World War II with Tom Hanks

When I was a kid,

every adult I knew shared one thing in common;

a gap in their lives when everything appeared uncertain

and time itself seemed to stand still.

When they talked about it, they simply called it The War.

For six dark years, the world was on fire,

cities were demolished, and whole populations threatened.

When would the war end? No-one knew.

How would it end?

No-one knew.

Life was in stasis.

The War is now a part of our culture,

portrayed in movies and on television,

in novels and history books.

The Allies usually defeat the enemy and save the world.

But the grim reality of the war is almost impossible to comprehend.

Over 65 million people are killed, the majority civilians.

Everyone fought some version of The War,

beginning with the mothers and fathers,

who sent their children overseas, not knowing when, or if,

they would ever see them again.

And, of course, the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines,

often just a bunch of kids,

who served with honour and bravery to liberate enslaved peoples

and preserve human dignity.

In doing so,

they saved that which is most precious and valued by us all.

Freedom.

The Second World War is the largest event in human history.

No part of the globe is unaffected.

World War Two changed everything, for all of us.

All wars change the world.

But none of them change the world like the Second World War did.

Japan's on the march; Germany's on the march.

No-one can imagine the nightmare they're about to unleash,

the most destructive war in human history.

Suddenly the world is turned upside down.

And all hell is let loose.

The West is stunned by the speed of the advance.

You get the Allies led by the big three,

Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.

Men who are dealing with immensely complicated questions.

It's the biggest military operation of human history.

The Allies have to come together,

not just militarily but industrial scale,

it's a global perspective.

They have to fight in every climate from the Arctic

to the jungles of the Pacific

to the deserts of Africa and the depths of the ocean.

But there was no certainty of victory;

it was going to be a horrific bloodbath.

We see humans at their absolute worst,

how they treat other human beings.

And we see them at their absolute best,

willing to give their lives that others might live.

World War Two was a struggle in which there could be one victor

and one vanquished.

Sometimes the most monumental events begin without fanfare.

Before the world wakes.

And so it is, on the 1st of September 1939

as dawn breaks over a sleeping city on the Baltic Sea,

that the bloodiest conflict in all history begins.

This is the National Programme from London.

Germany has invaded Poland.

Heavy outbreaks of fighting along the German Polish frontier.

In just a matter of hours, a million and a half men...

...1,300 planes...

...and 2,750 tanks...

...cross the Polish border at lightning speed.

September 1st 1939.

A storm breaks over Poland.

The Germans are racing through with tanks and with artillery

following up with the infantry and accompanied by the Luftwaffe.

And all of a sudden people were waking up to the sound of tanks

rumbling through the town, not really knowing what was happening.

You're going to see waves of trucks and mechanised

and motorised vehicles.

It looks a bit like a science fiction novel,

like all those novels written in the '20s and '30s

about what the war of the future would look like.

And suddenly in 1939, the future is now.

At 11am, Hitler arrives at a Berlin opera house,

where he's gathered the Reichstag.

This is the moment Hitler has been waiting for all his life.

He's been the leader of the Nazi Party since 1921.

He came to power in '33. He rearms the country in '35.

And since then, it's been prepare, prepare, prepare.

But Hitler wants a war.

The invasion follows months of diplomatic tension

over a strip of land known as the Polish Corridor.

Land that had once been part of Germany...

...but was ceded to Poland to give her access to the sea

after the first World War.

Twenty years earlier,

global leaders gathered in the French city of Versailles

to sign the historic treaty ending that war.

After four years of brutal fighting,

an alliance led by Britain and France,

and supported by the United States, emerged victorious.

Germany, its military exhausted and its people near starvation,

had lost.

And now, they would pay the price of defeat.

The Treaty of Versailles takes territories away from Germany.

It strips Germany of populations and raw materials.

It turns the entire German merchant marine over to the allies.

It imposes reparations on the Germans.

The Allies were attempting to limit the future power of Germany.

The effects of the First World War were so grave.

They were so catastrophic that no-one wanted to see

a repeat of that.

One young Austrian corporal fighting for the German army

is Adolf Hitler.

Like many, he is shocked by the way the war ends.

Your average German was surprised by the news of the armistice

because it happened so suddenly.

The army was still in the field, and there was the sense

that we haven't been invaded and thoroughly beaten.

It was personally a tragedy for Hitler.

He heard the news of the armistice

when he was still ill from injuries sustained in battle.

He did not process the end of the war well.

He did not accept the defeat of Germany.

Surviving soldiers come home angry and confused.

Frankly, the response of many of them is disillusionment.

Four years at the front, I managed to dodge all those bullets,

and now I came home and this is what I fought for.

When Hitler comes back from the war,

he learns to talk to former soldiers who are now disgruntled

and begins to feel the fact that he's actually quite a good speaker.

He attends a meeting of a small group,

which will become the National Socialist German Workers,

or Nazi Party.

He finds something attractive. this is a party of grievance,

talking about how Germany could be transformed,

and Germany could be made powerful again.

In 1921, Hitler's talent for public speaking

makes him the leader of this tiny party.

Hitler's first move is an attempted coup

against the Bavarian state government in Munich...

...but it fails and he's arrested for treason.

At his trial,

the Judge allows Hitler to publicly share his movement's grievances,

against war guilt, reparation, and communism.

In jail, he publishes his memoir Mein Kampf,

or My Struggle.

With Hitler's notoriety, Nazi Party membership grows

as Germany's Weimar Republic moves through the unstable '20s.

The economy is burdened by heavy war reparations.

In 1923, the cost of one loaf of bread

rockets from three Marks to 80 billion.

The years that follow are unstable, chaotic.

Hitler's Nazi Party fuels racial hatred against Jews

and fears about communism.

Then, just as the economy is recovering,

the Great Depression throws six million Germans out of work.

People in Germany are confused, bewildered, unhappy.

And so there's a real opening for a leader who will speak

all these lines perfectly and talk about

how I'm going to bring the Germans back together.

In the 1932 elections, Germany is deeply divided.

But President von Hindenberg, backed by conservative businessmen,

appoints Hitler Chancellor to run the government

at the beginning of 1933.

In 1934,

Hitler declares that he will now continue to be Chancellor

and take over the role of the President as well.

He's transformed what was a democracy in Germany

into a one-party and a one-man dictatorship.

He's become the German leader, the Fuhrer.

His first promise as Fuhrer is to reclaim the land

Germany lost at Versailles.

He seizes The Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland,

German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia.

By 1938, just four years later, he's reshaped the map of Europe.

Desperate to avoid another war,

Britain and France allow Hitler to expand his empire.

In 1938, at Munich, Neville Chamberlain,

the British Prime Minister,

and the French actually made a deal with Hitler.

What he wanted was the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia.

The British had said, fine,

we'll just dismantle an entire country to keep you happy.

But when Hitler turns to Poland,

the West finally takes a stand.

The Poles have already endured centuries of foreign rule.

The country regains its independence as part of the Versailles treaty,

but its new borders now include 20,000 square miles

of what had been German land.

In summer 1939,

the British and the French sign a guarantee with the Poles,

promising military assistance if the Germans invade.

Hitler, speaking to his officers, they're asking him questions.

What was the attitude of the West going to be if you attack Poland?

And he snorted. 'Don't worry,' he said.

'I've seen my opponents at Munich. They're little worms.'

Hitler doesn't believe the West has the will to go to war...

...so he moves across the border,

ready to invade with the full force of the Nazi Wehrmacht.

In the first 24 hours of the invasion...

...the Germans take out railroads, bridges, and airfields.