1:08:24
War ravaging the East since 1937 and Japan's invasion of China reached Europe on the 1st of September 1939 with Germany's invasion of Poland. It became global on the 7th of December 1941 when Japanese aircraft attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. It ended with a new weapon for a new age. This is the history of the greatest of all man-made events. These men are part of that history. They are eyewitnesses to the triumphs and tragedies of the war wherever it was fought.
Their testimony is part of the story of how our world was made by those who could pay and those who could no longer meet The Second World War ended more than 70 years ago, but wars never end. For those who fought or suffered, the memories are indestructible. And there's a voice in my ear saying, "Help. Help me." 5,000 ships gathering together. It was a sight to see. They virtually killed in the crash. And that left three of us. We But now nobody thinks we cuz we came back. To understand something so profound, we must start before the beginning with what Winston Churchill called the gathering storm. On the 22nd day of the 20th century, there was a death in the family. It was
a large family prone to squables and jealousy. But across Europe, its tangle of marriages and alliances held sway over vast empires, creating, if not the reality, then the comforting illusion of stability, continuity, and authority. And these were the reassuring qualities on display as crowned heads, grand dukes, heirs apparent and presumptive followed the coffin of Queen Victoria. Victoria's successor Edward IIIth gave his name to the Edwardian era, a time of mounting international tension and social unrest. When he died in 1910, the same grand mourers marched again.
Amongst them were three cousins. A German Kaiser whose cousins called him Willie. A British king who was also an emperor they called him Georgie. And he bore an uncanny resemblance to the Russian Zar they called Nikki. Within 4 years of the funeral, these cousins would be at each other's throats, and a world that had been hundreds of years in the making would be swept away. Of the cousins, only Georgie kept his crown. The idea of dynasties had taken a terrible mauling, but as we shall see, the idea of empire could still seduce. When the First World War's four years of destruction finally ended, a world awoke, determined to prove that the
sacrifices had been for some purpose. Divisive social issues were settled. If not because of the war, then it seemed almost incompensation for it. Ireland was granted limited home rule. Women received the vote. The autocratic Zar was overthrown by a communist revolution. The militaristic German government was replaced by a liberal democracy. Pioneer aviators drew the continents together. It seemed as though the peace for which so many had died was here to stay. People let their hair down, celebrated the jazz age, and danced the Charleston. Life, it seemed, was returning to normal in cities like the Berlin of Cabaret and the Paris of Manget.
The talkies came to your local cinema. The jazz singer Jolson and more stars than there are in the heavens. Metra Goldwin Mayor said. And with radio, entertainment invaded the home, putting the habit of family sing songs very much on notice. Been an ancient tradition of the British monarchy that the new sovereign should send a written message to his peoples. Science has made it possible for me to make that written message more personal and to speak to you all over the radio. Radio changed culture. Radio gave birth to soap opera, the news broadcast, the panel game. Great qualities have been appreciated and valued. But the first world war, like a neglected wound, was festering and would undercut all of this. The cost of the
war and the terms of its armistice were corrosive. The two great wars of the 20th century that occurred so soon after Victoria's death are linked. In the view of some historians, they are one conflict interrupted by a peace that proved to be unsustainable. Those who see the two wars as separate fights nonetheless agree that the second finds its origins in the first and most particularly in the aftermath of the first in what the losers did and how the winners behaved. One of the great monuments to power in Europe is the palace of Versailles. Vast, ostentatious, indulgent, and not celebrating the glory of God or any higher purpose. It was built because a man ordered it to be built. He was the king of France.
Such a show of absolute power made a fitting setting for the peace treaty that ended the great war. For here the winners paraded their power in a way that made a durable peace most unlikely. The winners fatally decided who should be party to their talks. Soviet Russia was not invited and the losers although the war had ended without a single enemy boot setting foot on their soil had the settlement presented to them for their non-negotiable signature. That settlement proclaiming German actions as having been the sole cause of the war delivered three types of humiliation: military, economic, and territorial.
