All language subtitles for hestpuis

In the Second World War,

Britain faces the biggest
challenge in its history.

Across six years of conflict,
we must see off invasion,

fight campaigns at sea
and across the globe.

We have to invent new technologies

and win allies to our cause

in order to fight and win
against an enemy

who are better prepared
and better equipped.

Defeating Hitler often feels
like an almost impossible task.

Tonight, we go behind the scenes
of the war's most famous events -

Dunkirk, the Blitz,

the Battle of Britain,

the D-Day landings, and more -

to remember the people who really
turned the war in our favour.

You may not have heard of
all of these heroes and heroines,

but their ingenuity and courage
helped change the course of history.

I'm Michael Burke.

When I was a foreign correspondent,
I covered a dozen wars.

It taught me that conflicts can
go either way without warning.

I'm Arthur Williams, a pilot
and former Royal Marine,

and I know from experience

that war is not won just by the
so-called great men of history,

but also by the thousands of moments
of individual bravery

and resourcefulness.

His nickname was Stuffy.
Stuffy Dowding.

If this reached the Germans,
they would have smelt a rat.

It's only when you delve
behind the well-known stories

of the Second World War that you
realise how hard victory was,

and the knife edge
we walked together.

Just eight months
after war is declared,

our darkest hour is symbolised
by Dunkirk and the little boats -

the rescue of the British Army
off the beaches in France

to fight another day.

Now here's the hidden story
of a handful of brave soldiers

who fought to the death
to make that possible.

Young Alec jay is among those
soldiers who would become known

as the Calais Force.

He and his brothers in arms
are about to make a staggering

sacrifice to try and save
the entire British army

in France from destruction.

Less than 50 miles east of here,

the British Expeditionary Force

is in full retreat.

Germany's Blitzkrieg,
their Lightning War,

is sweeping through Europe.

Time is running out.

The Nazi war machine has the
complete annihilation

of the BEF in its sights.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill
wants the BEF to make a stand

on the French coast.

But there has to be
an evacuation plan, too.

If Britain loses the majority
of its trained army here,

we'll be powerless to resist
a Nazi invasion.

You have this situation
where the Germans are really close

to outflanking and surrounding
the British Expeditionary Force

and the French, so now the allies
are in this pocket,

and we can absolutely see the
importance of these channel ports.

You've got Boulogne there.

You've got Calais there,
you've got Dunkirk there.

And the ports are clearly
needed at this point

to keep the
British Expeditionary Force moving.

If it evacuates, where is it going
to evacuate back to Britain from?

From the Channel ports.

So they had to be held.

Churchill must slow the German
advance by fighting back.

And for that,
he'll need more soldiers.

Defending those ports is now
Churchill's highest priority.

The War Office decides to send
reinforcements from Britain,

among them a teenage lad
from London.

Alec jay is one of Britain's
hidden heroes,

who suddenly find themselves
thrown into war

and fighting a life or death battle
to hold on to Calais.

I've come to meet Alec's son, John.

What sort of young man
is your father?

He's a trainee
stockbroker, public schoolboy.

He's a Jew.

He was very aware of the sufferings
of the German Jews,

and he was very aware that if
the Germans invaded Britain,

terrible things would happen
to the Jewish community here.

At what point does he decide
to do something about it?

He decides to become
a Territorial Army volunteer.

That's a kind of weekend soldier,
part time soldier.

Yeah, training in the evenings,

learning how to map-read,

learning how to assemble
and disassemble a gun.

At what point does the war
get serious for him?

Well, the outbreak of war,
there cease to be weekend soldiers,

and he realises that he's going
to be thrown straight into battle.

On May 22nd, 1940,

Alec is on his way
across the Channel

to join the soldiers
defending Calais.

They see intensive bomb damage,
shattered glass everywhere.

There are wounded soldiers,

there are dead bodies on the
quayside waiting to be taken home.

So here is this weekend soldier,

who's never fired a shot in anger,

suddenly in the middle of
a battle scene.

How much does he know
about his position,

the risks he's running?

He's starting to think very
seriously about this.

Round his neck, he's got his
ID tags with the word Jew on them,

so very carefully,

and without being seen by the
other members of his platoon,

he takes off his ID tags,

and makes a little hole in the sand
and buries them.

Alec Jay's reinforcement unit
arrived with one simple order -

to hold the port of Calais.

A division of 15,000 Germans
are bearing down

on Alec's Calais force
of barely 4,000 men.

Commander of the garrison
is Brigadier Claude Nicholson,

a veteran of the First World War.

Claude Nicholson tours around
and tries to calm them down

because he understands
that a lot of these guys, you know,

some of them are teenagers.

And he says, if you hear a shell,
it's not going to kill you.

It's the ones that you
don't hear that'll kill you.

You've been a Marine,
can you think yourself

into the minds of those guys
in Calais?

I think it would be terrifying,
actually.

As Marines in modern day conflicts,

we're always deployed
into war zones and situations

where we stand a better than odds
chance of coming out on top.

But for the guys that were in
Calais, I couldn't imagine the fear.

Dawn breaks with perfect conditions
for a German assault -

the 69th Panzergrenadiers
open up with a mortar barrage.

By 6pm, they've broken through
the first line of defence.

For Alec and the Calais force,

retreat to Dunkirk is not an option.

Their orders are to stand firm.

The Calais Force is running
low on men and ammunition.

Brigadier Nicholson doesn't
know how long they can last.

Churchill now faces
a critical decision.

To save the troops at Dunkirk
may require the ultimate sacrifice.

A fight to the end
for the Calais Force.

The lives of young Alec
and his friends

now hang in the balance.

Gathering on the beaches of Dunkirk
are more than 300,000 soldiers

of the British Expeditionary Force.

But to the west in Calais,

a small group of soldiers
are desperately trying

to hold back the German advance.

Among them is 19-year-old volunteer
Alec Jay.

What is Alec experiencing
at this point?

The Stuka attacks were
particularly frightening.

Dad got the impression almost
that the pilot is looking at him

in the eye
as he heads down to drop his bombs.

Artillery was bombing
from the hills.

The whole place is in flames.

Does he know how outnumbered
they are?

You know, Dad and his fellow weekend
warriors are not just outnumbered,

but they are up against
battle-hardened fanatics,

the 10th Panzers,
who had spent the previous

autumn destroying Poland.

The Calais force, led by Brigadier
Claude Nicholson,

is losing men fast.

In London, Churchill faces one
of the toughest decisions he'll ever

have to make - have them retreat
to join the troops in Dunkirk

or fight on to the end?

Churchill sends a message
to Brigadier Nicholson.

"The eyes of the Empire are upon

"the defence of Calais and His
Majesty's Government are confident

"that you and your gallant regiment
will perform an exploit worthy

"of the British name."

Churchill is sacrificing the Calais
force for the greater good.

On the final afternoon
of the battle, they really are

in a very small space,
separated from other parts

of the British garrison.

Just this little group of a few
hundred men in an area perhaps

300 yards across.

And there's a German
machine-gun nest on the dunes

that has a very clear line of fire

on those remaining few hundred
British troops.

A brigade officer said, "We've got
to take out that machine-gun nest."

They make their way
through the dunes and they get

to the clearing, where the
machine-gun nest is,

and then it's a First World War
charge.

The command is "fix swords",
and if you fix swords,

then this is for real, this is what
you've been trained for.

And Dad wasn't very good
at the screaming and shouting,

but this time he's screaming
and shouting for real,

and they charged the nest, and then
it's hand-to-hand fighting,

it's kill or be killed.

And Dad takes out the nest with his
colleagues, and he realises

what he's done
and he is comprehensibly sick.

Did he leave any record of
what he was going through mentally?

Yeah, it was like going back
2,000 years.

It was like civilisation
dropping off you.

Separated from the rest
of the battalion

and about to be overrun,

Alec and his comrades had little
choice now but to surrender.

Dad's own personal point
of surrender occurs when a German

soldier marches up to him, reaches
into his tunic and points dad's

own pistol at his throat and says,
"Soll lch? Soll lch?"

"Shall I? Shall l?"

And it's really quite surreal
because in the afternoon sun

of that last day, Dad looks behind

and can see
the White Cliffs of Dover

clearly visible in the distance.

So near, yet so far.

Over 3,000 men of the Calais force
are either killed, seriously wounded

or captured by the Nazis.
One of the captured is Alec jay.

On the beach at Dunkirk, Churchill's
rescue mission gets under way.

Over the next ten days,
the Little Ships arrive

to play their part. 338,000
British and French troops are saved

to fight another day.

The story of the miracle of Dunkirk
is born, but the Calais force,

who helped to save the BEF,
will be largely forgotten.

How much of an achievement was it
that your father

and his colleagues managed to pull
off in the defence of Calais?

They held up a German division
for a number of days

that could have sped towards
Dunkirk.

Dad and his colleagues are also
demonstrating to the Germans

that the British will put...
put up a fight,

that it's not going to be
a pushover.

Alec becomes a prisoner of war,
but he manages to conceal the fact

that he's Jewish.

He escapes five times
from prisoner of war camps.

He returns home in 1945
and becomes a stockbroker.

But it's Calais that affects him
to the end of his days.

There was Dad from before Calais
and Dad after Calais.

He lived with Calais for the rest
of his life.

He would wake up screaming
in the middle of the night,

suffering from terrible nightmares.

Before we started on this project,
I confess, I hadn't heard

of the battle or the Siege of
Calais. Yeah. I knew about Dunkirk,

I knew a lot about Dunkirk, but I
didn't know about the sacrifice

those guys made there.

But the whole point was, Dunkirk
would've happened

in a much-more disastrous way,

if it hadn't been for the sacrifice
of the troops at Calais.

Well, that's why it's so important
to remember them, I think, isn't it?

