Original subtitles

♪

During the afternoon of August 31st, 1939,

German forces made their final preparations

for the invasion of Poland.

Air crews studied their targets.

Tanks moved to their assault positions.

Then, in the early hours of September the 1st,

German soldiers dressed in Polish uniforms

attacked a radio station on the German side of the border

leaving behind some bodies.

This was the "aggression" which Hitler later used

to justify his attack.

At 8 that morning,

German troops pushed aside the Polish frontier barriers

and mobile forces raced forward.

Two days later, on September the 3rd,

Britain and France declared war,

honouring their promise to stand by Poland.

But by then, the Poles were in deep trouble.

They were not only outnumbered,

but facing a new form of warfare

for which they were ill-prepared.

Blitzkrieg.

In 1939, the German army consisted of 1 1/2 million men.

Its elite were the Panzers. Tanks.

Six armoured divisions and four light divisions

intended for reconnaissance.

A total of 2,400 tanks.

These had been designed to break through

an enemy's defences and strike deep,

cutting communications and spreading confusion.

Enemy's strong points would be bypassed,

left to the following infantry to mop up.

The new German air force, the Luftwaffe,

was also designed for Blitzkrieg.

It had 2,500 aircraft lined up against the Poles.

The most notorious was the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber.

It was a form of flying artillery

making pinpoint attacks in support

of the fast-moving ground forces.

The Poles could muster just 600 planes.

On the ground it was just as bad.

Poland's army was just 500,000 strong.

It had only 880 tanks.

It even had 11 brigades of cavalry.

Lances and horses against armour.

But it wasn't just numbers

that gave the Germans their advantage.

They used their Panzers in a radically new way.

As separate, hard-striking units.

The Polish tanks were dispersed to support their infantry.

The Poles' task had been made even more difficult

by the German takeover of Czechoslovakia.

The west of the country, including the capital Warsaw,

was now surrounded on three sides

by German-controlled territory.

This geographical advantage was essential

to Germany's grand plan.

The task of the first thrust of the tanks

was to create an initial breakthrough.

But actually winning the war depended

on deep pincer movements

designed to surround and crush the enemy.

These would come from Army Group North

under General Fedor von Bock.

He would launch two thrusts

from northeast Germany and east Prussia.

Army Group South under General Gerd von Rundstedt

would launch two more from Silesia and Slovakia.

The aim would be for the pincers to meet

near Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk.

From the start it went well for the Germans.

Polish air force was effectively eliminated

within the first two days.

The Panzers cut through and struck deep.

And the Stukas and medium bombers

proved devastatingly effective.

The Poles were sliced apart,

pinned into pockets which yielded

vast numbers of prisoners.

Legend has it that some Polish cavalry units

gallantly tried to attack the Panzers.

But it was futile.

They were just brushed aside.

By September the 8th, the inner pincers had met up.

German troops were advancing on the outskirts of Warsaw.

On September the 17th, the outer pincers

met at Brest-Litovsk.

On the same day, Soviet forces

crossed the eastern Polish frontier

as part of the agreement reached

between Hitler and Stalin in the Nazi-Soviet pact.

The Polish army was now in full retreat,

its government fleeing abroad.

Warsaw, however, fought on.

Its defenders rejected a German offer to surrender,

so the full fury of the German war machine was turned on it.

Watching it all was Adolf Hitler,

who had followed closed behind his conquering army.

On September the 27th, Warsaw surrendered.

The next day the victors carved Poland up

according to the Nazi-Soviet pact.

The Soviet Union annexed

slightly over half the country to the east.

Germany took the rest.

Both regimes began rounding up

anyone who might present a danger in the future.

Many were murdered.

And for the first time, the Germans revealed

how they would behave against those peoples

in eastern Europe whom they considered inferior.

They sent in the Einsatzgruppen,

special SS squads, to round up Jews.

Most were forced into ghettos in the major cities

where they would be starved to death.

Others were executed on the spot.

This was not, however, the end of the Polish army.

More than 50,000 troops escaped

and eventually reached France.

There, a provisional government had been formed

by General Wladyslaw Sikorski.

The Poles would fight on bravely from abroad.

In Britain, the air raid sirens

had sounded within minutes

of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's announcement

that hostilities had begun.

In fact, despite their politician's guarantees

of Polish sovereignty, Britain and France

had done very little to help Poland.

As Hitler had gambled, they had no idea what to do

once they had actually declared war.

Both countries had begun mobilization.