Militarily, Germany was to be allowed no air force, no tanks, no submarines, and an army restricted to 100,000 troops. Economically, it was through reparations to repay to the victorious allies what they calculated as having been the full cost of the war. And territorially, the map of the world was redrawn. Germany lost its overseas empire, 12% of its population, and 13% of its European territory. The Versai settlement by redrawing the map of Europe also dismantled the old empire of the Hapsburgs. By treaties, marriages and conquests, the Hapsburgs had grown to dominate central Europe. The main seat of power for the Hapsburg Empire was the imperial capital, Vienna. From there, Hapsburg rule extended south
into the Balkans and north into central Europe. It encompassed many nationalities, languages, and religions. It was an empire whose instability was a major contributor to the three wars of the 20th century. The First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War. What the peacemakers of Versailles did about the Habsburg Empire in the war's aftermath made further conflict almost inevitable. AustriaHungary was stripped of its imperial realm. Its Balkan lands became Yugoslavia. And in central Europe, new countries were created or reestablished.
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the Balkan states. Countries that relied for their survival on the goodwill of stronger neighbors. Germany objected to Germanspeaking minorities being placed behind new frontiers without consultation and Russia to the non-return of formerly Russian territories seeded to imperial Germany in the treaty that released Russia from the first world war. Versai was, said the abdicated Kaiser living in exile, a peace to end all peace. Germany would make the first move to redress what she saw as injustices. The first move towards the establishment of a greater Germany, Ga Deutseland, a union of those
Germanspeaking peoples. The first significant move did not involve reclaiming lost territory. It did finally wipe from the map the empire that had been part of Europe since the 13th century. Germany absorbed Austria in the ancus of 1938. In a referendum following the annexation, 99% of Austrians approved of being part of Gross Deuts. Germany next turned its attention to significant Germanspeaking minorities elsewhere. Firstly to those in the Sudetan area of Czechoslovakia, Poland would follow and the Second World War would follow that. But for that climax to be reached, other
things through the decades of the 20s and 30s had to happen. The jazz age had to be extinguished by the Great Depression, which would in turn usher in the rise of the dictators. At Versailles, it had been the American president Woodro Wilson who had set the agenda or tried to. He had some success, but ironically he failed to influence American policy. When Wilson returned home, he found a hostile Congress refusing to ratify the treaty he had labored to conclude and equally unprepared to endorse American membership of the fledgling League of Nations. The United States of America returned to a policy of isolationism. But political isolation did not mean a limitation on American power. On a cultural and economic level, nothing could stop the
spread of America's influence. People wanted American cars, watched American movies, and danced to American It was a new type of empire. An empire that found a way to wield influence everywhere without the burden of having to acquire and manage territory. The wealth of America had been the banker for the allies and Britain and France ended the First World War hugely in American debt. The war increased Britain's national debt tenfold and forced her to liquidate many of her overseas investments to pay the bills. The allies and particularly France were determined that they would be repaid by Germany in the form of reparations. But Germany was an economic basket case. In 1914, 20 Reichs marks had been worth£1 sterling. In 1922 it was 35,000 and then and only then did
hyperinflation set in. In 1923 a pound was worth 16 trillion marks. The US stepped in and the Davis plan stabilized the German economy allowing Germany to borrow money. from America. So the USA loaned money to Germany which paid compensation to Britain and France which used the money to repay its debts to the USA. This was not the only form of financial recklessness which at a time when the global economy had no overseeing agency like the World Bank or IMF was sewing the seeds of disaster. But it was one. By 1929, US banks had loaned Germany $100 billion in today's values, $8.5 billion in real terms. In 1929, the stock market crashed, wiping $10 billion off the value of the market, more than the total cost to
America of the war and more than the real value of her loans to Germany. So, Wall Street brought the curtain crashing down on the 20s, ushering in what the poet WA Jordan called a low, dishonest decade. A decade scarred by the Great Depression, a harsh time for working and middle-class people everywhere. Everywhere, including Germany, which reacted at the ballot box. A new populist party of the right that had secured 2.5% of the vote previously found its share jumping to 18.3% in 1930.
The National Socialists were suddenly a serious political force and Adolf Hitler was a figure on the national scene. The post first world war period in the defeated nations, the depression in every country constituted a sort of certainty vacuum and dictators with their oretry, their clear-cut solutions, their strength and their theatrical costumes rose to fill that vacuum. Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain, Stalin in Soviet Russia. Mussolini had taken power in Italy in 1922.