Yeah. And that story. Mm.

Just five weeks after Dunkirk,
the people of Britain

are facing the unthinkable.

Invasion.

Hitler's thinking is simple -
if he can knock out the RAF

and Britain's air defences,
then a Nazi land invasion

would be bound to succeed
against Britain's small

and poorly equipped army.

There is just a small problem
with Hitler's plan - one man sees

it coming and starts making plans
to thwart it from the very outset.

A rare moment of foresight
that shifts the course of the war.

Most people have never heard
of Hugh Dowding, but years

before a shot was fired,
it was Dowding who had the vision

to ready Britain's air defence
against attack from Germany.

He's every bit the hero
in his own unique way.

His nickname was Stuffy,
Stuffy Dowding,

And that was because, really,
he was very socially awkward.

He used to host these
terrible sherry parties.

He would just have one glass
of sherry and he'd play

his gramophone, and his sister
would tell you,

it was almost impossible to get
anybody to come

because he was so awkward.

But the other side of that was that
he was an organisational genius

and he was also absolutely
fascinated by technology.

And that became important
because he was basically the person

who formulated
Britain's air defence.

Four years before Britain goes
to war, at a time when many

are still in favour of appeasing
Hitler, Air Marshal Hugh Dowding

sees what's coming,

and he has a plan to make Britain's
air defences the best in the world.

How's it going? Good.

So, Chris, 1935, how did the German
aeroplanes compare to ours?

Well, the Germans had the advantage

that they were rebuilding
their air force from scratch.

The RAF was a little bit
more conservative.

Germany had been forced to disarm
following the First World War,

but its government nonetheless
tasks its engineers with designing

a new air force of nimble bombers
and super-fast fighter planes.

But in Britain's Air Ministry,
the top brass is still investing

in heavy bombers.

If you think about the period
between the wars,

that was when it was thought
that wars would be won by bombing.

The first side to bomb the other
side's cities would win.

Now, Dowding - Stuff Dowding,
he disagreed.

He thought there was a real
importance in a fighter defence.

After years of chipping away at the
Air Ministry, Dowding manages

to convince them that it's time
to invest and modernise.

So he is in charge of this massive
rearmament programme,

and fighter squadrons
rapidly expands.

The first of Dowding's babies
is a brand-new fighter called

the Hawker Hurricane.

This was the first RAF fighter
aircraft, which was a monoplane,

so all the aircraft before,
they were biplanes, very similar

to what you saw
in the First World War.

So this was absolutely
revolutionary for its time.

Without any doubt, this was
a complete game-changer.

When it entered service, it was

probably best fighter aircraft
in the world.

The Hurricanes' eight machine guns
put down such a rate of fire,

they can literally saw
a Luftwaffe bomber in half.

But it's the second of Dowding's
new aircraft that takes the fighter

to a whole new level.

I fly a Second World War plane
myself, and this is one

of my all-time favourite aircraft.

Everybody knows about the Spitfire,
but what is it about this aeroplane

that makes it so special?

I mean, just look at it.

It's such a beautiful design,
sort of clean lines

and, beyond the aesthetic aspect,
that meant that it just could

fly really fast.

It flew, like, more than 360mph -

later versions,
even much more than that.

Just look how thin that is,
that just slices through the air,

so the Spitfire was one of the
fastest aircraft in the world.

Dowding's new fighters are thrown
into action in 1940, as the Allies

retreat in Belgium and France.

But in the dogfights over Dunkirk,
a fatal flaw is discovered in both

the aircrafts' engine. As the pilots
pitch over nose down,

the engines stall. At best, that
means the enemy gets away,

but at worst, the aeroplane
and pilot plummet to the ground.

What was believed to be the newly
modernised Royal Air Force

has all of a sudden
just become the weakest link

in Britain's air defence.

And just five weeks after Dunkirk,
Luftwaffe bombers are heading

across the Channel.

BELL CLANGS

The Battle of Britain begins.

But in a workshop in Farnborough,
one woman is about to come up

with a solution that will help
alter the course of the battle

for Britain's skies.

The Battle of Britain begins on July
10th, raging through the summer

across Britain's skies.

Britain's hopes are pinned
on Hugh Dowding's star fighters -

the Hurricanes and Spitfires -
to save us from invasion.

But Dowding's planes have a problem.

Performing their daring manoeuvres
in combat, the pilots

discover their engines are prone
to failure, coming out of high-speed

dives with catastrophic results.

So what were they going to do
about it? Well, the solution fell

onto the shoulders of not
your average or typical

1940s engineer,
but SHE was a motorcycle racer

and aeronautical pioneer

going by the name of Beatrice -
or Tilly - Shilling.

Beatrice Shilling is a leading
specialist in aircraft carburettors.

This 31-year-old engineer grows up
with tools, not toys,

and buys her first motorbike,
aged 14.

17 years later, she's a motorcycle
racer and has a job

at the Royal Aircraft Establishment
in Farnborough.

She may not be a household name,
but perhaps

she should be because Shilling
is about to find a way to get

Hugh Dowding's fighters back
in the game.

Tilly's solution to the problem was
fiendishly simple.

It was this. Looks like just
a normal washer, doesn't it?

But this is just what the engines
needed to solve the problem.

Using her lifelong knowledge
of engines, and some serious

mathematical calculations, she finds
a solution that's beautifully

simple and effective.

It's called the RAE restrictor -

a metal disc with a hole
in the middle.

This tiny piece of kit controls
the fuel flow into the fighter's

engine and stops it flooding.

And most importantly, the restrictor
can be fitted easily, so Dowding's

new fighters won't be grounded
at the very time

they're needed in action.

The really extraordinary thing,
really,

was how, behind these events,

the really big events that shape
the war, there's often

a single individual.
Yeah. A flash of inspiration.

Yep. Beatrice Shilling coming up,
almost single-handed, with a very,

very simple solution
to solve such a big problem

which, if it had been allowed
to continue... Yeah.

"Could have cost us
the Battle of Britain.

Shilling continues her engineering
career after the war, racing fast

cars until old age finally
forces her to stop.

A petrolhead to the end.

The Battle of Britain rages on.
Day after day,

hundreds of Luftwaffe bombers,

escorted by fighters, cross
the Channel to attack the southeast.

But Hugh Dowding,
head of our Air Fighter Command,

is using ground-breaking
new technology to spot

the attackers early.

It's part of the integrated
air defence system

that he's been developing for years.

So this is Chain Home.

These are the wonderfully intricate,
delicate and brilliant towers

that were responsible for looking
out over the sea and spotting enemy

aircraft as they approached
the coast.

They were very effective.

This was radar.

During the Battle of Britain,
over 20 Chain Home towers watched

for enemy bombers, along
with a network of 1,050 observation

stations and 30,000 observers
covering 60,000 square miles.

Hugh Dowding's plan is coming
together.

He's got a growing fleet
of state-of-the-art fighter planes,

he's got a system of radar and men
and women plane-spotters to warn

about incoming enemy aircraft.

Now for the third piece
of the puzzle - the system to pull

it all together and win the battle.

This is Bentley Priory, once
a stately home, now the nerve centre

of Hugh Dowding's Fighter Command.

This building conceals
the secret to our success

during the Battle of Britain.

OK, Michael. So here we are.

This is Bentley Priory -
Fighter Command's headquarters.

Dilip Sarkar can show me
why the country's survival depends

on a place known simply
as the filter room.

Why is this room so important?

Well, this is where all
the information is coming in,

and we are looking at the picture
nationally here. And then

the information is all plotted
on this board, on this vast map?

That's right. So this is a raid.
Radar tells us that there are

20-plus bandits, enemy aircraft,

making up that formation,
and that raid is given

this reference number.

So in this case, H024.

Now, we also know that it's flying
at 8,000 feet.

OK? So as this raid starts to move,

one of the WAAFs will be pushing

it with a stick along its direction
of travel.

And that's got to be pretty scary.

That somebody's coming to drop
bombs on us.

The WAAFs - or Women's Auxiliary
Air Force - plot the movements

of aircraft on the giant map
to build up the complete picture

of where and how we're being
attacked.

This is where the pressure is
at this map table.

CHATTER

They've got to make sure
all the information is right.

And while they're trying to do
all that, there could be another

raid coming in, and another raid
coming in.

And then our squadrons have to go
on the board as well.

So there's a huge
amount of information

that all has to be reflected

on this map table.

It's kind of three-dimensional
chess, in a way, isn't it?

Except that not only

are thousands of lives at stake,
the whole future of the war.

Absolutely.

All the intelligence from this room
is filtered out to command centres

so fighters can intercept the enemy.

Dowding's complete air defence
system, years in the planning,

is brilliant.

Now it faces its greatest test, one
of the biggest Luftwaffe bombing

raids of the entire war.

So take us back to the early morning
of September the 15th. We draw

the curtains back, it's a clear,
sunny day.

It's good flying weather.
It's going to be a busy day.

Just out of range of the Chain Home

radars, a fleet of German Dornier
bombers are rising

from the airfields
across northern France.

At Fighter Command, Dowding's system
soon bursts into life.

These aren't just small raids,

these are raids of 100-plus. 100
aircraft, 100 fighters, 100 bombers.

This is really worrying.

And this is all going to come
across the Channel towards us.

BELL CLANGS

The call to scramble goes out
at 504 Squadron at RAF Hendon.

Among them is a young Hurricane
pilot from Wallasey,

26-year-old Ray Holmes.

Ray Holmes is in the bath
when the alarm sounds.

Still soaking wet,

he leaps out, throws on his clothes,
and within minutes his Hurricane

is airborne and ready to meet
the enemy.

Dowding's plotters are tracking
the progress of the German bombers.

They're making a beeline
for the capital.

The first raid comes in at noon,
and they are met by a big

force of RAF fighters.