Air raid precautions were speeded up.

Anti-aircraft guns were placed in major cities.

Shelters were erected.

Soon, children were being evacuated.

Everyone had to carry gas masks,

and a blackout was introduced.

The British army began to deploy

its 100,000 strong Expeditionary Force to northern France.

French troops did advance a little way

inside the German border.

But they refused to move

beyond the protective cover of artillery range.

The initiative was still firmly in Hitler's hands.

And he at least knew precisely what he was going to do next.

The Blitzkrieg against Poland

had been a stunning success for Adolf Hitler.

He had subdued an entire country in less than four weeks,

and he was hungry for more.

So he ordered his generals to plan to attack

the British and French in November 1939,

less than two months after the fall of Poland.

His general staff was appalled.

The bulk of the German army was still out east

and had to be moved west.

And there had been some serious losses

in the Polish campaign.

Lessons had to be learned.

Polish anti-tank guns had destroyed a division's worth

of the lightly armoured Panzers.

A quarter of the aircraft used had been lost.

The Panzers were too light and unreliable.

And they had frequently outrun

both their supply columns, and the marching infantry.

Reluctantly, after furious arguments,

Hitler agreed to wait until the following spring.

Meanwhile, his enemies were also learning lessons.

Britain had thought that bombers

would be a key weapon in the coming conflict.

But when on September the 4th Britain's Royal Air Force

made a daylight raid on German shipping,

seven of the 30 bombers were shot down.

It soon became clear that this wasn't a one-off misfortune.

In some raids, over half the aircraft were lost.

British bombers just weren't up to the job.

So the RAF switched to night raids.

And they decided to drop not bombs,

but leaflets, so as not to provoke retaliation.

So with the Blitzkrieg stalled and the air war quiet,

the focus now went to the one remaining arena, the sea.

Germany's Navy was still in the middle

of an ambitious building program

that wasn't due to finish until 1948.

The commander of its submarine arm, Admiral Karl Doenitz,

planned to cut Britain's supply routes across the Atlantic.

For this, he wanted 300 ocean-going submarines.

But he had just 38.

Nevertheless, Doenitz ensured that all available U-boats

were at sea on September the 3rd,

the first day of the war against Britain.

That evening, believing it to be an armed merchant cruiser,

U-30 sank the liner Athenia without any warning.

112 lives were lost, including 26 American citizens.

The Royal Navy dwarfed its German counterpart.

It had 12 battleships.

Germany had none.

It had five aircraft carriers.

Germany, again, had none.

So after the Athenia, Britain declared

a total blockade of German ports.

But for all its size, the Royal Navy

had too few escort vessels.

Many merchant ships had to sail alone.

And by the end of 1939, more than 100 had been sunk.

It quickly became apparent that the British

had woefully underestimated the submarine threat.

On September the 17th,

U-29 sank the British aircraft carrier Courageous.

On October the 14th,

the battleship Royal Oak was sunk

when U-47 slipped through the defences

of the British main fleet base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys.

Meanwhile, Germany's small service fleet

had also been unleashed against the sea lanes.

In the North Sea, the battle cruisers

Scharnhorst and Gneisenau,

intercepted a convoy on November the 22nd.

They sank its escort, the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi.

But it was the pocket battleship Graf Spee

which caused the greatest problems.

Designed specifically for commerce raiding,

its 11-inch guns could overwhelm any ship

fast enough to overtake it.

And it had the speed to escape from any battleship.

The Graf Spee had slipped away from Germany

before hostilities began.

Soon, it was cutting loose

in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Finally, three British cruisers,

Exeter, Ajax and Achilles,

intercepted it off the River Plate

on the east coast of South America.

The British ships damaged the pocket battleship so badly

that it had to take refuge in the neutral

Uruguayan port of Montevideo.

The Germans were then fooled into thinking

that a more powerful British force had arrived.

When the Graf Spee was commanded to leave port,

the captain scuttled her, rather than risk annihilation.

Back home, the Royal Navy crews were feted as heroes.

But this was just about the only obvious success

enjoyed by the British or French armed forces

during the winter of 1939,

though the British did enjoy one secret victory

in the technological war, which was to prove vital.

As soon as the war began, Britain began to lose

large numbers of ships to German mines.

What was so mysterious, was that the ships

didn't seem to have actually struck them.

The mines had simply exploded as the ships passed nearby.

Then, on the night of November the 22nd, 1939,

a German plane was spotted dropping a mine

at low tide in the Thames Estuary.

