Original subtitles

September, 1945.

Germany and Japan have surrendered unconditionally.

The destruction and death of the Second World War is over.

There is jubilation around the world.

The United States and the Soviet Union

emerged from the conflict

as the globe's two dominant superpowers.

They fought side by side when they shared a common enemy.

But now that that enemy has been defeated,

an American-Soviet rivalry appears unavoidable.

All wars changed the world,

but none of them changed 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 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 II was a struggle

in which there could be one victor and one vanquished.

It's official. It's all over. It's total victory.

The day of days for America and her allies.

Peace, it's wonderful.

The war is over.

The entire world begins to breathe and live again.

The Allies won this war in the cause of freedom

and the ideals of anti-fascism, the ideals of democracy.

One of the great legacies of the Second World War

is that a disputatious, complicated,

often wrong nation

like the United States

can, in extremis, marshal significant force

to do the right thing.

It took us a long time.

As Churchill is alleged to have said,

"You can always count on the Americans

to do the right thing once we've exhausted every other possibility."

We spent blood and treasure to defeat fascism.

The United States had fulfilled Roosevelt's ambitions

to be the arsenal of democracy

to orders of magnitude no-one could have predicted.

In New York, hundreds of thousands lined the docks

to greet America's ships

and welcome home their sons and daughters.

President Harry Truman is honoured with a ticker tape parade

through the city's Canyon of Heroes.

Speaking in Central Park,

the President addresses the nation.

The world cannot afford

to let the co-operative spirit of the Allies in this war

disintegrate. The world simply cannot allow this to happen.

In Red Square,

thousands celebrate and honour Generalissimo Joseph Stalin.

He's dressed in a white Marshal's summer uniform

with shoulder boards, like a Russian Romanov emperor.

Stalin emerges from the Second World War

with astonishing, almost religious prestige

in the Soviet Union.

Stalin and the United States have made an alliance

that ultimately brings Hitler and then Japan to its knees.

The spirit of co-operation is so high

that Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander

in Europe, probably one of the future

staunchest anti-communists in American history,

stands right next to Stalin.

The bloodshed and horror of the Second World War

is unprecedented in human history.

Nearly 70 million people are killed,

the majority civilians.

An estimated 27 million Soviets.

20 million Chinese.

10 million Germans and Japanese.

One million British and Americans.

And six million Jews.

Europe is destroyed.

The Brits are bankrupt.

The Americans and the Soviets, they're demobilising.

What's really clear coming out of World War II

is that the U.S. has an incredibly important role to play in the world.

She hasn't been physically touched by the war

other than Pearl Harbor. America is the superpower.

There's every expectation that some kind of peaceful coexistence

will emerge. When the Americans talk about

the way they want the international system to be,

they talk about the United Nations.

The United Nations, in many ways,

is Franklin Roosevelt's dream come true.

During the war, it's Roosevelt who says we must have

this international body. It's a very hopeful group.

Lots of ideals, the UN Charter, all of this comes into being

in 1945.

Leaders of the United Nations,

representing all but a fraction of the Earth's population,

lay the post-war foundations

of international security. - Out of the fires of war,

they wanted for there to be an organisation

where we don't have 1939 again.

The United Nations combines two ideas:

the first is the General Assembly, where equal states can meet

and confer and make resolutions. There is also

the wartime military alliance

between the Soviets, the British, France,

and the United States, as well as China.

And that's the Security Council

that will be the cornerstone to ensuring peace.

Because it's not just winning the battle of the day,

it's trying to prevent the next one.

One of the first challenges

is to determine how Germany will fit into the post-war world.

We can't today perhaps understand just how threatening

and powerful Germany seemed to the Allied leadership in 1945.

They had just fought two world wars,

the greatest enemy of which was Germany.

Ultimately, they realised that control of Germany

will play a huge role in determining Europe's future.

The American view is just like the Soviet one

at the beginning, in the sense that we've got to divide Germany.

We've got to make sure that it can never rise up again.

That's the first urgent thing.

The Allies split Germany into four occupation zones.

The British, Americans, and French will govern western Germany.