And the Germans had been told that
Fighter Command was on its knees,

so here they are
on the way to London,

when there are squadrons from 11
groups, and they must have attacked

them like terriers, really.

Pilot Ray Holmes is in the thick
of the action, he's attacking

a Dornier on the right flank,
shearing bits off its wing

before climbing up
to attack another one.

But this one is fitted with the
latest Nazi experimental weapon -

a flame-thrower.

Imagine the gut-wrenching fear
of realising that the enemy are now

modifying their aircraft
to spray fire.

The flame-thrower malfunctions,
spraying Ray's cockpit with oil,

but as the windscreen clears, Ray
realises he's on a collision course

with the bomber, and dives
underneath the belly of the plane

to avoid it.

And the amazing thing about this is
we've got Londoners on the ground

who are actually able to watch this,
are able to watch what's happening.

It must have been unbelievable that
this isn't an airshow,

this is people fighting and dying
and... Right overhead,

over England, over London.

In the skies above Westminster,
Pilot Ray Holmes goes in

for another attack, and another.

In the confusion of a desperate
dogfight, the Hurricane's wing

shears off the tail of the Dornier.

They're both going down, as a bomb
even falls on Buckingham Palace.

This Hurricane begins to fall
out of the sky.

He has no option but to bail out.

He jumps, his parachute opens,
and he hits the roof

of a block of flats.

His parachute snags on the gutter
and he comes to rest with his feet

dangling above a dust bin.

Ray survives, and by the end
of the day, as he is helped

down from his perch, Fighter Command
has lost 29 aircraft

but have shot down 56 enemy planes.

The Luftwaffe retreats.

So, as night falls on September
the 15th, where are we with the war?

Well, at the end of the day,
Britain was still in the game.

That's the bottom line, isn't it?

So the Germans cannot continue
sustaining losses like this.

It was absolutely obvious to
everybody that there was

a turning point, that Britain had
weathered the storm that summer,

and whatever happened after that
was not going to be as bad.

And it was all ultimately controlled
from this room. From here.

Two clays later,
Hitler postpones his invasion.

The Battle of Britain is won

through the bravery of pilots
like Ray Holmes,

the brilliance of engineers
like Beatrice Shilling,

and from this humble office at
Fighter Command headquarters,

the vision and strategy of Hugh
Dowding,

which alters the course of the war.

It's tempting, isn't it,
to play the game

of "what if"? Without Dowding,
we could easily have lost

the Battle of Britain.

If we lost the Battle of Britain,
the Germans could well have invaded,

and there was precious little
to stop them.

Without Dowding,
we could have lost the war.

Hitler is soon making his next move,
bringing war to the homes and lives

of ordinary people.

Britain's ports and factories
are in the firing line

in what will become known
as the Blitz.

We're familiar
with the unforgettable images

of London, blitzed and ablaze.

But this is the forgotten story
of Liverpool, whose citizens endure

seven nights of continuous bombing,
then show Hitler how a city

of ordinary souls can fight back.

HOOTER

While the people of Liverpool go

about their daily business,
down on the quayside

the city's dockers are at work.

Keeping up the vital flow of
supplies from across the Atlantic -

weapons, fuel and food.

In 1941, these clocks are the mouth
that feeds Britain.

Hitler wants to close that mouth
for good.

Hitler may have given up on invasion
after the Battle of Britain,

but on May 1st, 1941, he turns
the might of the Luftwaffe

onto Liverpool.

That night, the Germans dropped
a terrifying combination of high

explosives and firebombs, hammering
the clocks at Bootle and Wallasey.

But it's not just the clocks
that take the hit.

Nearby are row upon row of tightly
packed terraces, the homes

of dockers and their families.

The following night,
the bombers strike again.

On the third night, they're back
in even greater numbers.

Nearly 300 bombers unleash what
will be the most devastating attack

of the Liverpool Blitz,
killing 850 civilians.

Mike Royden grew up in Liverpool.

His mother, Hazel, is one
of the many thousands

caught up in the horror of that
night, as Hitler's bombs rained

down on the city.

Your mum was a girl then.

Yes, she was ten years old.

And she was...actually,
she had a lucky escape. Yeah.

It was a munitions train -

it was shunted back up
to the Breck Road sidings,

which is up near Anfield,

and it was up near the suburban
housing.

And the train didn't take
a direct hit, but the line did.

And then the train caught fire.

And so, one by one, these trucks
are going up.

And, of course, my mum was in the
Anderson shelter in the garden.

How close was she,
and what happened to her?

So my mum comes out to the shelter
and they go into the house,

only to find the front door has been
completely blown in,

off its hinges,

and there's a big piece of iron
that seems to have been blown

over from the railway line.

And then there's what looks like
snow all over the place

and all the trees are covered in all
this... But it's the cotton

off the munitions train that's
just blown up all over the place.

The family has survived,
but the neighbourhood is shattered.

70,000 people across Merseyside
lose their homes in the May blitz.

In Bootle, just 15% of houses
were left standing

When I was a foreign correspondent,
I covered a dozen wars,

and I was bombed a few times,

so I know, I suppose, a bit
of what the people of Liverpool

must have felt.

It's...it's the noise, the dust,
always the dust,

the fury and the sense
of powerlessness, helplessness.

But, you know, I chose to be there,

I knew I could eventually go home.

But the poor people of Liverpool,

these WERE their homes.

These WERE the lives
that were being torn up.

By the final morning of the May
blitz, after seven nights

of bombing, the city centre lies
in ruins. 1,800 people are dead.

No-one knows how the city
will respond. Hitler's strategy

of bombing clocks and homes
could succeed.

Now it's down to the resilience
of the people to get Liverpool back

on its feet
and keep Britain in the war.

It's how things start to get back
to normal - your light comes on

in the house, or the electricity's
back on, or you come in and the gas

is on again, and it's little things
like that that start to build up

and build up. And gradually, over a
period of time, you know,

the morale starts to improve.

Byjune, you've got a number
of berths being put back into use

in the docks. By July they were
working to 90% capacity.

So when you start to see these
gradual improvements,

that's a turning point. Yeah.

The Liverpool dockers keep the port
up and running throughout the war.

Although ordinary working civilians
are helpless to defend

themselves, their will to carry on
defeats Hitler's ambition

to shut down the vital port
of Liverpool.

What's so striking about
the Liverpool Blitz or Calais

or the Battle of Britain
is the bravery and ingenuity

of ordinary people - those figures
behind the scenes who are helping

to change the course of the war.

For Britain, there are four more
years of war ahead, but ordinary

heroes have helped prevent invasion
and will next take

the war to Hitler.

What did you make of our
fighter pilots?

These guys were 20 years old
and they were in combat

in awful conditions.

I take my hat off to them.

I think what they did was
seriously scary.

What about you, Michael?

Well, he's the man I REALLY admire.
Dowding?

Yeah. He's a very reserved, formal,
rather aloof man,

who came up with the ideas

that actually made defending Britain
in the air

possible, and pushed them through.

HE'S my hero.

Thanks to our hidden heroes
and heroines, Britain JUST survives

the first stage of the war.

British industry, however, is badly
damaged and our natural

resources critically low.

To continue fighting,
we need vital supplies like oil,

which means importing millions
of tonnes from overseas.

Hitler knows if he sinks enough
of our supply ships,

he can force Britain's surrender.

So his state-of-the-art submarines,
known as U-boats, fan out

across the Atlantic.

The Nazis' U-boats are picking off
our merchant vessels almost

at will - any time, anywhere they
like, but there's a hidden story,

and that's in how we see them off.

Across millions of square miles
of the Atlantic, a deadly

cat and mouse game takes place.

The swift and silent U-boats hunt
the slow merchant ships

stacked with cargo.

The battle plays out on an epic
scale, and within it, terrible human

dramas face the individual sailors.

One of these hidden heroes
is a Yorkshireman who volunteered

for a life at sea, Peter Franklin.

He's a 20-year-old
radio operator on a merchant ship.

I was going to say,
he didn't look very old, does he?

No, and war is, as ever,
a young man's game.

Peter's ship, the Richmond Castle,
is mid-Atlantic with 5,000 tonnes

of food, when a torpedo slams
into it without warning.

In his diary, Peter describes
the scene of horror that follows.

"As I went past the engine room
escape hatch, I saw one man,

"a greaser, standing there.

"He must have got hot oil or
scalding steam thrown all over him.

"He wasn't pleasant to look at.

"How he got out, nobody knows.
He was in the engine room tunnel

"when the torpedo struck there."
Oh, it's like hell, isn't it?

It's really awful.

And the ship he was on sank
in just eight minutes.

Forced to abandon the sinking
ship, Peter scrambles to one

of the lifeboats,

when the U-boat surfaces.

But having destroyed the ship
and its cargo, the German crew takes

pity on the survivors,
throwing them some rations,

then it disappears
to find a new target.

Peter spends a further nine days
adrift at sea,

but survives this ordeal
AND the war.

I'm a former soldier myself,

and I had, I suppose, the advantage
at least being on level terms

with my enemy or foe,

but people like Peter Franklin,
it's the unknown, isn't it?

I mean, he's sailing along
in an unarmed ship with almost

his hands tied behind his back,
not knowing when his time

is going to come. Absolutely, yes.

And you never can tell when that
torpedo is just going to strike

and that's going to be it.

Before war's end, 29,000 merchant
mariners will lose their lives.

These sailors are not
in the military, they're civilians,

yet they suffered
a proportionately higher death rate

than ANY of the Armed Forces.

The U-boats had a really,
really terrifying grip

on the convoys.

You put yourself into the mind-set
of the sailors that are chugging

along at five knots, in the dark,
in the cold, heading home,

but not knowing
if they're going to get there.

You know, I've got a relative
who lost his life.

