the Allies
recaptured the Port of Narvick
but by June, 1940, they were forced
to finally abandon it.
Once more, German Arms
had proved triumphant.
Back home, the German
people were jubilant,
the constant news of endless victories
by their armed forces but
even more spectacular news
was soon to greet them.
So far the struggle for
Norway had in some respects
been a distraction for
Hitler from more important
strategic aims against Britain and France
but he needed to secure his vital supplies
of precious iron ore from Sweden
which would've been
threatened if the Allies
had control the Norwegian ports.
His primary aim was the
conquest of the low countries
in northern France as bases for his plans
onslaught against Britain.
Earlier that year, the
Allies had been wondering
whether Hitler was
turning away from the idea
of invading France and possibly Britain.
It seemed now that Hitler
had lost the opportunity.
In the words of the British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain,
Hitler had missed the bus.
In fact, there had been a
major debate in the German camp
over how the attack should be carried out.
The German army in the west was organized
into three army groups.
The original plan called
for Field Marshal von Bock's
Army Group B in the north
with the bulk of the tanks.
To make the main effort
into Holland and Belgium
and then sweep down the coast.
Gerd von Rundstedt, Army Group A,
would support him on the southern flight.
Wilhelm von Leeb's smaller Army Group C
would remain on the defensive
in front of the Maginot Line.
(tense music)
Gerd von Rundstedt,
commander of Army Group A
and more especially his chief of staff,
Erich von Manstein, objected to this plan.
It was too obvious and would leave a large
French army in tact at
the end of the operation.
Rather the main thrust should be made
by the army group in the center,
with the aim of cutting off
the northern Allied armies.
Army Group B would overrun Holland
and hold the Allied
attention in the north.
While Army Group C
retained its defensive role
in front of the Maginot Line.
Hitler eventually agreed
to this plan in mid March
but the Norway campaign
delayed its execution.
The Allied decision to establish
their defense in the north
on an advance to the River
Daly in neutral Belgium
the moment the Germans attacked
played into the hands of
the von Manstein plan.
The hilly and wooded Ardennes region
of southeast Belgium through
which the main German
thrust would later come
was mistaken and regarded
by the Allies as impossible to tanks.
The Allies labored under
other disadvantages.
(weapons firing)
For a start, there was the
matter of Belgium's neutrality.
Belgian refusal to allow
British and French troops
across their frontier
meant that the Allies
could not carry out practice
maneuvers in the area
where they intended to fight.
The Allies, especially the British,
had reinforced their
armies to a higher level
during the winter but
many British divisions
were still ill equipped.
Communications at the top were poor
and Allied commander Maurice Gamelin
was an academic rather
than a fighting general.
While the Allies actually had
more tanks than the Germans,
some 3,300 as against almost 2,600,
many like these British
Matildas were dedicated
to supporting British infantry
and were relatively slow moving.
The massive French Char B suffered
from having a one man turret which meant
that the occupant had
to both command the tank
and operate its gun at the same time.
The most serious Allied weakness
was that maginal mentality which produced
a rigidity of thought ill suited
to coping with the highly
fluid German Blitzkrieg.
The German attack was finally mounted
before dawn on the 10th of May.
German aircraft to attack
Belgian, Dutch and French
air bases in order to
destroy as much as possible
of the Allied forces on the ground.
Shortly afterwards, the
German ground forces
crossed the frontiers of
Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg.
In the north, paratroops were used
to secure vital bridges
needed for the advance
of von Bock's tanks.
A complete divisions was
landed on Dutch air fields
and roads in order to
seize other vital points.
The Dutch, taking note of
what happened in Norway
put obstacles on runways and
this caused heavy casualties.
(weapons firing)
Nevertheless the Dutch army
with its obsolete weapons
was no match for the highly
tuned German war machine
and much of the country had
been overrun in just five days.
On 14th of May, the Germans
demanded the surrender
of the large Port of Rotterdam.
The Dutch hesitated and
immediately a large force
of German bombers took
off to attack the city.
While the bombers were airborne
the Dutch surrendered Rotterdam.
Unfortunately the German
bombers could not be contacted
or stopped and much of Rotterdam
was needlessly destroyed.