Disarmed and rescued from the mud,

the mine was found to be set off

by the magnetic signature of a ship passing close by.

The solution was to reduce the ship's magnetic signature

by hanging a copper cable around the hull

and then passing an electric current through it,

a process called degaussing.

Once degaussing was applied to all ships,

the danger from the magnetic mine was massively reduced.

But otherwise, as 1940 began, the war was quiet.

The two sides did little during the winter,

except to patrol, train, and try to keep warm,

for it was a particularly cold one.

An American journalist called it the phony war.

For the Germans, it was the Sitzkrieg.

In the spring, the British Expeditionary Force

took up its position towards the left of the front

on the Belgian border.

But it was dwarfed by its French ally.

France had some 100 divisions

along the Belgian and German frontiers

or in reserve nearby.

This imbalance meant that the British Commander Lord Gort

had to go along with the ideas

of the French General Maurice Gammelin.

And these were entirely defensive.

French hopes were pinned on

the massive ramparts of the Maginot line,

a series of fortifications that ran

from Switzerland to Belgium along the French-German border.

The Marginot line was considered to be completely impassable

and would ensure that French territory remained safe.

But otherwise, the allies had no idea

of how actually to defeat Germany.

Instead, they brought up their forces

and prepared for a repeat of World War I.

They would blockade Germany to sap its strength,

and they would dig in,

ready to grind down the assault which they knew must come.

None of their commanders seemed to consider

that the Germans might have totally different ideas

or that the next moves might come

in a completely different arena,

Scandinavia.

On November the 30th, 1939,

a new theatre of war was opened up.

The Soviet Union invaded its tiny neighbour, Finland.

Finland had only achieved independence

from the Russians in 1918, and hated them.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was convinced

that one day the Finns might allow the Germans in

to attack Leningrad and the vital arctic port of Murmansk.

The red army outnumbered its Finnish opponents

by more than 10 to one.

The invasion should have been a walkover.

But its leadership had been devastated

by Stalin's terrible purges.

The Finns were led by General Gustaf Mannerheim.

He fought back using hit-and-run tactics

amid the deep snow, often on skis.

The Soviet troops, confused and poorly led,

suffered massive losses.

Finland's gallant resistance

caught the imagination of the British and French.

Soon they were planning to send help via Norway and Sweden.

The fact that this might suck

two neutral countries into the war was ignored.

But a renewed Soviet offensive at the beginning of February

broke the Finnish defensive line.

In early March, the Finns had to cede territory to Stalin.

By now, Hitler, too, had become interested in Scandinavia.

The Nazi war machine relied on iron ore from Sweden.

In the winter months, the only way it could get to Germany

was via the Norwegian port of Narvik.

If the allies landed in Norway,

this vital supply could be cut off.

So he ordered plans to be prepared

for an invasion of Norway.

Denmark, which was in the way,

would also have to be seized.

The Norway theatre heated up on February the 16th, 1940.

The British destroyer Cossack

boarded the German supply ship Altmark

in a Norwegian fjord to release prisoners.

Then, on April the 9th,

German troops began landing at five ports,

Oslo, Kristiansand, Bergen,

Trondheim and Narvik.

At the same time, men of their newly formed

German parachute division

seized Stavanger and Oslo airfields.

The Norwegian defenders were swiftly overwhelmed,

as were the Danes.

German forces occupied their country within 24 hours.

In Norway, the Germans moved swiftly

to link up their beachheads and seize all the major towns.

In the air, the Luftwaffe had total control.

The allies now responded.

A landing force was dispatched to recapture Narvik.

French and Norwegian forces achieved this

on May the 28th.

But a substantial German force was now approaching.

So six weeks later,

the allies abandoned Norway to its fate.

Hitler had spent most of that winter and spring

at his country retreat,

the Berghof in Southern Bavaria.

For him, the events in Scandinavia were a sideshow.

Instead, he was preparing for his next major Blitzkrieg

against Britain and France.

The first plan his generals brought him

had a familiar ring to it.

The Germans would advance into Belgium

aiming to swing down towards Paris.

It was a repeat of the Schlieffen Plan,

which the Germans had used at the start of World War I.

The allies were expecting this.

And their main strategic discussion

was how to prepare for it.

When the Germans attacked, the allies planned

that their forces west of the Marginot Line

would swing forward into Belgium

to hold them on the shorter and more defensible line

of the Rivers Dyle and Meuse.