He was a radio operator
on a merchant ship torpedoed

by a U-boat in the Atlantic.

And you're able to connect, aren't
you? Cos everybody's got some

relative of the family who played
a part in the Second World War.

The urgent task facing the nation is
how to end the carnage

in the Atlantic
before it's all too late.

It's in - or rather below -
this unassuming building

here in Liverpool that there's
a nerve centre that's fighting

the Battle of the Atlantic, trying
to outwit the U-boats and keep up

the flow of food and fuel and raw
materials and ammunition

that's keeping us alive.

This is Western Approaches Command,
where the Royal Navy organises

Atlantic convoys and tracks
their progress.

It's like walking
through the 1940s -

the telephones, the utility desks,

the green and yellow paint.

YOU C8D SGHSGWYOU C8D sense

the ghosts that used to work here,
and you can sense it's a place

where history was made.

Men and women work here
round the clock to try

and protect our shipping,
but for the most part,

all they can do is
watch, wait and hope.

All the violence and horror is

taking place a thousand miles away

out there, but how is that playing
out here, on this big wall?

On here, everything would be
plotted on.

First thing we look at is
a convoy being plotted,

and so we've got a convoy on its way
from Britain. From Britain

to America. Heading over
to New York.

And these are the individual ships
in the convoy?

Those are the ships that are there
for protection, yeah.

A U-boat will have spotted that
convoy and other boats will now

be lying in wait.

It's a tactic called the wolfpack.

A single U-boat is too easily
chased off by warship escorts...

...but if several patiently stalk
a convoy from the depths

then strike together in the dark
of night, we don't

have the firepower to stop them.

How long we...have supplies
that will last? So we're running low

on supplies, we're close
to the point where we're days away

from running out of oil,
and that effectively becomes

a "do we surrender?" decision at
that point, because without the oil,

we can't carry on the war.

We need help.

And Winston Churchill hopes
to get it from a good friend

in the United States.

After a year of war, Britain needs
help from America to stay

in the fight.

All hopes rest
on President Roosevelt.

Churchill knows that if he goes
to Roosevelt with cap in hand,

he's not going to get very much.

He needs to offer something.

To America, Britain's pockets are
woefully empty.

But one man thinks Britain DOES
have something to offer -

the head of Imperial College
in London, Sir Henry Tizard.

Tizard is an ex-pilot and played

a leading role in creating the radar

that helped win
the Battle of Britain.

He remains active in the world
of secret military research,

where he is respected and liked.

He often spends his nights at work,
chatting with his staff

and playing billiards.

His colleagues have been developing
things that will change the course

of warfare - more accurate radar,
jet propulsion, even atomic weapons.

Tizard is an unsung hero
of World War ll.

He gets a meeting with Churchill
to discuss a proposal

that, in peacetime,
would be utter madness.

He thinks Churchill should give
away our most valuable technological

discovery to the Americans
in the hope that they can turn

blueprints into kit.

In our war-torn state, there's no
way we can develop these ideas

further, but the Americans
have the resources

to do exactly that.

The plan is they take our secrets,
use them to make new weapons,

then sell those weapons back to us,
along with oil and other

badly needed provisions.

The cost - we lose ownership
of world-changing discoveries.

But the benefit -
we might just survive the war.

It's a hell of a gamble.

Churchill accepts that our survival
as a nation rests

on Tizard's proposal.

Tizard is dispatched to Washington
to wow the President

with our secret military research.

But even if Roosevelt is willing
to deal, there's no guarantee

these weapons will be ready in time
to help.

But after two weeks, Tizard is ready
to reveal his ace in the hole -

a series of working prototypes.

His hand-picked team of scientists
gather here at Liverpool to join

the ocean liner the Duchess
of Richmond. They're carrying

with them a black metal trunk.

Inside it, all the treasures of
Britain's science and engineering.

They stow their precious cargo
on the bridge, giving it

its own armed guard, and telling
the captain to dump it overboard

if he comes under attack. The
U-boats will be waiting for them

just as much as any oil tanker.

Then, as the ship leaves Liverpool,
the city comes under attack

from German planes.

The ship escapes the city
and avoids the U-boats,

to deliver the precious box.

The Americans are impressed with
its contents, and agree to Tizard's

secrets-for-weapons plan.

Churchill may have sold the family
silver, but in return,

America is sending us vital supplies
as well as, in the background,

turning our inventions
into useful equipment to fight

against the Germans.

But it could take months or years
before any of our prototypes make it

into the field.

And that's time
Britain doesn't have.

Britain is losing the Battle
of the Atlantic.

The seamen know it, their commanders
know it, Churchill knows it.

Later in his history of the war,
he will write,

"The only thing that really
frightened me in the war

"was the U-boat peril."

While we hang on for dear life,

the Germans go
from strength to strength,

launching 20 new U-boats
every month.

1942 brings a chance to turn
the tide, and to Churchill's relief,

America joins the war at last.

Convoys start to cross
in even greater numbers, protected

by the US Navy now,
as well as our own.

But the Germans still retain
the edge in tactics and technology.

In fact, they're sinking
so many ships,

their commander, Karl Doenitz,
calls this his happy time.

Britain might not yet be defeated,
but we do need to find a way

of stopping the U-boats, otherwise
America can send

all the supplies they like -

they'lljust end up
at the bottom of the ocean.

The best way to destroy a sub
is actually from the air.

U-boats submerge to stalk
their prey, but they spend much

of their time on the surface,
making them easy to spot and bomb.

Unlike warships, bomber planes
can patrol huge areas, outrun

any ship in the sea
and run no risk from torpedoes.

But the problem for the bombers
is finding the subs

in the vast ocean. As it happens,

one of Sir Henry Tizard's prototypes
is designed to do exactly that.

While Doenitz and his wolfpacks
are roaming the Atlantic,

the brightest British, Canadian
and American minds

are on their tails.

For nearly three years,
we've been a whisker away

from creating a new kind of air-sea
radar that can spot objects

miles away, and could transform
the battle with the U-boats.

In late 1942, American engineers
turned Tizard's radar prototype

into a working system...

...powerful enough to spot
a U-boat's periscope,

and compact enough to
fit inside a plane.

How does this start giving us
the upper hand?

The big idea as you move into 1943,

is they start going
on the offensive,

going hunting for U-boats,

and that is near their bases

on the French coast and the Bay
of Biscay, with a lot of aircraft

like these Wellingtons using this
new radar system that they've got.

At last, the predators
have become the prey.

But one problem still remains -

our aircraft can only attack
targets close to shore.

We don't have a plane with enough
range that can reach the middle

of the Atlantic, where the
U-boats can still hunt freely.

Then, after four years
of marathon Atlantic battle,

a new American bomber
changes everything -

the 5-24 Liberator

Why was the Liberator a better
aircraft than the Wellington?

It was its size.

It's got four engines,
it's got great range,

so they can really get out
into the middle of the Atlantic,

where the U-boats have
been causing problems,

and start protecting convoys
right the way across to Britain.

So we've got an upgraded radar.

We got a bomber that's capable
of getting out into the middle

of the Atlantic gap.
Where do we go from there?

By, really, sort of
April, May 1943,

a lot of things are starting
to come together.

You get very long range Liberators
descend towards convoys under attack

to just go and kill U-boats.

The difference is stark.

In August 1940,
we sank just two U-boats.

But in May 1943, we sink 42.

Admiral Donitz's his own
report to Hitler sums up

the transformation perfectly.

"We are at present facing the
greatest crisis in submarine warfare

"since the enemy, by means
of location devices,

"has made fighting impossible,
and we are suffering heavy losses."

In the summer of 1943, one month
later, Donitz withdraws -

the longest engagement
of the entire war is won.

The gamble - the enormous gamble -
all these secrets handed

across to the Americans with no real
guarantee.

But it did ultimately pay off -

the Americans did come
over as our allies,

they did turn a lot of the
technology

into war-winning gadgets
and things.

But I suppose there are people
who will say we lost a lot

of our wealth, we lost a lot of
our scientific and technological

pre-eminence, but that was
the price that we had to pay.

Tizard's technology undoubtedly

helped secure victory
in the Atlantic,

but the sailors caught in the heat
of battle have another source

of help that they themselves
know nothing about.

Intelligence from Britain's
classified code-breaking factory,

Bletchley Park.

Gosh, here it is,
the Enigma machine.

Never actually seen one
in the flesh.

It just looks like
a normal typewriter,

but when you think about how many
lives were in the balance

with what this machine is capable
of doing, it's incredible.

Looks really humble.

Historians believe breaking Enigma
shortened the war by years.

Alan Turing - the man who led that
effort - is rightfully famous.

But he is just one of thousands
of hidden heroes working here

in complete isolation and secrecy -

so secret, their stories are still
emerging eight decades later.

How hard was it to maintain
the information

that they were processing,
bearing in mind

it was absolutely top secret?

Everybody knows that if you came to
Bletchley Park,

you were made to sign
the Official Secrets Act,

you were given some kind
of really scary induction talk

where there was a pistol on the desk

when you signed
the Official Secrets Act.

And the subtext of that being that

"if you don't do as I'm telling
you you must do, then, you know,

"you may pay the ultimate price".

They also compartmentalised people
so that very, very few people

had an overview of everything
that was going on on the site.

We've still got some veteran
codebreakers who are still alive.

They've never heard of Enigma.

They were just given
the machine to work

and told, when the machine stops,
you phone through the results

and occasionally somebody
says "well done".

That's your contribution
to World War ll.

It's completely meaningless.

But the change in Britain's fortunes
is real - as the successes

of Bletchley's secret heroes
and heroines are reflected

on the battlefield.

For the first time in
this war, we're not just

staving off defeat, but we're
actually starting to carve out

some pretty hard-won victories.