The Soviets will govern the east.

Berlin, deep within the Soviet zone,

is divided between all four nations.

The wartime Allies have very different plans

for the new Germany.

What Stalin is doing is taking as much of the wealth,

as much of the factories,

as much of the productive capacity and stockpiles

from occupied Germany back to the Soviet Union.

Stalin would say

he was only taking what the Germans owed him

for the horrible suffering during the war.

Conversely, the western Allies want Germany rehabilitated.

The Western idea is not to devastate Germany

economically through reparations, but bring them into global markets,

connect Germany to the world,

and through that you'll get German people

who are incentivised to do things that are constructive.

So it's gonna need industrialists, middle managers,

local governance. Many of these people

would have been members of the Nazi party.

The crimes of the Nazi Third Reich

are so horrific that the wartime Allies determine

there must be an attempt to achieve justice.

Nuremberg is highly symbolic

as the spiritual heart of Nazi Germany

and as the place

where hopefully the demons of Nazism can be purged.

Everyone in court stands up as the tribunal enters.

Four judges and alternate members: French, American,

British, and Russian.

The defendants are to plead guilty or not guilty

to the charges against them.

Rudolf Hess.

22 Nazi leaders are put on trial.

The next defendant called was Ribbentrop.

Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg tribunals,

announces that history will judge the fairness of the trial

not by the convictions and the executions it obtains,

but by the acquittals. But the Soviets are expecting these

to be old-fashioned show trials. Wilhelm Keitel.

Stalin had seen how effective show trials could be

in his own consolidation of power in the 1930s...

...and was happy to give the Germans a trial...

Hermann Wilhelm Goering.

...and then hang them.

12 of the defendants receive the death sentence.

Hermann Goeing avoids the gallows

by committing suicide.

Seven are given lengthy prison terms.

Although the Soviets object, three are acquitted.

From '45 onwards,

you just have this constant growing tension

between the United States and Britain on one hand

and the Soviet Union on the other. Stalin has to play a careful game.

He wants to keep what he has.

But he doesn't want to directly antagonise the United States,

because the United States is still much more powerful

economically. It has complete air and sea control.

And it has the atom bomb.

World War II devastated the Soviet Union.

Joseph Stalin must rebuild his country,

ensure its security, and consolidate his power.

But some of Stalin's ambitions will conflict

with the post-war plans of his Western allies.

Stalin saw the wartime alliance as a way to defeat Nazi Germany,

but never something

that would permanently reshape the globe

or that would make capitalism and communism friends.

Stalin is an ideologue. That can never be forgotten.

He believes that communism and capitalism are incompatible,

that they will at some point wage a great fight

for the future, and he believes communism will win.

Stalin is in an extraordinary position.

There's a moment when he reviews what they've conquered

in World War II, looks at the map of Europe and Russia

and says "We really haven't done badly." An understatement.

The Red Army is in Berlin and most countries to the east:

Poland, the Baltics, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria.

The Soviet wave broke right around Berlin

and they just never receded. - Stalin has done better

than any of the greatest Czars in Russian history:

Peter the Great, Catherine the Great. He's created

the biggest ever Russian empire. Stalin intends

to create a buffer against the West, militarily and ideologically.

He would say, we have now had two world wars

where first imperial Russia, then the Soviet Union

were invaded through Eastern and Central Europe. I will make sure

that they are never a threat to us gain.

For Stalin, the key thing for Eastern and Central Europe

is that it must be loyal to the Soviets. It's non-negotiable,

and the recipe for doing that is communism.

He starts to create a new economic centralised system

in Central and Eastern Europe: controlled governments,

armies, secret police, factories, agricultural systems,

with all of the decisions effectively

for those countries' economies being made in Moscow.

The Europe that the United States wants to build

does not look very much like the Europe the Soviets want.

The United States has an enormous advantage

over the Soviet Union: the atomic bomb.

The Soviets construct numerous sites across the USSR

in order to accomplish task number one.

Task number one is to create a nuclear weapon

at breakneck speed. No resources are too much.