Then on January the 10th, 1940,

a German liaison aircraft lost its way

and crashed in Belgium.

A copy of the German plan was found.

This convinced the allies

that their Dyle plan must be right,

and they deployed their troops accordingly.

Unfortunately, the same event made the Germans

alter their ideas entirely.

Chief planner General Erich von Manstein

had always thought the original plan unimaginative.

He was worried that the German forces

would become bogged down, as in World War I,

and that his country would lose a long, drawn out war.

So he proposed to Hitler that the main thrust

should be made at the point where the Marginot Line ended

and where the allies were most vulnerable,

as their western armies moved forward.

Virtually all Germany's Panzers would be gathered

opposite the Ardennes in southeast Belgium.

The allies considered this hilly and wooded area

almost impossible for tanks.

It was, therefore, lightly defended.

The plan was to drive deep behind the allied armies

which would have advanced into Belgium.

They could then cut them off.

And all the forces sitting in the Marginot Line

would be bypassed.

It was a high-risk strategy.

The German armour could become stuck in the forest.

But Hitler loved it.

So the German forces were redeployed

without the allies knowing.

The allies meanwhile prepared for their long, defensive war.

In addition to the formidable barrier of the Marginot Line,

they had a slight advantage, both in manpower,

some 110 divisions available against 95 German,

and in armour,

about 3,000 vehicles against 2,700.

The French also had the better tanks.

Their 32 ton Char B had both

75 and 47 millimetre guns.

Its disadvantage was that the main gun

was mounted in the hull and so was difficult to aim.

The other gun was in a one man turret,

from which the commander had to control the tank

as well as man the gun.

In contrast, the newest German design,

a 17 ton Panzer Mark IV

had a 75 millimetre gun

in a spacious three man turret.

So its crew could work as a team,

though only about 100 were available.

The other main French tanks also had guns

which matched those of their German counterparts,

but again, the French had the one man turret.

The one area where the Germans had a clear advantage

was in the air.

The Luftwaffe had 2,000 bombers, the allies just 800.

The Luftwaffe had 4,000 fighters,

including the ultra-modern Messerschmitt Bf 109.

They faced just 2,500 mainly older aircraft.

The Royal Air Force did have about 800

excellent Spitfire and Hurricane fighters.

But it was keen to keep them for home defence.

But the main difference between the two armies

was in philosophy.

Everything the Germans did

was focused on the possibilities of Blitzkrieg.

All their armour was grouped

in 10 independent Panzer divisions.

But the French were preparing for a repeat

of the static fighting of World War I.

They saw tanks as infantry support

and distributed them piecemeal

instead of concentrating them.

They had noticed the success of Germany's Panzers in Poland.

So they were assembling three armour divisions.

But by the start of hostilities, none was fully operational.

Two totally different ways of military thinking

were about to go head to head.

Blitzkrieg against static warfare.

The summer of 1940 would soon show which was correct.

On May the 10th, 1940,

Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain.

He couldn't have picked a worse day.

That was the day Hitler chose to launch

his Blitzkrieg against France and Britain.

At dawn, a whole German airborne division

parachuted into Holland to seize bridges and airfields.

Simultaneously, the massive Belgian fortress

of Eban Emael was assaulted.

Paratroop engineers were dropped on top

by swooping German gliders.

They swiftly silenced its guns.

Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe attacked

Dutch and Belgian air bases.

Then, the frontier barriers were pushed aside.

And Hitler's Army Group B under General Fedor von Bock

now drove into Holland and Belgium.

As planned, the French and British armies

along the Belgian border moved forward

to their new defensive line along the Dyle and Meuse Rivers.

But none of the allied commanders

seemed to have noticed

that German Army Group A, which had the bulk of the Panzers,

after brushing aside the Belgian frontier troops

had now begun driving through the hills and woods

of the Ardennes to their south.

Meanwhile, the Germans were pushing rapidly through Holland.

The obsolete Dutch army was no match

for the highly tuned German war machine.

And it was under continual heavy air attack by the Luftwaffe

which roamed the skies unchallenged.

On May the 14th, the Germans demanded

the surrender of the port of Rotterdam.

A large force of bombers took off as the Dutch hesitated.

While they were airborne,

the Dutch agreed to surrender the city.

But apparently a recall message never reached the bombers.

Rotterdam was devastated.

The Dutch capitulated the next day.

Then came the hammer blow.

The thing that British and French planners

had thought impossible had happened.