America is in the war as our ally,
our vital Atlantic supply lines

are wide open, and we are starting
to take the fight to Hitler.

The tables have been turned,
but for how long?

The really crucial theatre of
war is to the east, in Russia.

From the very beginning, Churchill
knew that by helping Russia,

we'd be helping ourselves.

In 1941, he wrote, "We shall give
whatever help we can to Russia

"and the Russian people."

Roll forward two years,

and we had exactly the kind
of help that Stalin needed.

British codebreakers about
to unravel a secret so powerful

Stalin could use it to
smash Hitler's invasion

of the Soviet Union.

Here at Bletchley, more work of
the utmost secrecy continued -

to read the Nazis' encrypted
radio messages.

Since early in the war,
cryptographers here

have been stumped by a fishy
Nazi code nicknamed Tunny -

short for tuna fish.

David, what is Tunny, then?

If you think of Enigma as a tweet,

then Tunny is more of a long e-mail.

The second difference is
who's using the system.

Enigma is used by the army
at the divisional level

and in the Navy by individual ships,

whereas Tunny was used by very,
very senior Germans

communicating to one another
at quite long lengths.

We often think that Enigma
is top, top secret -

but, in actual fact...
There's a level above again!

If you read one enigma message,
probably doesn't tell

you a great deal. Whereas if you
can read even a single message

from a senior commander, where
he's laying out his thoughts

or his plans, then that one message
can be really, really powerful.

Wow. So if we crack this,

then we know exactly what
the Germans are doing. Yes.

Only a select group of people
know that Tunny exists -

even within the German military.

They believe we'll never come close
to reading a single message -

except we do exactly that.

This is the machine
that sent that message.

It's called a Lorenz S242,

and they are only known to be four
of them left in the world.

Makes the Enigma
look like a child's toy.

The Enigma uses either three or four
rotors to turn a message

into a scrambled stream of letters.

The Lorenz, on the other hand,
has 12 rotors.

Unlike Enigma, the Lorenz
codebreakers

have no captured
machine to help them.

But an unknown young maths
whiz takes on the challenge.

If he cracks it, we'll see into
the mind of Hitler himself.

In 1940, Britain was alone
and on the verge of surrender,

but a series of behind-the-scenes
victories in diplomacy,

technology, and intelligence
transformed our fortunes.

In 1941, a mistake by a German radio
operator enables Bletchley Park

to decipher one message from
Hitler's most complex code.

But without the machine
that made it, they don't know

how to read any others.

Then a young member of staff is
given a go - 24-year-old Bill Tutte.

His father was a groundskeeper in
Newmarket, and he got a scholarship

to the local grammar school.

He managed to get a scholarship
from there to Cambridge.

There are basic things you can do
if you're a code-breaker,

and one of them is, if you're
looking at something

that appears
to be random but is very long,

the question is, is there
actually a pattern?

Using nothing more than a pencil
and paper, Tutte finds that pattern.

He realises that the opening 12
characters of every message

are not part of the message itself -

they're actually instructions
for creating the secret code,

one letter for every rotor
on the machine.

To go from 4,000 jumble letters to
a conception of a 12-rotor machine

is an enormous leap.

It's pretty impressive.

Tutte now knows how the messages
are encrypted,

but a daunting task lies ahead.

The Lorenz machine has more
possible settings

than there are stars
in the universe.

Decrypting each message means

finding these countless
settings one by one.

The process takes so long that, by
the time Tutte can read a message,

it's old news.

The question is how to
work them out at speed.

The answer is to apply
brute computing power.

And this is the machine that did it.

It's called the Colossus,
and it has some claim

to be the world's first electronic
digital computer.

By feeding the messages on tapes
like this into the machine,

then the Lorenz's precise settings
can be revealed in hours

rather than weeks.

This breakthrough uncovers an
intelligence gold mine.

Almost four years into the war,

it yields a nugget of information

that can upend the conflict
far away on the Eastern Front.

In July 1943, the Germans are
preparing to attack the Soviets

with close to 3,000 tanks
and almost 800,000 men.

The idea is that they're going
to use their heavy armour

as a spearhead to smash through
the Soviet lines

and lead to a decisive victory
on the Eastern Front.

It's an excellent plan, and it
should work for the Germans.

And we should
know because we've been

listening in on the whole thing.

Bletchley Park decrypts
the secret battle plans.

Churchill sends the message
straight to Moscow.

Using our intelligence, the Red Army
prepares an almighty counterattack

at the western
Russian town of Kursk.

The result is the biggest
tank battle in history,

and a crushing German defeat.

The Battle of Kursk set the
Soviets on the path to victory -

it was their first step in
a very long, hard road

that would see them go all
the way through to Berlin.

And what of Bill Tutte?

He almost took his work on the
Lorenz machine to the grave -

it remained an official secret until
just before his death in 2002.

After the war, he left Bletchley and
he went into a specialist field -

graph theory - and he became a world
renowned figure in that discipline.

Since the arrival of the World Wide
Web and the internet, graph theory

is absolutely central to all sorts
of systems that operate now.

So he's had an enormous impact on
all of our lives since the war.

So not only has he broken the Nazi's
High Command cipher machine,

which was believed to be
unbreakable, but he's also laid

the foundations of what we all
use pretty much every day today.

Absolutely, yes.

And if you'd asked him about it,
he would have been very, very humble

about the whole thing.

Bill Tutte. Think of the
problem that faced him.

Yeah. I mean, you, as one man,

come up with a solution for breaking
an unbreakable machine

that underpins the
entire Nazi hierarchy.

The interesting thing, I think,
about him - and the other people

who made breakthroughs here
at Bletchley Park,

like Turing and so on -

is that they were capable of
two things.

The most intense, detailed work,
and the sudden leap of imagination

to take them to the solution of the
incredible problems they solved.

While the codebreakers at Bletchley
work away in the shadows,

the British Army is making
a last stand in the blazing

North African sun.

The Western Desert was the main
area of battle for Britain,

for the Commonwealth.

We weren't really
fighting anywhere else.

We are struggling to defend our
colonial possession, Egypt,

which borders an Axis-occupied
colony, Libya.

If we lose Egypt, we lose the
Suez Canal - the critical supply

route for Middle Eastern
oil, and a vital link

to India, Australia and more.

Without these, we lose the war.

Trying to take it from us is one of
Germany's best and brightest -

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
The Desert Fox.

We were in retreat.

We were preparing to evacuate,

Cairo was under threat.

It was a rumour that General Rommel

had already booked
his rooms in Cairo.

Rommel has pushed halfway to Suez,
but with his own men exhausted

and running short of supplies,
his offensive grinds to a halt

at a railway siding
called El Alamein.

We managed to fight Rommel
to a precarious standstill,

but Churchill is unhappy with
the progress of his existing

commanders in the field.

So, in August 1942, he appoints a
new man to the task in North Africa.

Lieutenant General
Bernard Montgomery -

also known to his men as Monty.

INAUDIBLE

A famous battle here at El Alamein
will make a household name of Monty,

but behind the great general stands
a man out of the limelight -

a former film-maker
who outfoxes the Germans

with an unbelievable trick
straight out of Hollywood.

Like all good blockbusters, this one
begins with a convincing pitch.

Instead of attacking now,

Monty wants to spend time and money

rebuilding our forces.

Churchill reluctantly agrees,
writing, "We are in your hands.

"And, of course, a victorious battle
makes amends for much delay."

Monty's opening act is to

assemble a force of 190,000 men

and more than a thousand tanks -

among them, the latest weapon
arriving from the USA.

This is the legendary
American M4 Sherman tank.

They built nearly 50,000 of them

and it saw service in
every theatre of World War Two.

It's the first tank that gave
the Allies a real fighting chance

against the deadly German Panzers.

Tanks like these bring star
quality to Monty's production,

but now he must set the stage for
battle - a short 35-mile front

between the Mediterranean
to the north,

and a deep desert
depression in the south,

which is impassable for tanks.

He can't go around either side.

He can only make a direct assault

against the heavily
fortified German line.

If it works, he'll halt
the German advance - permanently.

But he must somehow
take Rommel unawares.

Having a weapon like this is great,

but it does present rather
a large problem,

and that is that you can't
park hundreds of 34-ton

main battle tanks in the middle
of a vast, empty desert

without the enemy finding out
about them pretty quickly.

So in order for Monty to maintain
the advantage,

he's got to pull off
a pretty impressive magic trick.

And that is he's got to convince
Rommel that this isn't a tank.

Montgomery orders
Operation Bertram to begin -

the biggest booby trap
of World War Two.

It's an enormous bluff.

While actually preparing
to strike in the north,

he orders his men to trick the
Germans into thinking

the attack will come in the south.

Many people know
of Monty's brilliance

in the North Africa campaign,

but few have heard of
a man who made a crucial

contribution behind
the scenes -

his director of camouflage,
Geoffrey Barkas.

Barkas was a very nice man.

He was a filmmaker who had fallen -

like many filmmakers do - on hard
times,

and he made his own film
called Tell England.

But he'd ended up running
the sort of demonstration unit

for the Shell Motor Company.

To make Rommel think that our
attack is coming from the south,

Barkas decides to
create a fake army.

To German observers in the air,
and from their own front line,

it should look like four armoured
divisions preparing for battle.

In reality, it's like
the world's largest film set,

which must be ready for
action in just a few weeks.

Like all filmmakers, they had
a deadline - and that deadline

was literally a deadline
because if they got it wrong,

there would be a lot
of dead men out there.

With astonishing speed,
the set takes shape.

Fake tanks are made
out of fabric and wood,

every empty box in the Army's
possession is gathered up

to look like ammo dumps.

Barkas reportedly even commandeers
all the papyrus in Egypt.

All the people working for
the camouflage unit

knew how to make something
out of nothing.