The nuclear programme's

what the USSR was almost designed to do. It's a big country

with lots of natural resources. It can marshal and mobilise

for the nuclear project. It's not completely

unlike the Manhattan Project, which was also top-down,

secretive and resource-heavy. The Soviet Union

puts the full weight of its coercive power

behind this project. Stalin puts

one of his most ruthless lieutenants in charge,

the chief of his secret police.

Lavrentiy Beria is a man of brutal ruthlessness and sadism,

one of the great monsters of the Soviet story.

He rapes women, he tortures victims himself.

But he's also as efficient as a Swiss clock,

and he uses everything. He happily turns off power

in several cities just to power a project.

He gives scientists villas, dachas, cars,

shooting rifles, holidays. But at the same time,

he threatens to kill them and their whole families

if they ever deceive him. And he drives on the project.

It's not gonna be quick for Stalin.

There's no way that he can flip a switch

and acquire nuclear weapons. But the USSR

can't sit on its laurels in 1946. It has to be ready for new conflict.

After the turmoil of the Second World War,

the people of Great Britain and the United States

hope to return to a normal, prosperous life...

...with peaceful coexistence among nations...

...including with the Soviet Union.

For the past five years,

Stalin had been your friend. He had been Uncle Joe.

But once again,

a familiar voice sounds a warning.

Winston Churchill's in a pretty bad mood.

He was thrown out by the public

in a dramatic election defeat in 1945.

His wife said it might be a blessing in disguise.

He said, "Pretty good disguise." He feels he won the war,

he saved Britain. And here he is on the speaking circuit.

Winston Churchill receives an invitation

to give a speech at a small college

in President Truman's home state.

This is an opportunity for Churchill

to say things he's got in his mind, also an opportunity to spend time

with the President of the United States of America.

He'll stand on that stage and tell American people some home truths.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,

an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

The famous Iron Curtain speech,

where he very clearly lays out what is happening in Europe,

one side free, the other side not.

Behind that line,

all are subject to a very high and in some cases

increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Churchill sees Soviet communism,

Stalinism, as a greater threat, really, as Nazism was

a generation before. - This is certainly not

the liberated Europe we fought to build up.

It's dynamite.

Because what Churchill is doing is reframing the wartime alliance.

He's casting the Soviet empire as a malign force in the world.

Truman, by the way, is absolutely

on board with this speech. But to Stalin,

this is just proof that Churchill is a warmonger.

The alliance that defeated Nazi fascism

is beginning to fray.

In late 1946,

the French vote to elect a new government.

The Communist Party does well,

winning a plurality of seats in the French legislature.

With the politics of Europe in a state of extraordinary upheaval

because of the catastrophe of the war,

you do have a high degree of concern in Washington

about Western Europe turning to communism.

There's a lot of unrest.

There are strikes starting to take place in France.

There's a huge pro-communist movement in Italy.

And Stalin thinks maybe he'll win some of these countries

without having to send an army in.

To the south,

Stalin attempts to pressure Turkey

into giving him control of the Turkish Straits,

which would allow access to the Mediterranean

and the Middle East.

And in Greece, communist guerrillas and government forces

are fighting an ongoing civil war.

These countries have never been viewed as essential

to American security. The United States does not have

a history of backing the governments of Turkey or Greece.

The British have been funding the Greek army

and sending weapons to Turkey.

But early in 1947 in the White House,

this document arrives, a shocker. It's from the British government,

and it says, for a long time, we've been supporting Greece

and Turkey, but we are broke.

This is a really important moment,

the winding down of the British Empire.

By early 1947, they do not wish to be a great force

in the east Mediterranean, which they had been for a long time.

It becomes clear to Truman and the American State Department

that this issue in Greece and Turkey is a threat to national security.

They believe that if Greece

and Turkey become Stalinised, these are dominoes,

and the rest of Western Europe could possibly fall.

And the British say to the Americans,

if you wanna make sure these places remain pro-Western,

you as the United States will have to use military force.

Now, that is a real put up or shut up moment for Truman.

Truman is a very practical, plainspoken, linear thinker.