German Panzers were through the Ardennes

and had reached the Meuse by the evening of May the 12th.

Among the first to arrive at Sedan,

well north of the Marginot Line,

were the men of the 19th Panzer Corps

commanded by General Heinz Guderian,

fresh from the triumphs in Poland.

Guderian now showed how Blitzkrieg should be done.

He ignored the troops in the Marginot Line,

and he didn't wait for his own infantry to catch up.

He pushed straight on.

The next day, assault troops crossed the River Meuse.

Engineers began building bridges for the armour

while under heavy French fire.

On the 14th, the Panzers began crossing.

That evening Guderian's bridgehead was eight miles deep.

The French troops, stuck in the Marginot Line,

were too immobile to intervene.

Allied bombers made despairing attempts

to destroy the German bridges.

But most were shot down.

All the while German artillery

pounded the French defences

while the Stukas screamed in.

Just three days after the attack had been launched,

the French defenders around Sedan broke.

Guderian's Panzers began racing westwards.

By nightfall they had advanced more than 40 miles

behind the northern group of Allied armies.

These had been holding firm on the Dyle line.

But now the French supreme commander, General Gamelin,

realised that they were about to be encircled.

He ordered them to fall back.

This sudden decision to withdraw

bewildered the allied troops

who had no idea what was going on behind them.

As they fell back, they were hindered by a growing flood

of refugees clogging the roads.

That day, the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud

phoned Churchill.

He said, "We are beaten."

We have lost the battle."

But for all the brilliance of the Blitzkrieg,

the Germans were vulnerable.

As the Panzers raced westwards,

they created an ever longer corridor

just a few miles wide.

The allies realised that this was open to counterattack.

The bulk of the German army was still

totally dependent on horsepower

or its own feet for transport.

So the gap between the rampaging Panzers

and the follow-up infantry grew with every hour.

On May the 17th, Colonel Charles de Gaulle,

commander of one of the newly formed French armour divisions,

made the first of two attempts

to cut through the German line near Crecy.

But the cumbersome French command system

meant that units were sent into battle piecemeal,

not in a coordinated thrust.

The Germans had little difficulty

warding off both attacks,

inflicting heavy casualties.

It seemed that nothing could now stop Guderian.

He plunged on further and further into France.

By the 19th, his lead units were past Peronne.

On the 20th, in an extraordinary 56 mile dash,

Amiens had been taken by lunchtime.

Abbeville, just 14 miles from the English channel,

was seized by 9 that evening.

And at midnight, a battalion of the 2nd Panzer division

reached the coast of Noyelles.

The Germans had split the allied front in two.

Everything now depended on whether they could defend

this long, thin corridor,

or whether the allies could successfully counterattack.

So now the British got ready to break the German lines.

On May the 21st, two armoured battalions

prepared to launch an attack south of Arras.

The British tanks were even more unsuited

to fast-moving armoured warfare than the French.

Their most effective machine, the Matilda II,

had been designed for infantry support.

Though well armoured, it was slow and undergunned.

The Germans had little trouble in repulsing the attack.

But it did have an effect.

By now, the German high command

were becoming worried

by their extended lines of communication.

So, for the time being,

driving south into the rest of France was put on hold

until the infantry had caught up.

The priority was to turn north

and eliminate the British Expeditionary Force

and the French First Army fighting beside it.

On May the 22nd, Guderian and the Panzers

began their attack to destroy the allied armies.

These were now pulling back to the ports

of Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk,

but they were trapped.

On May the 23rd, General Alan Brooke,

commander British II Corps, wrote,

"Nothing but a miracle can save

the British Expeditionary Force."

Two days later, the Germans seized Boulogne.

It was beginning to look as if

even a miracle would be too late.

May the 25th, 1940.

The situation of the British Expeditionary Force

and the French First Army was desperate.

The port of Boulogne had been overrun.

German troops had isolated Calais.

The British were being forced back to the port of Dunkirk.

Lord Gort, the British commander,

advised his government that the only hope

of saving even a fraction of his troops

was to organise an evacuation by sea.

But as the dive bombers screamed down

and the Panzers were poised for the final assault,

evacuation seemed a forlorn hope.

The British anticipated that Dunkirk

would be overrun within a day.

But unknown to the British,

Hitler and the German high command

had made a decision which was to save them

from total annihilation.

The Germans were only too aware

that their Panzer crews were exhausted

and their machines needed urgent repairs.

Those attacks by De Gaulle and the British may have failed,

but they had shown very clearly

how vulnerable the German lines of communication were.