Once again those who foresaw the results
of aerial bombardment were proved right.
Next day, the Dutch
government capitulated.
As with Holland, the Germans had to face
the trouble of a northeast Belgium
of initially attacking
waterways covered by guns.
(weapons firing)
The key to these defenses
was the Fort of Eben-Emael
which was attacked by glider
bourne paratroop engineers.
Using holo charged explosives
and flame throwers,
they forced its surrender
much to the surprise
of the Belgian high command who believed
Eben-Emael to be impregnable.
The main advance into Belgium
could now get properly underway
and the Germans were
soon thrusting westwards.
The Belgian forces,
their exhaustion growing
withdrew back towards the River Daly.
Meanwhile the best of the
French and British armies
had crossed into Belgium
on the 10th of May
to take up the positions
on the River Daly.
They ran into swarms of
refugees coming the other way,
which in fact often hindered
the Allied army's progress.
The Allied commander thought
that the lightening tactics
of Blitzkrieg could operate
only over flat open country
but nothing could be
further from the truth.
The Allies had believed
that the well wooded
and hilly country of the Ardennes Forest
and its numerous small rivers
would severely slow down
the westward thrust of
the speeding German tanks.
So they hadn't defended the area fully
and the Germans met little opposition.
The German tanks advanced almost unimpeded
through the Ardennes,
preceded by well trained
battalions of engineers.
They cleared pathways
for the tanks to follow.
In fact, the Ardennes Forest
proved to be no barrier
at all to the techniques of Blitzkrieg.
In a mere three days, the Germans reached
the banks of the River Moselle
infinitely faster than the
French could ever have believed.
Strategically the Germans
should've paused here
to bring up heavy
artillery before attempting
to cross the river, but
instead they again relied
on a now well tried
weapon, the dive bomber.
They blasted the French
positions across the Moselle.
(booming)
With feverish haste, the
Germans laid a barrage
across the river at
anything and everything
they could shoot.
(weapons firing)
This tremendous
concentration of fire power
continued all through the night.
By the following day, elite shock troops
were able to get across the river.
These shock troops held the bridge head
until the engineers arrived
and built their own bridges.
Then without losing a minute,
the main armored force
poured across these bridges
for the all important
break through into France
and onto the first main
French town of Sedan.
The French now tried to use
their four armored divisions.
One only just formed and
commanded by Charles de Gaulle.
These attempted to strike
at the ever more exposed
flanks of the pans of thrust
but their cumbersome
commander control system
and poor planning meant
that they were sent
into battle piecemeal and the Germans
had little problem warding them off,
inflicting heavy casualties.
By the 15th of May, the Allied armies
were holding firm against pressure
from von Bock's army group in the north.
But General Gamelin now became aware
of the growing threat from
von Rundstedt's panzers
to the south.
He therefore ordered his forces to begin
withdrawal from the River
Daly defense position.
(weapon firing)
This sudden order to withdraw dismayed
the Allied troops who
felt they had been giving
a good account of themselves.
It was also bewildering
for the local population.
The growing flood of
refugees clogged roads
and made the withdrawal
that much more difficult.
von Rundstedt's panzer divisions continued
to sweep westwards creating
more and more confusion
the deeper they penetrated.
Gamelin himself was now
incapable of making any decisions
and on the 19th of May was
replaced by Maxime Weygand.
At the same time, Marshal Henri Petain,
hero of Verdun in the First World War
was made Deputy Prime Minister.
Weygand tried to coordinate
British and French
tank attacks into the
flanks of the panzer thrust.
Although the British temporarily
halted some German tanks,
the Allied attacks were
repulsed once more.
The German drive continued
but the Allied tank attacks
had made the German
high commander nervous.
This was especially because the main body
of the German infantry was falling further
and further behind.
The exhaustion of the German
tank crews was increasing
and a temporary halt was ordered.
(gentle music)
But General Heinz
Guderian, one of the prime
architects of Blitzkrieg was determined
to allow the Allies no respite
and pressed on once more.
On the 20th of May, his tanks
reached the channel coast
at the mouth of the Somme.
The northern Allied armies
fighting their way back
were now cut off.
(weapons firing)
Guderian advanced north and
seized the port of Boulogne
before going on to attack Calais.