He doesn't come into office with some big vision

of what the world should be. He picks up the mantle of FDR

and tries to build a post-war order

according to what he thought FDR would have done. But really,

from the moment of meeting Stalin at Potsdam,

he starts to formulate his own views.

And now Truman recognises that this is a turning point.

In this post-war world, what happens on another side of the globe

can be critical

to America's national security. After deliberating

with his diplomatic and military advisors,

President Truman addresses a joint session of Congress.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States

to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation

by armed minorities or by outside pressure.

We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies

in their own way.

The United States is shifting away from isolationism.

The Truman Doctrine is now U.S. policy.

The Truman Doctrine is the culmination,

going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson,

of setting out American ideals, American principles,

but this time backing them with more power, more force,

because Truman's vision is that the U.S. will support

any country resisting communist aggression.

Any country. - It is difficult to overstate

what a dramatic departure the Truman Doctrine is for the U.S.

In 1941, the United States had to be dragged into war.

But what Truman is saying is now, we're ready to take the fight

wherever democracy requires us.

We must take immediate and resolute action.

Truman asks Congress, and he receives $400 million

of military aid for Greece and Turkey.

It's only the beginning.

This is a radical shift, not only in the way that America had thought

about its place in the world, but in where Truman's own line was.

It's actually putting American power behind a global ideological contest

with the Soviet Union.

As the American-Soviet alliance fades,

a contest between superpowers emerges.

Europe is in the grip of one of the coldest winters in memory.

People have little to eat, and struggle to stay warm.

They begin to despair

at the slow pace of post-war recovery.

Western governments have not been able

to rebuild their economies. Agriculture has been destroyed.

Transportation and manufacturing have been destroyed.

And there's an enormous refugee crisis

that is ongoing.

During the war, there was the deliberate forced movement

of populations. So there are millions and millions of refugees

on the roads, in camps, in towns, cities and villages not their own.

Truman and his advisors

fear that Europe is on the verge of collapse.

General George Marshall, one of the chief architects

of American victory in World War II,

believes the whole world hangs in the balance.

What Truman and George Marshall, his Secretary of State, realise

is you need to rebuild the European economy.

It has to be not just the militarised Truman Doctrine,

but there needs to be a way of getting money

to support Western European or capitalist states.

The Marshall Plan is a $13.3 billion, essentially,

handout to foreign governments to help these countries

rebuild themselves, westernise, and stabilise politically.

And it would be keeping people alive

in places where starvation was an actual real thing.

So it's done for altruistic reasons, but also geopolitical ones.

President Truman and George Marshall

believe that the best guarantee against communism

are well-fed bellies, good schools, orderly societies,

the kind of things that can only happen in a prosperous economy.

Stalin recognises how Marshall's plan

threatens his objectives.

To him, it's another trick.

It's another American way to try to undermine the Soviet Union

and pull Europe into the American orbit.

It's presented as Stalin's typical paranoia.

Actually, he's got every reason to distrust the West.

He was right. - Today, our aid

to the free nations of Europe

is helping them to resist dictatorship.

Stalin understands that Western goods

with Western money would lead to Western values

of liberal democracy, of open society,

and also would spread the attractions of capitalism.

And it would undermine Stalin's own rule.

For him, the Marshall Plan must be stomped out.

Stalin directs the countries under his command

to reject the American offer.

Very clearly, Stalin has drawn a line

and said, this is my turf, this is your turf, and that's that.

Stalin expects to maintain complete control

of the East European countries liberated from Germany

by the Red Army. But one nation will test him.

Czechoslovakia is deeply connected to the Western European economy.

The Czechs have advanced industry. They could become wealthy

with access to Western capital via the Marshall Plan.

The democratically elected government in Prague

is led by President Edvard Benes.

Several of its ministers are members of the Czech Communist Party.

Stalin pressures Benes to reject American aid

and compels the Czech communists to seize control.

Over the next few months,

local communists stir up unrest throughout the country.

The citizens of Czechoslovakia haven't gotten the memo

that they're the subordinates of Soviet power.