That's what filmmaking
and theatre design is -

you make something wonderful
out of bits of old canvas.

It's all very well pretending to
attack down south,

but how do you hide
the real army up north?

Once again, Barkas has
a frankly bonkers plan.

He places 700 empty trucks
on the front line.

This is where the attack
will begin in earnest -

but for all the Germans can see,
it's a harmless lorry park.

And this is where the
really clever bit begins.

Only days before the attack, the
trucks - which are positioned here -

in the dead of night, move

out of position and
are replaced exactly by the tanks.

Each of the tanks' crews

has been equipped with this
lightweight sunshade.

Now, bear with me.
This does look slightly ridiculous.

But to the German observers
that are flying high overhead,

it looks like just any other truck.

It's business as usual,
and they carry on the way.

The fate of the British army
rests on this flimsy deception.

All it takes is ONE German soldier
to notice something amiss,

and it's curtains.

Monty is impressed -
so impressed, in fact,

that he scraps a back-up plan

to pull his troops back,
should this crazy scheme fail.

He writes, "lf we're attacked here,
there will be no retreat.

"If we can't stay here alive,
then we stay here dead."

The Germans fall for the deception,

Montgomery unleashes a spectacular
artillery barrage

in the place the Germans
are least expecting.

It's a successful opening night,

but the battle still rages on
for two bloody weeks.

Then on the 4th of November 1942,

Rommel retreats.

It was an important moral victory
and the British Army needed it.

And what Churchill said
after the war, and it's hyperbole,

but he said, "Before Alamein,
we never had a victory.

"After Alamein,
we never had a defeat."

Geoffrey Barkas,
after the war, said,

"lt was the biggest production
that I ever worked on."

He obviously was a dreamer, an ideas
man. An eccentric, actually.

But look at this.
If you were standing there,

it wouldn't fool you for more than
a couple of seconds, would it?

But I suppose if you're
in an aircraft,

and you are in an aircraft
an awful lot, looking down,

maybe desert,
no trees or anything...

...but you can pull
the wool over their eyes.

Yeah, you certainly can.
I think if you were at height,

which you would have to be because
of anti-aircraft,

which would be protecting these
tanks and defensive positions,

and you're travelling quite
fast as well.

All you need to do is glance down.

You've got the heat of the sun,
sweat in your eyes.

You're tired.

It's all this ingenuity,
these kind of mad, crazy ideas.

Isn't it extraordinary how,

in the war, there was a lot of these
wacky ideas and some of them

came off and some of them made
a really big difference. Yeah.

Victory in North Africa put Britain
on the offensive, but that might not

have been possible without thousands
of volunteers who fought

for our country, yet never
set foot here.

Six months after El Alamein,
we pushed the Nazis

out of North Africa, but few people
are aware that our victory is made

possible by men not just
from the UK, but from what was then

the British Empire.

Here in the UK, I find that
the contribution of imperial troops

has largely been ignored
or not represented as much

because here the narrative is a lot
about Britain standing alone

and fighting against the Nazis.

The numbers are extraordinary.

The numbers are soaring, and that
is two and a half million men

from the subcontinent.

And that's currently regarded
as the largest volunteer force

in the world.

Where were they sent?

So they found themselves in the
Middle East and North African fronts,

in Sicily, in Cyprus.

Men were sent from India to almost
every single theatre of war.

Here we have a letter that's
from a Havildar,

or a junior officer,
in the British Indian army.

And he says, "The war in the place
where I've been fighting is now

"over with the total defeat
of the enemy.

"Now we're having a bit of rest.

"But what's going to happen next?

"God alone knows.

"His Majesty The King came down
to visit us.

"It was indeed a godsent
opportunity to see him.

"He was awfully pleased with
the extraordinary gallantry

"of our army."

These are men who are caught
up in the trials and tribulations

of war that really does span
across the world, that's sometimes

something we forget.

It's not simply a European
war or an American war.

It's a world war.

And I think knowing about
the contributions of Indian soldiers

starts putting the world
back into the war.

Five months after El Alamein,
the Allies have all but crushed

German and Italian forces
in North Africa.

From here, they'll be able to invade
Europe and enter the final phase

of the war, but will only pull
it off with a combination

of deception, trickery
and subterfuge.

To press home their advantage,
Churchill and the Allies decide

they need to take the island
of Sicily, here, right slap bang

in the middle of the Mediterranean.

It's the stepping stone to mainland
Europe and the key to control

of this area of sea here.

But...but there are thousands
of German and Italian troops

dug in on the island.

The Allies need to mass
160,000 of their own troops

here in North Africa if the invasion
is to stand a chance.

The problem is it's all too obvious.

Hitler's bound to find out
that the Allies are massing

their troops here in North Africa.

And it's an easy deduction to make
that Sicily is the target.

How can Britain fool the Germans
into thinking it's not the target?

That they plan to attack somewhere
else?

In Whitehall, Ml5 are masters

in the art of spreading
false information.

They need to fool Hitler
into concentrating his defences

as far away from Sicily as possible.

If they fail, the Germans
will be waiting to cut the invasion

force to ribbons.

The intelligence services set
about fabricating a completely

different, but totally believable,
invasion plan.

Can they fool Hitler into believing
that they plan

to hit Greece instead?

If the ruse works, then
they'll still have the element

of surprise when they attack Sicily
after all.

Ml5 consider every possible plan,
no matter

how far-fetched it might seem.

One of Britain's most prolific
schemers is a budding author

by the name of Ian Fleming.

After the war,

Fleming will go on to create
James Bond, but, for now,

he's been busy dreaming up a list
of 51 possible ways to wrong-foot

Hitler with fake intelligence.

In 1943, it looked like there was
only one plan that might fool

the Germans, but, if it did,

it would alter the course
of the war.

Fleming calls plan number 28

"Not a very nice one."

It details using the dead body
of a British officer to put

fake invasion plans directly
into the hands of Hitler.

Considering this somewhat gruesome
plan are two ambitious intelligence

officers, Ewan Montagu, who,
before the war, was a successful

barrister and an RAF officer,
could Charles Cholmondeley.

Montagu's legal background
has gained him a reputation

for mastery of detail.

Cholmondeley, frustrated in his
ambitions to fly

due to poor eyesight,
finds adventure at Ml5

through his fertile brain.

Between the two of them in the belly
of the Admiralty, no doubt burning

the midnight oil,
they decide to actually go ahead

with Fleming's plan.

What they need to make the plan work
is a fresh, dead body disguised

as an intelligence officer
and loaded with fake documents

that show the allies actually intend
to invade Greece and not Sicily.

Then they have to sit back and hope
that Hitler swallows the bait.

It might seem like an absolutely mad
plan, but Britain has little option.

Montagu and Cholmondeley's
first challenge is to get a body.

In wartime London, there are plenty
of bodies, but this one needs

to be fresh with no physical marks
and, crucially, no family ties.

A 34-year-old homeless Welshman
named Glyndwr Michaeljust come

into the morgue
having taken rat poison.

Now, the coroner doesn't think
that the rat poison

will show up if Glyndwr is examined.

He has no other marks on his body
either, but he can be made to look

like he's been in
an air crash at sea.

Montagu and Cholmondeley set
about their mission, now codenamed

Mincemeat, to construct the life
of a man who never existed.

Professor Rory Cormac is an expert
in covert actions.

He can show me the extraordinary
lengths they went to transform

a dead homeless man into
a British officer carrying

fake invasion plans.

They have to come up with
a plausible back story.

The name they chose was Bill Martin.

They settled on him
being an acting major.

So a rank which was senior enough
to justifiably be carrying

this sensitive material, but not
too senior

that the Germans would know
who he was.

And you can see the level of detail
and the planning in all of this.

They stuffed his pockets
and his briefcase

with what in the jargon is called
wallet fodder, or pocket litter,

to again help create
a plausible back story.

How much time did they spend
putting this together?

Ages.
The Germans are not stupid.

They are on the lookout
for British intelligence

and deception operations.

So the British intelligence
establishment took attention

to detail incredibly seriously.

So here we see the lovely Pam,
Martin's fake girlfriend.

Who was she?
She actually worked for Ml5.

She was a young Ml5 clerk who posed
for this particular picture.

Again, just to build
this credibility

that Martin's a real person
with a real girlfriend.

And, along those lines,
there are letters from her.

There's a receipt for a ring
he bought her to make

that relationship seem
as credible as possible.

The personal effects
are a smokescreen.

Montagu and Cholmondeley really want
the Germans to read one letter

in particular to send them
on a wild goose chase.

To me, naively,
it seems a little bit obvious.

I mean, you've got a letter stuffed
in somebody's pocket and a title

at the front is says
Personal and Most Secret.

But it is such a brilliant letter

written by the vice chief

of the Imperial General Staff,
Archibald Nye.

And you see Sicily is even
mentioned, but it's mentioned

as a cover target and almost
as a kind of double bluff

just to throw the Nazis
off the scent.

And then, instead,
he explicitly says

we are going to invade
through Greece,

even naming the beaches
that the Allied forces

are going to roll up on.

If this reached the Germans
on its own, you're right,

they would have smelt a rat.
Well, deception is about creating

an entire fake reality to make
the key piece of information

as plausible and as powerful
as possible.

What Montague and Cholmondeley now
need to do is plant the body,

and the plans, somewhere
the Germans will find them.

They plan to take the body
to the coast of neutral Spain

near the port of Huelva.

They've chosen Huelva
because it's known to be crawling

with Nazi spies, the very people
that Montagu and Cholmondeley

want to find the body and believe
that it's Major Martin who's died

in a plane accident at sea, en route
to delivering vital documents.

British, French and American troops
are still pushing the Axis forces

out of North Africa.