Like other dictators, he cashed in on resentment over the war that ended in 1918. 600,000 Italians had been killed fighting with the Allies, but Italy had been effectively excluded from the peace process and compensated with very little for her support of the Allied cause. A strong man promised to place her in the front rank of nations to make the Mediterranean Marstrom our sea and to win an empire which if not quite a new Roman Empire would be in that tradition. Italy would move first into Libya and then in 1935 into Abbiscinia, modern Ethiopia, an impoverished nation whose leader styled himself emperor. When the emperor highly Salassie made a dignified and fruitless appeal for assistance to the League of Nations, he
eloquently exposed the League's impotence. So, in an unprecedented scene, Alis Salassie stands in dignified silence, waiting for the uproar created by Italian journalists to cease. Though Mussolini posed as a strong leader and dreamed an imperial dream, Italy was far from being a first rank power. Time would reveal the defects in his grand ambition. The spectre that encouraged people of influence and wealth to support Mussolini was the same as the one that enabled the rise of Salazar in Portugal in 1932 and Franco in Spain in 1936.
The fear of international communism and it was also fundamental to the support that Adolf Hitler received in Germany. By the early 1920s, the Bolevik grip on power was unchallenged. The communist state, which would take the name union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, seemed to prove the worst fears of established regime everywhere, that it was possible for the people to rise up, grab power, take over the means of production, and turn the idea of property on its head. The rise of the right-wing dictators was, as much as anything else, the rise of forces whose appeal was to conservative values, patriotism, and nationalism, turning resentment away from internal enemies, the bosses or the aristocrats outward to
those who threatened something called our way of life. The left-wing dictatorship of the Soviet Union may have been the philosophical opposite of Nazism, but the two regime shared important common qualities. Each was absolutist, inflexible, sure of itself, the one based on class, the other on race. And each was totalitarian, seeking to extend the business of government into the totality of society, education, welfare, health, industry, agriculture, transport, the economy, culture. At their peak, Hitler and Stalin were the two most powerful individuals of the 20th century. Of the two, it was Hitler who set a course that changed Europe and the world.
It was Hitler who led the world into war with an agenda identifying the enemy, the program, the objective that never changed. Hitler never doubted. He set his crado down in mine camp or rather he dictated my struggle to Rudolph Hess in 1923. And the day before he died in the bunker in Berlin in 1945, he wrote his last testament. Its final words are these. But before everything else, I call upon the leadership of the nation and those who follow it to observe the racial laws most carefully to fight mercilessly against the poisoners of all the peoples of the world. International Judaism Again and again as we tell the story of the Second World War we will find that Hitler's decisionm his policy
formulation was determined by his racial theories. It leads one almost to conclude that Hitler lost the war because he was a Nazi. Before tracing Hitler's rise to the point where war in which he believed was inevitable, we must turn to the other side of the world where an empire equally compromised by racist convictions is already at war. An empire whose ambitions will not make common cause with Adolf Hitler, but which will assault a common enemy, creating a war on every continent. Japanese troops are steadily advancing into Manuria and occupying towns and villages. Japan had left the peace treaty deliberations of Versai with resentments and disappointments to match those of any other nation. But it also left with territory. The German concessions in
Shandong in China and some of the Pacific drops in the ocean that had been part of the German Empire, which was to be significant in the conflict that lay ahead. Japan's resentment arose chiefly from the peace conference's failure to endorse the racial equality clause that she had proposed. The objections were led by Australia's Prime Minister Billy Hughes. He feared that formally adopting such an idea would make impossible administration of the white Australia policy, which enshrined in Australian law the exclusion of non-white, particularly Japanese migrants from his sparsely populated country. For Japan, which was not sparssely populated, the solution to its shortage of space and even more critical shortage