In 1948, there is a communist-led coup

in Prague that topples the Benes government

and places another East European country

firmly in Moscow's orbit.

Now, Stalin decides to take fewer risks

in Eastern Europe, no risks at all. He doesn't believe

that ultimately communism will flower politically

and economically, and that working peoples

around the world will embrace it because it is the true,

scientific approach to civilisation. He believes in power.

Across Eastern Europe,

he crushes any hint of liberalism, free speech.

He doubles down on his Soviet system.

He arrests tens of thousands of people.

More people are sent to the Gulags after the war

than before the war in the 1930s during the Great Terror.

Marshall Aid is an essential component

in the American post-war recovery plan for Europe.

But its success widens the increasing divide

economically and politically between East and West.

We are now in a bipolar world.

It's a world of rivalry like the world had never seen.

The Soviet Union has proved again and again

that it cannot be trusted.

And it's a race.

It's a competition for pre-eminence,

and it's ultimately going to be a competition for security.

And Berlin, the former capital

of the Third Reich, is at the centre of the conflict.

In the summer of 1948,

billions of Marshall Aid dollars

flow into the countries of Western Europe.

Europe is slowly but surely

edging back towards economic health.

Careful planning for the use of the $324 million allotted

has helped Western Germany temporarily to its feet.

Great Britain and the United States

merge their German occupation zones. The French will soon join them.

A common currency is introduced, the Deutschmark.

Stalin understands that the Western powers

intend to establish a strong and independent West Germany.

Since the end of the war, Great Britain, France,

the United States and the Soviet Union

have occupied Berlin. It lies

deep within Soviet-dominated Eastern Germany.

Now, imagine for someone as paranoid as Stalin

having these Western militaries going back and forth

between Berlin and the Western occupation zones.

This is a source of instability, disruption, dangerous.

Stalin wants to sever direct contact

between Berlin and the western half of Germany.

He doesn't want to invade West Berlin,

because that's an act of war, but what he believes he can do

is he can blockade Berlin. - At this time,

Berlin is still a pile of rubble.

it has very little tactical significance

for the United States government. - So it really made no sense

to keep West Berlin,

and Stalin believed that in the end the West would blink and withdraw.

On June 24th, the Soviets cut all road,

rail and water routes linking West Berlin

to Western Germany.

Suddenly the trains stopped.

Traffic between Berlin and the Western zones was banned.

The famous autobahns were deserted,

and even canal traffic was at a standstill.

The blockade even cut electric power

and put out 75% of the lights.

Truman is a pragmatic person. This could be a moment

where he says, it's not worth saving this city,

because I don't know what Stalin's gonna do.

I don't know how dangerous this is gonna be. Instead, he says,

we're not going anywhere.

The U.S. and Britain realise this is Stalin testing the wire.

It'll be Berlin first, then it'll be elsewhere.

And the Allies choose to make it a red line.

Keep in mind, it's 1948.

For Truman, it's an election year. It's the first post-war election.

The firs in the nuclear age.

The first in the television age.

He's aware that all eyes are on him.

The British and Americans ask, what can we do short of war?

And the answer is, they can keep Berlin supplied.

Not by road, not by rail, not by canal, but by air.

The British and the Americans construct an air bridge

into West Berlin. - The plan is to deliver it

on airplanes, everything that a modern city needs to survive.

Got food, got coal, you got fuel, you've got medical supplies.

It's a superb example of an operation

that's pulled together very quickly. Huge numbers of aircraft,

plans flying round the clock. These British and American officers,

the same officers that organised the war's triumphs of logistics.

A continuous stream of cargo planes

land in West Berlin every few minutes.

But to reach the city,

they must fly over hundreds of miles of Soviet-controlled territory.

They're choosing to defy Stalin.

And if you fill the airspace with military aircraft,

even though they're unarmed,

you have to assume that Stalin might strike back.

You have all this military capacity.

You have the paranoia and fear in Washington and in Moscow.

You have this hall of mirrors quality.

The two countries are involved in a kind of escalatory spiral.