The clock is set to invade Sicily
from here in ten weeks' time,

Montague and Cholmondeley need to
dupe Hitler

into massing his defences
in the wrong location.

On April the 19th, Montagu
and Cholmondeley pull the body

out of the morgue deep freeze
and start to dress it.

The feet are so frozen they can't
get the boots on so they thaw them

out with a two-bar electric fire
and they put the body in a canister

marked Optical Instruments and drive
it to Scotland, to be put on board

a submarine bound for Spain.

Only the captain knows the
true nature of the mission.

On the 30th of April, the submarine
surfaces off Huelva

and ejects the body.

Tied to its waist is a briefcase
containing the fake invasion plans.

Just as Cholmondeley and Montague
hoped,

a Spanish fishing boat discovers

the corpse and takes it back
to port.

It's now only nine weeks
to the invasion, and one of the most

crucial turning points of the war
depends on the fake plans

successfully getting into the hands
of German intelligence.

If they fail.

The invasion is in real trouble.

The lives of thousands of Allied
troops are at risk.

To draw Nazi spies in to find
the bogus major and his plans,

they leak intelligence messages
that the British are looking

for his briefcase.

They sent some messages about some
papers from this Major Martin,

of being of great importance
and of great secrecy.

This is another intricate part
of the plot, because the Brits knew

that the Germans were intercepting
and decoding these, they knew

the Germans were going to read
these two letters.

It's the 21st of May, just six weeks
before the real invasion.

Montagu and Cholmondeley are
anxiously listening out

for any radio traffic suggesting

that Hitler has fallen
for the fake invasion site.

Codebreakers at Bletchley pick up
a signal from German high command.

The message orders Mediterranean
commanders to prepare

for the imminent invasion of Greece.

Montagu and Cholmondeley
have done it.

The Germans found the body and, with
it, secret documents

and, most importantly, the proposed
plan of the invasion of Greece.

They've fallen for Mincemeat's
subterfuge.

Ml5 hastily send a telegram
to Churchill, which simply reads

"Mincemeat swallowed,
rod, line and sinker."

To set a trap for the bogus
invasion, Hitler moves an entire

Panzer division, 19,000 men,
from France all the way to Greece.

The total forces defending Greece
jump from one division to eight.

The morning of the 10th ofjuly.

Germans are dug in and ready to
cut down Allied troops storming

the beaches in Greece.

But nothing happens.

Instead, Hitler is horrified
to receive reports that Sicily

is under attack.

160,000 British, American
and Commonwealth troops

put their lives on the line.

The British expect huge casualties.
10,000 men in the first week.

But, with German defences
concentrated elsewhere,

around 1,400 Brits
are wounded or killed.

Thanks to Sicily, the Allies will
wrest control of the Mediterranean

from the Axis forces and Hitler
receives a clear message.

"We're coming for you."

A message delivered
by British intelligence.

So, Michael,
Operation Mincemeat there.

Isn't it fascinating that it was
Ian Fleming, you know, author

of all those wonderfuljames Bond
novels, who came up with the not

very nice idea of using a corpse?

You could almost say Hollywood
couldn't make this stuff up,

but, of course, that's exactly
where it came from.

They must have been about the
most successful spymasters

of the Second World War.

Well, there's no doubt.
After the war, they just went back

to ordinary life.

I mean, one of them
sold agricultural machinery

after the war ended.
The other became a solicitor.

And Ian Fleming,
whatever happened to him?

Glyndwr Michael, the man
who unknowingly gives his corpse

to save thousands of lives,
is buried in Huelva, Spain.

The inscription now simply
notes that he served

as Major William Martin.

In 1943, the Allies push on
from Sicily into mainland Italy.

But Hitler can still
fight back hard.

His industrial war machine
is powered by factories

all over German-occupied territory.

The Allies need to disable
these factories if we are to stand

any chance of advancing into Europe.

But they're deep behind enemy lines.

For the past three years, Churchill
has been pioneering a new way

to attack targets like this

with the Special Operations
Executive, or SOE.

Some of these men and women
would often be an odd choice

for the military, but they are
perfect for sabotaging the Nazi

war machine from the inside.

One of the hidden stories
of this army of unlikely heroes

is that of Harry Ree.

Good morning, sir. Good morning.

This is Harry in a film
that was made about his mission.

Harry is playing himself.

We make extensive inquiries
before we recruit our people.

Do you think we're the right
people for the job?

We're sure of it.
All right. I'm on.

Harry is a 24-year-old
school teacher who's fluent

in French and German.

But he's an unusual candidate
to strike a killer blow

to the Nazi war machine.

Harry's son, Jonathan, can reveal
what drove his father to enter such

a dangerous world.

What sort of person is
Harry Ree as war breaks out?

He's teaching in a grammar school.

His background, though,
was very posh.

He'd been to public school
and Cambridge University

and his parents were very rich.

So he was a posh socialist.

He doesn't it doesn't look
very warlike, does he?

He definitely wasn't warlike. In his
braces in front of the blackboard.

He was he was a schoolmaster
by vocation.

He loved being a schoolmaster.

And, as a pacifist, he thought
he would sit it out at first.

But then he decided that he wanted
to join the war because he thought

that, after the war, his pupils
would not respect him

if they thought he'd sat it out.

Harry trained for his mission here,
at Bewley in Hampshire.

It may look like an idyllic stately
home, but it's shadowy history

as a training ground for the
Special Operations Executive

can be revealed
by Drjuliette Pattinson.

What's significant about the room
that we're currently sat in here?

They would learn in this room
about different kinds of gadgets

such as these.

We've got a wireless set here
that is hidden

within, like, a lunch box.

So you can see the wire here
that this is the aerial.

So you can see it's wound up
at the moment, but it

would be unravelled and then
strung up, maybe in a tree, to get

the reception
to enable this to work.

Well, what do you think this is?

It's obviously a shaving brush.

Absolutely.

Ostensibly, it's a shaving brush.

But, as you can see, there is
a nice little gap inside.

And so you could secrete
amsomething like this.

Which is a silk map, could be a map
of France, for example.

This is the sort of thing you dream
about when you're a boy growing up,

like, escape maps

and things hidden
in shaving brushes.

And then you have other things,
such as the exploding rats.

Yeah, a rat that has been
hollowed out and then filled

with plastic explosive.

Seriously?

And I have...

You have said rat here.
An example here.

No way. This wonderful rat.

It will have a seam underneath

where it was filled with
plastic explosive.

Honestly, that's a real thing? Yeah.

Armed with the tricks of the trade,
Harry is ready to join the hundreds

of SOE agents coordinating
sabotage in France -

blowing up trains, financing
resistance, assassinating informers.

The SOE's ruthless methods earn them
a nickname -

the Ministry of
Ungentlemanly Warfare.

The risk of being caught is high,
revenge by the Germans merciless.

What was the survival rate
like for these people?

I mean, would they last
the retirement age?

So the French section,
when they were recruited, some

of them were informed
that they had a 50/50 chance

of survival. It's such
a dangerous job, isn't it?

Absolutely.
Agents are risking their lives

and many of them were captured,

many of whom were tortured,
and a lot of them were executed.

In April 1943, our idealistic young
teacher is parachuted, under cover

of darkness, into France.

By the 10th of May,
he makes his way east

to the manufacturing area around
Sochaux, near the German border.

He tries to blend in while looking
for opportunities to hit the Nazis

where it hurts.

He's good at getting on with people.

He's good at summing up
people's characters.

And he was very, very careful
about how he conducted himself.

He would never carry a gun himself.

Everyone said that he was just
extraordinarily prudent, cautious,

but he's pretty brave.

He got into situations where
he was in extreme danger

and he had to get out of them
pretty quickly.

But he would certainly not have
described himself as brave.

And I think actually he would
have said that the most important

thing is to be prudent, be careful.

Harry's new territory contains
a prime British target.

The Germans have commandeered
the Peugeot car factory in Sochaux.

At 30 acres, the factory is one
of the biggest in France,

and it's capable of churning out
tens of thousands of vehicles

for the Nazis.

Harry discovers that the manager
of the factory, Rodolphe Peugeot,

has sympathy for the resistance

and makes his acquaintance.

But the factory has also caught
the attention of the RAF.

It's number three on their list
of top industrial targets.

On the 15th ofjuly,

they arrive to stop
the factory for good.

165 bombers determined
to wipe out the Peugeot factory

in one devastating raid.

The night's clear -
perfect bombing conditions.

They drop hundreds of tons of high
explosives, the crews are convinced

that they've done the job.

But next morning's reconnaissance
reveals the truth - the bombs

have missed their target.

Instead, they've destroyed several
nearby villages, killing 100 people,

injuring many more.

The Peugeot factory's assembly line
is still rolling out munitions

for Hitler's war machine.

Harry and the people of Sochaux
are horrified by the deaths caused

by the RAF raid.

And he went to see
Rodolphe Peugeot and said, look,

this air raid was
a terrible disaster.

Can you help me do it as
an inside job so that your factory

will be selectively sabotaged,

but there will be no more
civilian casualties.

So, Harry and Rodolphe Peugeot
get together.

What the plan they come up with?

The plan is that they will organise,
or rather that Harry will organise

a sabotage to plant bombs directly
on the machines inside the factory.

And Rodolphe introduces him
to his chief engineer,

who introduces him to other workers
in the factory

who will carry out the plan

on condition that Harry will get a
guarantee from London that the RAF

will bloody stay away.

Harry arranges for explosive charges
and detonators

to be delivered by parachute.

But on the 26th of September, one
of Harry's contacts betrays a nearby

resistance cell to the Gestapo.

16 people are executed
by firing squad.

The Germans are closing in on Harry
and his resistance network.

Pretty handsome chap, isn't he?

Yeah, I mean, he looks completely
untroubled in this photograph,

doesn't he, you know? Clear brow
and all this sort of thing.