of resources had to be the acquisition of territory. One way or another, the empire had started to expand in the 19th century. Okinawa, Taiwan, then called Formosa, and Korea had been occupied. And in 1931, Japanese forces already in China had invaded the province of Manuria. When the League of Nations adopted a report condemning Japan's invasion, the Japanese were defiant. Japan finds it impossible to accept the report adopted by the assembly. Japan walked out of the league and in 1937 would expand its ambitions into a full-scale invasion of China. That conflict would with Japan's further enlargement of its military action into East Asia and its attack on Pearl Harbor
become part of the Second World War. Through all these years of imperial expansion, the only constant in terms of Japan's leadership was the emperor Hirohito, who had ascended to the throne in 1926, when, as was the custom, a name had been chosen for the era over which he would reign. It was to be called the Shawa, the era of illustrious peace. Hiito's role has been the subject of controversy and argument since the war ended. Was he a revered figurehead happier with his interest in marine biology or an influential voice in the decision-making comparable to Stalin in the Soviet Union, Roosevelt in the USA, Churchill in the United Kingdom, or Hitler in the Third Reich. To follow the destiny of his empire, we
must turn to the rise of Adolf Hitler. It is there that we will find the spark which ignited the world war. In 1919, Hitler who had served bravely in the first war was appointed a building officia. He gave lectures on political and social matters and as the historian Ian Kershaw says found something he was good at. HE COULD SPEAK. HITLER JOINED THE GERMAN workers party where he enlisted in the tailong storm force the SA or brown shirts the party's street fighting force. By 1920, the shell of the Nazi party had been formed, and it was street fighting against bulsheism and just as much against the idea that Germany had lost the war. To Hitler, one of the supposedly undefeated army. The First World War had
been lost because the German soldier had been stabbed in the back. He had, in other words, been betrayed by traitors at home. It was a myth, but it gained traction. It was a myth that could never have flourished had the allies declined to accept an armistice. Had they instead marched on Berlin to ensure the total collapse and unconditional surrender of their enemy. The allies would not repeat the mistake. In 1945, unconditional surrender would be the only terms on offer to the Axis powers. But that is far in the future. On January the 25th, 1923, at the first Nazi party day in Munich, Hitler in a
speech said that the betrayers of the German fatherland must be done away with. Referring to those who signed the armistice, he shouted, "Down with the perpetrators of the November crime." He called the peace treaty a dictat. He called it in speech after speech the shantag, the shameful treaty. In 1923, Hitler, the unsuccessful orchestrator of a farically underpowered attempt to seize government, the beer hall push, was imprisoned. But turbulent people match well to turbulent times. And in the presidential election of March 1932, Hitler would lose to Hindenburg in a runoff, receiving 37% of the vote.
Hindenburg, in recognition of Hitler's high level of popular support, appointed him chancellor on January the 30th, 1933. A month after Hitler took office, the German Parliament building, the Reichag, was burned down. But who lit the fuse? A young Dutch communist named Marinos Vandaluba was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed without saying much. Suspicion has ever since implicated Hitler in a plot to spook the people into believing that a communist revolution was at hand. The climate created allowed him to arrest and imprison his opponents and suspend parliamentary democracy.
Throughout the year, he methodically created a one party state which he ruled by decree. In November, he put his reforms to a referendum and 92% of the voters approved. Many of those who disapproved moved to the SAR, the only part of Germany that under the terms of the peace treaty was still under foreign occupation. In a further referendum in November 1934 following the death of Hindenburg, the German people were asked if they approved of Hitler combining the roles of president and chancellor and becoming furer. 89.93% did. He was their furer, the undisputed and undisputable leader of a one party state. and he had not in any way acted
unconstitutionally. What happened next is a lesson in propaganda, fear, politics, and national sentiment. Umbrellas kept off the snow. Nothing could damp the order of the German front. On January the 13th, 1935, a plebvisit was held to determine the future of the French occupied Sar region. As part of the Versai settlement, the region had been occupied and administered by the French. Now after 15 years, and as had been planned from the start, the people were to be asked to vote on their territorial status. Hitler instructed his minister for propaganda Ysef Gerbles to deliver an intensive campaign promoting the virtues of union with the Reich. In this he was supported by the local Catholic Church.