This was the great weakness of Blitzkrieg.

So the high command made a fateful decision.

It decided to stop the Panzers' advance

to save them from further damage,

and wait for the infantry to come up.

Only then would the allied pocket

around Dunkirk be eliminated.

So the Blitzkrieg was halted, and the Panzers lay idle.

They would not advance for two days,

just enough to buy the British in particular

a little time to prepare.

As the tanks waited, the only major action was in Calais.

There, the British and French garrison

refused to surrender.

Instead, they had to be overrun in three days

of bloody hand to hand fighting.

When the Panzers got going again two days later

on May the 26th, the weather had changed.

The Germans became bogged down in the heavy rain,

again giving the allies more time.

So it was that at 7:57 p.m. on May the 26th,

Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsey, Flag Officer commanding Dover,

received a signal that he was to put

Operation Dynamo into action.

Operation Dynamo was a plan to withdraw

the British Expeditionary Force by sea.

He had prepared it more in hope than in expectation

that it could ever be used.

The following day a makeshift fleet

of destroyers, tugs, and passenger ferries

crossed the English Channel.

But by the end of the day,

less than 8,000 of the over 300,000 troops

of Dunkirk had been rescued.

The port was under such heavy air attack

that it could not be used.

And the ships could not get in close enough to the beaches.

So Ramsay now sent out a call for any boats of shallow draft

that were over 30 feet long.

Hundreds of cabin cruisers, fishing boats,

and barges were gathered from harbours

all over southern England and sent across the channel.

Often crewed by their civilian owners,

the little ships worked on the beaches of Dunkirk

ferrying troops out to the larger boats

waiting to take them to safety.

All the time they were under constant air attack.

The British Air Force threw every fighter it possessed

into the battle to drive the Luftwaffe off.

Even so, seven French and six British destroyers were sunk

together with 24 smaller war ships.

A quarter of the 665 small boats never got home.

But when the evacuation was halted on June the 4th,

over 300,000 men, 41% of them French,

had been rescued.

None of this would have been possible

without the heroism of the French army.

It played a vital role in slowing down the German advance.

The French rear guard didn't leave

its positions around Dunkirk

until the last boats had pulled away from the beaches.

One British officer compared them

to the last stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae.

Even so, the British army had lost

most of its heavy weapons.

It wouldn't be fit to fight

the Germans again for a long time.

France still had to fight on,

but it had lost more than half its army.

Against them, the Germans had 92 divisions,

including masses of armour.

At 4 in the morning of June the 5th,

a short bombardment began the final destruction of France.

Assault troops crossed the Somme and the Aisne.

At first, the French resistance was fierce.

And the Germans struggled to break out of their bridgeheads.

But once again, the Luftwaffe helped crush the defences.

Soon, the Panzers were pushing south.

And the trickle of surrendering French troops

turned into a flood.

By the 9th, the Panzers had reached the River Seine.

And the infantry were only a few hours behind.

Once across the river, the Germans fanned out

into the interior of the country.

On the 14th, the German army marched into Paris.

The swastika was raised on the Eiffel Tower.

Hitler had secured the prize

which had eluded the Kaiser in 1914.

The Parisians could only watch in stunned horror.

Throughout the period of the French collapse,

Winston Churchill paid five visits to France

trying to bolster French resistance.

On June the 16th, he even offered Paul Reynaud

a union with Britain if France stayed in the fight.

But it was too late.

Raynaud's cabinet rejected the proposal,

and the Prime Minister resigned that evening.

He was succeeded by Marshal Philippe Petain

who immediately asked the Germans for an armistice.

It was only now that the Germans

finally began to attack the Marginot Line,

which had been left isolated.

After a heavy artillery bombardment,

the French defenders offered only token resistance

before the German troops occupied the forts.

On June the 21st, Hitler went to Compiegne,

where the railway carriage in which the Germans

had signed the armistice in 1918 was kept.

As the French delegation entered the carriage,

he handed them his terms and then left.

The French insisted on consulting their government.

But the next day, they were told that

if they didn't sign immediately,

the Panzers would roll again.

They signed.

And the humiliation of France was complete.

For Hitler, his control of western Europe seemed absolute.

He felt sure that Britain must now seek peace

and that soon, he could turn

to the next stage of his master plan.

But even though the Blitzkrieg had achieved so much so fast,

it hadn't won him the war.

The British, battered and wounded,

had escaped to fight another day.