But imagine the stress of day
after day, week after week, month

after month, playing out this part,
knowing that one slip...

And you're done.
..and you're going to be done.

You're going to be tortured
and killed.

Somebody or other at any time
could have betrayed

you to the Germans.

I mean, imagine living with that
stress for long periods of time.

We think we have stressful lives
now.

Harry, the lapsed pacifist,
is desperate to prevent another

catastrophic air raid on the factory
and surrounding villages.

He radios London to stall the RAF,
to let him destroy

the factory his way.

By November, his team are primed
for sabotage.

As Harry's team is about to slip
into the factory and prepare

the explosives,
they run into a problem.

The German guards are not leaving
as scheduled.

Instead, they're involved in a game
of football with the Peugeot workers

and would-be saboteurs.

It's surreal.

The plan has to be aborted.

Every day that passes, the Gestapo
tighten the net around Harry.

On the 5th of November, Bonfire
Night, the saboteurs try again.

Using Harry's plan, they plant the
bombs in the factory at the points

which will cause maximum damage.

Harry and his team have pulled
off an extraordinary strike

at the heart of the enemy.

The factory lies in ruins,
destroyed from within,

and incidentally, possibly saving
the lives of hundreds of civilians

at risk from another
Allied bombing raid.

For the next six months, production
of German military equipment

on the Peugeot assembly lines
is at a complete halt.

Harry's attack hits Hitler's
war machine where it hurts.

With this and others like it,
the Nazis will struggle to stay

on the offensive, paving
the way for D-Day.

And despite the utter destruction
of the factory, no lives are lost.

As a pacifist soldier, he did think
it was a good kind of operation

to have been engaged in,
as there were no casualties,

but very serious damage
to machinery.

But Harry and his team have just
made themselves

public enemy number one.

The Gestapo soon hunt Harry down,

and in a desperate escape
to Switzerland,

he's shot four times, but remarkably
gets away.

He said, "Extraordinarily lucky."

That's what he said! Which I think
is putting it mildly.

After those
extraordinary experiences,

what was the rest of his life like?

He went back to being
a schoolteacher.

And working with young people was
what he always wanted to do,

and that's what he devoted
his life to.

Harry's story is typical
of the unassuming men and women

who make the SOE such a success.

They showed that the Nazis
can be stopped

and the final stage of
the war is coming.

By the summer of 1944, the Allies
have made the Atlantic safe again,

secured North Africa and neutralised
fascist Italy.

They're finally ready to take Europe
back from Hitler by invasion.

The planning for the D-Day invasion
is the most complex

military operation ever imagined,

let alone planned, and there's still
one huge challenge

that needs to be met, and that
is how do you push forward

the advantage and reinforce

the troops that have just landed
on the beaches

when you don't control any of
the channel ports

you need to bring in reinforcements,
new supplies and heavy weapons.

Our final story is of a young
British civil engineer

who was tasked with solving
that problem...

The challenge starts two years
earlier, when the Allies first begin

to work out how to invade
Fortress Europe.

Invasion by sea needs a harbour.

If we can't capture one, we'll have
to build our own, and fast.

Churchill is pushing a bold
idea that he'd first had

in the First World War - to create
a prefabricated harbour

here in the United Kingdom, to build
it in sections

and then tow it across to France
and the invasion beaches.

It's a daring gamble, and it's going
to require ingenious engineering

to make it a reality.

A major headache is how to get
heavy vehicles off the ships

and onto the shore.

The War Office thinks the answer
lies in long floating bridges,

but if the bridges fail,
the harbour is useless.

Solving that problem fell
to Allan Beckett.

I'm meeting with Allan's son, Tim.

So, this is a picture of Dad
in 1939.

Gosh. Smart, eh?

He was very much a very clever
and inventive engineer.

So, day one for your father
on the job, then,

how does he get involved? What does
he do? What's his task?

He was working in the bridging unit,
and Colonel Everall,

his immediate superior, gave Dad
a sketch and said to him,

you know, "Beckett,
you're a yachtsman,

"see if you can come up with
a solution for it."

Well, Dad's solution for the problem
of the long sloping beach

and the tide that went up and down

was to come up with a number
of floating pontoon units

and then to connect
them up with bridges.

And these bridges could twist
between the two ends.

It had to cope with waves,
so it had to twist and turn

and move with the water,

and that was the novelty of it.

Allan's idea is up against
two other prototypes.

The code name for his is The Whale.

The others are The Swiss Roll

and a combination called
the Hippo and Crocodile.

The War Office need to know
that these floating roadways

can support trucks in heaving
waves and changing tides.

They're put to the test in Scotland.

We've got some pictures
of the prototype being tested,

but you can see it's pretty
rough here,

and you can see that somebody is
driving a truck along it.

Did you feel sorry for the drivers
that had to test this?

Well, I must have been
quite exciting.

All three prototypes are about to be
put to the test

in a way no-one could have planned.

A huge storm blows up, wreaking
havoc on the Scottish coast.

Allan is given an order to report
to the testing base immediately.

He went up there on the train,
sort of full of trepidation.

And he didn't know what he was going
to see

and whether it would all be wrecked
or what.

But he got there, and he said
the Hamilton Swiss Roll had gone

and the Hippo and the Crocodile had
settled and collapsed,

and his floating roadway was
twisting and turning and everything,

but it was still there and they were
still managing

to drive a truck up and down it.

So, the powers that be
in the Army made their decision,

and they ordered ten miles
of it to be made.

The Allies had given themselves
just over a year

to get ready for D-Day.

Allen's Whales are only one part of
what becomes known as

the Mulberry Harbours.

Hundreds of British engineering
companies are building

one of the largest construction
projects the world has ever seen.

And now, they only have seven months
to go.

You have to get it right, don't you?
There was a lot at stake.

It had never been done before
and it will never be done again.

It didn't really matter
how much preparation you did,

you couldn't fully understand what
challenges you were going to meet

and what the enemy would throw
at you.

Finally, four years after
the British

evacuated Dunkirk, they're back.

It's D-Day.

Allan Beckett joins the biggest
invasion in history to ensure

their advance into occupied Europe.

If his floating bridges and
the Mulberry Harbours failed,

the invasion force could be left
paralysed on the beaches.

Dad went over. They had some quite
good American launches

filled with long-range fuel tanks,

So, they were in this thing full
of petrol,

and he was aboard it with some
very young American Gls.

He said they were all, you know,
pretty terrified

and they got worse as they got near
to Normandy

because there was a lot of bodies
floating around

and still fighting going on.

The Allies may have taken
the beachheads,

but the cost is heavy -
4,400 already dead.

With the invasion force
still fighting close by,

Allan sets about his job of liaising
construction between

Mulberry A, on the American beaches,

and Mulberry B, for
the British and Canadians.

Arriving with Allan's floating
bridges is another vital component

of the Mulberry harbours -

the breakwaters to protect them
from the sea, known as caissons.

Military researcher
Jacob Thomas-Llewellyn

has been studying how this
colossal armada became a harbour.

Some of the individual constituents
of these various structures

were enormous, weren't they?

I mean, probably the most notable
example are the concrete caissons.

The largest units were over
6,000 tonnes. Each?

Each. Each one of these? Each one.
6,000 tonnes? 6,000 tonnes.

Just explain what they do,
what they are.

So, the basic principle
with the caissons

is that they were hollow in design,

and it was because of this
hollow structure

that they were able to float. That's
the astonishing thing, isn't it?

These constituent units,
6,000 tonnes of concrete,

and yet they float.

Building two Mulberry Harbours
requires 147 of these caissons

towed up to 100 miles
across the Channel.

This is the moment of truth -
will they work?

They're sunk into position

while Allan's floating bridges reach
over the waves,

ready to meet the ships.

NEWSREEL:

If Allan's floating bridge design
fails, the harbours will be useless.

How revolutionary are the techniques
that are being involved here?

In terms of the scale, it was
completely revolutionary.

We're talking around over a million
tonnes of equipment.

The project, in
civil engineering terms,

is probably one of the largest
in history.

But just as Allan's floating bridges

are ready to carry their
first trucks, disaster strikes.

NEWSREEL:

Normandy suffers the worst
storm in decades.

The storm totally destroys
Mulberry A.

The American harbour takes
the brunt of the storm,

but the British one clings on.

Allan and his team of engineers
begin repairs.

Despite the damage, it becomes
a fully operational harbour

just four weeks after
the D-Day landings.

The harbour's so successful,
it becomes known as Port Winston,

and it remains operational until
November, 1944,

as the Allies push on into Europe.

11 weeks after the landings,
the French take back Paris.

The Mulberry Harbours are a
guarantee that the Allies

can keep up momentum against Hitler.

If Allan Beckett's floating bridges
hadn't worked,

the harbour would have been
a failure,

and so perhaps would have
been the invasion.

How much of a contribution
did the Mulberry Harbours make

to winning the war?

I think it showed how ingenious

British civil engineering
has and can still be.

I think it was one of
the defining projects

which allowed the Allies
to win in north-west Europe.

Allan Beckett was a soldier
in a hidden army of civil engineers

who made D-Day a
world-changing success.

For the next ten months, the Allies
fight their way across Europe

until they meet the Soviets
in Berlin.

Hitler commits suicide
and the Germans surrender

on the 7th of May, 1945.

The Japanese follow
on the 2nd of September.

Britain and her Allies have won
World War ll.

Allan Becket is awarded a military
MBE for his war-winning ideas.

A keen sailor since he was a boy,

he even returns to
the English Channel

to enjoy the challenge of the waves
and the tides.

The Second World War is filled
with stories like these -

our heroes and heroines were just
a few ordinary men and women

called upon to do
extraordinary things.

This is how the Second World War
was really won.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media