Here a hastily organized British brigade,
had just arrived from England
to reinforce the French defenders.
The reinforced garrison
put up stiff resistance
and there was fierce
fighting for two days.
Eventually German superior strength tolled
and the defenders were
forced to surrender.
This left the northern Allied
army with the German noose
even tighter around their necks.
They were totally cut off
from the French armies
on the Maginot Line and
south of the River Somme.
The Belgians, their country,
almost totally overrun
considered further resistance was useless.
And they now sought an armistice.
On the 27th of May, they surrendered.
The vacuum created by the surrender
forced the British and French
into an even smaller perimeter.
Meanwhile Lord Gort the British commander
had decided the evacuation
of his force to England
was the only option other than surrender.
Especially since German
pressure was intense
on the Allied pocket which
was based on Dunkirk.
The British troops
therefore began to assemble
on the beaches here for
what was to become known
as the Miracle of Dunkirk.
Back in England, a large fleet of vessels
ranging from destroyers
to cross channel ferries
down to small pleasure craft
had been hastily assembled.
They began to make their
way across the channel
in order to take off the
troops from the beaches.
The evacuation began on the 27th of May.
But the Germans made one mistake,
which bought vital additional
time for the evacuation.
Hitler halted the German
tanks because Hermann Goring
had persuaded him to allow the Luftwaffe
to finish off the Allied forces.
Several vessels were sunk.
RAF fighters based in southern England
made it possible for the
evacuation to continue.
Eventually though with the
French beaches themselves
now under direct artillery fire,
and the sinking of ships increasing,
the evacuation had to be
halted on the 3rd of June.
No less than 220,000 British and 120,000
French and Belgians had
been rescued to enable them
to fight another day.
But they had to leave all their vehicles
and heavy weapons behind.
As well as many men who
now faced a long period
as prisoners of war.
It had been a devastating defeat.
But the battle of France was not yet over.
There was more work to be
done before the German troops
could enjoy the fruits of victory.
On the 5th of June while Army Group C
continued to tie down
the Maginot defenses,
the Germans struck south across
the River Somme and aimed.
As usual, the Luftwaffe
prepared the ground.
Initially French resistance was fierce
and the Germans had to fight hard to break
out of the bridge heads.
But soon they began to make progress.
A trickle of surrendering
French soon turned into a flood.
The panzer columns raced onwards
with Paris now under threat.
The French government
declared it an open city
on 11th of June in order
to avoid the devastation
which had befallen Warsaw (mumbles).
Four days later, the
Germans secured the prize
which had alluded them in 1914.
Parisians could only watch stunned.
On the 16th of June, the
French sought an armistice.
By this time the Germans had finally begun
to attack the Maginot Line
which had been encircled
by the offensive from the north.
The French defenders could do no more
than offer token resistance.
The Germans soon reduced the force.
They then occupied the Maginot Line.
France's impregnable bastion had fallen.
The French situation had been aggravated
on the 10th of June when Mussolini
who had stayed out of the conflict
in spite of pressure from Hitler,
declared war on Britain and France.
10 days later, expecting
little or no opposition,
his troops invaded southern France
but were surprised by the
firm resistance they met
and made at the headway.
(weapons firing)
Even though the British had
to evacuate their forces
from France, they did try to send out
another expeditionary force.
This time to Sherborne.
But by the time this was organized,
and began to arrive at
Sherborne, it was too late
and it had to return to England.
Even if it had been landed,
the force was most unlikely
to make any difference to the outcome.
The German forces had overrun and occupied
seven European nations over a
period of less than 10 months.
In actual battle time,
the period was less than 10 weeks.
The concept of Blitzkrieg or lightning war
had proved its effectiveness
beyond question.
Winston Churchill had taken
over as prime minister
on the 10th of May, the
day the German invasion
of the west began.
He realized that Britain
would be Hitler's next target
and began to prepare accordingly.
Across the English channel
on the 22nd of June, 1940,
the French were brought
to the armistice table
which was in the very
same railway carriage
where there Germans had been made
to sign the November 1918 armistice.
It was the final indignity for the French
but a moment of supreme
triumph for Hitler.
(dramatic music)