98% of the electorate turned out to vote. 4 of 1% voted to join the French Republic. Less than 9% favored retaining the status quo. 90.8% voted in favor of being fully incorporated into the one party dictatorship of Nazi Germany. Underestimating the ambition and political skill of Adolf Hitler was ill advised. It was a mistake that Winston Churchill was guilty of making. Time after time in the House of Commons, Churchill referred to Corporal Hitler. In his 1935 book of essay's great contemporaries, Churchill had characterized the German leader as the former corporal. Churchill, the son of a lord and descendant of the aristocratic Duke of Malbra, could barely conceal his astonishment that a non-commissioned officer from lowly
beginnings should rise to the heights. Churchill was in many ways a relic of the Victorian age. At the Cairo conference in 1943, Lord Morren, his personal decision, noted the difference in attitude between the British and American leaders towards Chiang Kai-shek. To President Roosevelt, he observed China means 400 million people who are going to count in the world of tomorrow. But Winston, Moran said, thinks only of the color of their skin. remembered and revered as a war leader, Churchill had not destiny been kind to him might have been less favorably recalled. It was above all else his determined opposition to granting self-governing dominion status to India that put Churchill out of step with his party.
It is Churchill said alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandandy striding half naked up the steps of the vice regal palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king emperor. Ladies and gentlemen, are you following the Indian situation with the attention it demands? Things are going from bad to worse. Great mismanagement and weakness are causing unrest and disturbance to 300 million primitive people whose well-being is in our care. In some ways, the difference between Hitler and Churchill was wafer thin, but it was everything.
In 1935, boyed by the support of the German people in referenda on his rule and in the plebvisit about the Sar region, Hitler put into law a set of statutes that would come to stand for the most extreme part of Nazi philosophy, the Nuremberg laws. to the Reich Statistical Office, in 1933, Jews represented 3/4 of 1% of the German population, but this tiny proportion supplied 17% of the country's lawyers and 11% of its doctors. The Nuremberg laws disenfranchising these Jews were passed on September the 15th, 1935. And a whole series of supplementary decrees became bogged down in the minutia of how many Jewish grandparents does it take to make a person a Jew. The
bizarre surrealism of Nazi racial policy is illustrated by the official attitude to Christ. the night of the 9th 10th of November 1938 when gangs rampaged through city streets smashing Jews and Jewish shop fronts. Reinhardt Heddrich, chief of the security service, urgently telegram state police districts with instructions that included synagogues are to be burned down only when there is no danger of fire in neighboring buildings. In the aftermath of the rampage, the decree for the restitution of the street scene made the Jews liable for the damage done to their property and find the Jewish community 1 billion rice marks.
The growing problem of Jewish refugees from persecution was faced by 32 countries at the Evian Conference that same year. The conference had been the initiative of American President Franklin Roosevelt and its delegates met in their own words to consider involuntary migration from Germany and they turned their faces away. The Australian delegate Sir Thomas White was typical. Australia did not have a racial problem, he proclaimed, and we are not desirous of importing one.
The Second World War touched every continent. Its statistics can only be informed guesses. Not less than 50 and perhaps 80 million killed. At least 500 million lives, more than one in five of the world's then population directly affected. Several things make the conflict unique. As remarkable as any statistic is the fact that between 1939 and 1945, more civilians died as a result of the war than people in uniform. They were victims of starvation or enemy actions such as bombing. And in the middle of the 20th century, not the dark ages, not the time of the barbarians, but the 20th century in our time about 14 million of them were murdered. They
were shot, gassed, deliberately starved. The victims of murderers acting in official capacities carrying out government policies. The Einat Groupen were action groups assembled from German army and police ranks to carry out such non-judicial killing in occupied territories. But before they began the war of extermination on which Hitler insisted, Stalin had killed millions. And in the east, the Imperial Japanese Army was earning a reputation from which it would never recover. The year before the Evian Conference on July the 5th, 1937, a formal agreement to cooperate against the Japanese had been signed by the two
rivals who were fighting for mastery in China. the nationalist government under Chiang Kaishek and the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Dong. Two days later, the Japanese launched the full-scale invasion that initiated what is still known in China as the war of resistance against Japan. The nationalists were forced to retreat on the city of Chongqing in southwestern Sichuan. abandoning their capital, Nanjing, also known as Nangqing.