Truman now deploys dozens of B-29s

to air bases in England,

the same plane that dropped the atomic bombs

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nuclear weapons go from being a secret weapon

to a public strategic weapon.

The pressure on Truman at this point is incalculable

He knows that this move could be provocative enough

to start World War III.

But the Americans are hoping that this strong show of resolve

will encourage Stalin to back off.

They are gambling that Stalin does not want World War III.

After nearly a year of daily international tension,

Stalin halts the blockade.

Here's a glimpse of Berlin itself

as the first trains and vehicles got going at night.

All routes that connect Berlin to the West

are reopened.

Restrictions within Berlin between the Soviet zone

and American, British, and French zones

are lifted as well.

Stalin set up a challenge for the West.

He was probing the West.

He needed to know how far he could go.

But in fact, Truman rose to the challenge,

and in the end, it was Stalin who blinked.

As relations between the United States

and the Soviet Union continue to deteriorate,

Western governments plan to provide collective security

against possible Soviet aggression.

When the United States and the Soviet Union

look like they can be on the verge of war,

it became obvious

that the United States couldn't continue to ad hoc this,

to lurch from crisis to crisis.

The post-war path that FDR anticipated

was one in which the United Nations would help adjudicate disputes

and rule the peace.

What he was not able to fully anticipate

was that a struggle against his former ally,

the Soviet Union, would become the defining force of the era.

Representatives from Europe, Canada,

and the United States meet in Washington to discuss

the formation of a new military alliance,

the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.

The idea is to create

what military strategists call deterrence.

It's an alliance that is created to make sure

that the Russians know that if they attack one state

in the alliance, they could theoretically face a war

against all states in that alliance.

NATO is created to keep the Americans in,

the Russians out, and the Germans down.

What Harry Truman does with the Marshall Plan,

with the Truman Doctrine, with NATO,

is establish an infrastructure of deterrence

to try to contain the communistic influence.

If there is anything inevitable in the future,

it is the will of the people of the world

for freedom and for peace.

But the world is about to cross a threshold

from which there is no return.

In an appropriately desolate landscape,

the Soviet Union prepares to test its first atomic bomb.

Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's kind of mega-manager,

arrives to supervise in a little hut in the middle of nowhere.

He's incredibly nervous. If it doesn't work,

his downfall is quite likely.

He watches from a safe distance.

The test is a success.

Stalin's overjoyed

and relieved.

Now he's got an equal footing with the West,

and they cannot push him around

any more. - After this period

when Stalin's struggling to catch up with America, he's back in the game.

Truman's a poker player, and for these years after the war,

he had an ace in the hole. He had the bomb, the Soviets didn't.

That surety was gone. There was no turning back.

You've got two superpowers, two nuclear powers

that are facing each other across the world,

and all of a sudden the world is much less stable.

An 18th or 19th century scholar would say, oh,

you're gonna have a war between those two powers.

Inevitable, they're the two great superpowers. But atomic weapons

change things. If the Soviets and the United States can't compete

in the military sense directly because it's too dangerous,

well, then you compete indirectly.

After 1949, there'll be one war after the other:

big wars, small wars, guerrilla wars,

proxy wars between the two superpowers.

But what hasn't happened is the big one.

There has not been a World War III,

a general war involving the globe

that involves nuclear weapons.

World War II began in a universe

that would have been recognisable 50 years before.

It ends in a world that wouldn't have been recognisable

to anyone, because of the splitting of the atom.

The moral and philosophical underpinnings

that enabled the Allies to triumph in World War II,

an appreciation for the individual,

support for the dignity of all peoples,

a bias for democracy,

have for almost a century now enabled us to live and thrive

in a world where Armageddon is always at hand.

But it hasn't come,

not least because we've done the right thing.

The Second World War alters everything.

National, political, even moral boundaries are redrawn.

What was inconceivable before the war

is now part of the fabric of life.

The conflict that follows, the Cold War,

poses even graver consequence,

because now for the first time in human history

the world could literally destroy itself.

One war replaced by another and the world remains on edge.

As President Dwight D. Eisenhower observed,

"The only way to win the next world war

is to prevent it."