Nanking was occupied by the Japanese with notoriously barbaric consequences for 6 weeks without interference and possibly with official encouragement. Troops of all ranks roamed the streets, killing and raping at will. of the Chinese. Lieutenant Colonel Ryukichi Tanaka, the director of the Japanese Secret Service in Shanghai, said, "We can do anything to such creatures." History would shortly show that you cannot build and keep an empire with beliefs like those of Colonel Tanaka. Apologists for Japan's cruel excesses cite its unique and ancient warrior code. But bushido means fighting spirit,
not what has come to be known as the rape of Nank King. As war burned across China, statesmen in Europe were battling with words and compromises and small pieces of paper to keep the peace. It was called appeasement. Many in Great Britain had sympathy for Germany's grievances if not for her politics. They could see that the peace settlement had displaced millions of Germans, stripped Germany of historical territory, and forced her to make payments that were not altogether fair. And the British did like to believe that they knew a thing or two about fair play. So the starting point of appeasement was not making a pact with the devil. It was attempting to come to
terms with a regime whose demands did not seem to be unreasonable. New hopes inspired by the courageous genius of one man, the prime minister. Whatever the outcome of his meeting with Hitler, the world will know that Britain has left nothing undone which might save peace. But Hitler's demands were of course completely unreasonable. For all of his life and in his every utterance and writing, Adolf Hitler's guiding principle was that Germany had an historic right, a destiny in fact, to go east.
Laben's realm, living space, was much more than a land grab based on a need for additional territory. It was an imperial ambition for a great German empire dominating continental Europe and it was nothing new. The September program of 1914 had spelled out the same vision. The inconvenience of the fact that the lands to the east were already populated would be dealt with. The people were after all subhuman unto mench and could have no place in the German Reich. They would have to be relocated to Asian USSR to Siberia or they would have to die. The Japanese had a similar plan. And though the two wars of East and West and the regime of Hitler and of Japan seem so different, the parallels compelling them both
towards violent destruction are startling. Labens in Japan meant the acquisition and occupation of Chinese territory and the scheme there was known as the settlement of 1 million households, Japanese households to be settled in China. The Japanese had not planned for what would happen to the Chinese displaced by their scheme, but the Nazis had made a plan. There was an official hunger plan to calculate how long it would take the local populations to die before Germans could be fed from and settled in the conquered lands.
According to the plan, 30 million people were expected to die. Appeasing such a regime was never likely to produce a lasting peace. But the tragically whimsical figure of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, umbrella, Hamburgg hat, wing collar, had a gentleman's faith in the word of a gentleman. As Hitler tore up every restriction in the peace treaty, arming at will, building the air force he was forbidden, and the submarines he was not allowed, as he entered and militarized the Rhineland and rattled sabers in the direction of the Sudetan Germans in Czechoslovakia. The British prime minister invented shuttle diplomacy at a time when travel was far from comfortable. Between the middle and end of September, he flew three times to
what were in their way the world's first summit conferences. When I come back, I hope I may be able to say, as Hotspur says in Henry IV, out of this metal danger, we pluck this flower to safety. Finally, in Munich on September the 30th, 1938, an agreement was signed. On Hitler's agenda, the only item on the was Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain had set out his stall in a radio broadcast saying of Czechoslovakia how horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between
people of whom we know nothing. Chamberlain sacrificed Czechoslovakia which was annexed by Germany on the 21st of October. Believing Hitler's asurances that Germany had no other territorial ambitions, Chamberlain famously told the British people, "I believe it is peace for our time." But peace for our time lasted for no time at all. Hitler's vision of a vast continental empire stretching to the gates of Moscow could not be contained. And neither half a world away could the territorial ambitions of imperial Japan.
Soon the old world empires Britain and France and the Netherlands would be tested and the pursuit or preservation of empire would plunge the world into war. In the next episode of the price of empire, Adolf Hitler launches the invasion of Poland. But this time, against his expectations, the Western powers of France and Britain stand by their treaty obligations and war is declared. But for months, as an American politician observes, it is a phony war.
