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02:59The new German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, was also designed for blitzkrieg.
03:06It had 2,500 aircraft lined up against the poles.
03:10The most notorious was the Junkers' Ju-87 Stuka dive bomb.
03:18It was a form of flying artillery, making pinpoint attacks in support of the fast-moving ground forces.
03:25The poles could muster just 600 plagues.
03:32On the ground it was just as bad.
03:37Poland's army was just 500,000 strong.
03:41It had only 880 tanks.
03:45It even had 11 brigades of cavalry.
03:49Lances and horses against armor.
03:53But it wasn't just numbers that gave the Germans their advantage.
03:58They used their panzers in a radically new way.
04:02The separate, hard-striking units.
04:05The Polish tanks were dispersed to support their infantry.
04:10The poles' task had been made even more difficult by the German takeover of Czechoslovakia.
04:21The west of the country, including the capital Warsaw, was now surrounded on three sides by German-controlled territory.
04:28This geographical advantage was essential to Germany's grand plan.
04:38The task of the first thrust of the tanks was to create an initial breakthrough.
04:44But actually winning the war depended on deep pincer movements designed to surround and crush the enemy.
04:51These would come from Army Group North under General Fedor von Bock.
04:58He would launch two thrusts from northeast Germany and east Prussia.
05:03Army Group South under General Geert von Rundstedt would launch two more from Silesia and Slovakia.
05:10The aim would be for the pincers to meet near Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk.
05:22From the start, it went well for the Germans.
05:30The Polish air force was effectively eliminated within the first two days.
05:46The panzers cut through and struck deep.
05:52And the Stukas and medium bombers proved devastatingly effective.
06:02The poles were sliced apart, pinned into pockets which yielded vast numbers of prisoners.
06:07Legend has it that some Polish cavalry units gallantly tried to attack the panzers.
06:20But it was futile.
06:28They were just brushed aside.
06:29By September the 8th, the inner pincers had met up.
06:35German troops were advancing on the outskirts of Warsaw.
06:40September the 17th, the outer pincers met at Brest-Litovsk.
06:45On the same day, Soviet forces crossed the eastern Polish frontier.
06:56As part of the agreement reached between Hitler and Stalin in the Nazi Soviet pact.
07:02The Polish army was now in full retreat, its government fleeing abroad.
07:07Warsaw, however, fought on.
07:20Its defenders rejected a German offer to surrender.
07:22So the full fury of the German war machine was turned on it.
07:37Watching it all was Adolf Hitler, who had followed close behind his conquering army.
07:42On September the 27th, Warsaw surrendered.
07:51The next day, the victors carved Poland up according to the Nazi Soviet pact.
07:59The Soviet Union annexed slightly over half the country to the east.
08:06Germany took the rest.
08:09Both regimes began rounding up anyone who might present a danger in the future.
08:16Many were murdered.
08:19And for the first time, the Germans revealed how they would behave against those peoples in Eastern Europe whom they considered inferior.
08:30They sent in the Einsatzgruppen, special SS squads, to round up Jews.
08:36Most were forced into ghettos in the major cities where they would be starved to death.
08:49Others were executed on the spot.
08:53This was not, however, the end of the Polish army.
09:03More than 50,000 troops escaped and eventually reached France.
09:07There, a provisional government had been formed by General Władysław Sikorski.
09:11The Poles would fight on bravely from abroad.
09:14In Britain, the air raid sirens had sounded within minutes of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's announcement that hostilities had begun.
09:32In fact, despite their politicians' guarantees of Polish sovereignty, Britain and France had done very little to help Poland.
09:41As Hitler had gambled, they had no idea what to do once they had actually declared war.
09:46Both countries had begun mobilization.
09:53Air raid precautions were speeded up.
09:57Anti-aircraft guns were placed in major cities.
10:01Shelters were erected.
10:03Soon, children were being evacuated.
10:07Everyone had to carry gas masks, and a blackout was introduced.
10:17The British army began to deploy its 100,000-strong expeditionary force to northern France.
10:27French troops did advance a little way inside the German border, but they refused to move beyond the protective cover of artillery range.
10:37The initiative was still firmly in Hitler's hands.
10:41And he at least knew precisely what he was going to do next.
10:52The blitzkrieg against Poland had been a stunning success for Adolf Hitler.
10:57He had subdued an entire country in less than four weeks, and he was hungry for work.
11:01So he ordered his generals to plan to attack the British and French in November 1939, less than two months after the fall of Poland.
11:16His general staff was appalled.
11:19The bulk of the German army was still out east, and had to be moved west.
11:23And there had been some serious losses in the Polish campaign.
11:28Lessons had to be learned.
11:34Polish anti-tank guns had destroyed a division's worth of the lightly armoured panzers.
11:42A quarter of the aircraft used had been lost.
11:44The panzers were too light and unreliable, and they had frequently outrun both their supply columns and the marching infantry.
11:56Reluctantly, after furious arguments, Hitler agreed to wait until the following spring.
12:01Meanwhile, his enemies were also learning lessons.
12:11Britain had thought that bombers would be a key weapon in the coming convict.
12:17But when on September the 4th Britain's Royal Air Force made a daylight raid on German shipping,
12:23seven of the 30 bombers were shot down.
12:25It soon became clear that this wasn't a one-off misfortune.
12:31In some raids, over half the aircraft were lost.
12:36British bombers just weren't up to the job.
12:39So the RAF switched to night raids, and they decided to drop not bombs but leaflets,
12:46so as not to provoke retaliation.
12:47So, with the Blitzkrieg stalled and the air war quiet, the focus now went to the one remaining arena, the sea.
13:06Germany's navy was still in the middle of an ambitious building programme that wasn't due to finish until 1948.
13:12The commander of its submarine arm, Admiral Karl Dönitz, planned to cut Britain's supply routes across the Atlantic.
13:23For this he wanted 300 ocean-going submarines.
13:27But he had just 38.
13:31Nevertheless, Dönitz ensured that all available U-boats were at sea on September the 3rd,
13:37the first day of the war against Britain.
13:39That evening, believing it to be an armed merchant cruiser, U-30 sank the liner Athenia without any warning.
13:54112 lives were lost, including 26 American citizens.
14:02The Royal Navy dwarfed its German counterpart.
14:05It had 12 battleships.
14:08Germany had none.
14:10It had five aircraft carriers.
14:12Germany, again, had none.
14:14So after the Athenia, Britain declared a total blockade of German ports.
14:18But for all its size, the Royal Navy had too few escort vessels.
14:29Many merchant ships had to sail alone.
14:32And by the end of 1939, more than a hundred had been sunk.
14:36It quickly became apparent that the British had woefully underestimated the submarine threat.
14:45On September the 17th, U-29 sank the British aircraft carrier Courageous.
14:50On October the 14th, the battleship Royal Oak was sunk, when U-47 slipped through the defences of the British main fleet base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys.
15:06Meanwhile, Germany's small service fleet had also been unleashed against the sea lanes.
15:17In the North Sea, the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Neisenau intercepted a convoy on November the 22nd.
15:24They sank its escort, the armed merchant cruiser Raoul Pindi.
15:40But it was the pocket battleship Graf Spee which caused the greatest problems.
15:46Designed specifically for commerce raiding, its 11-inch guns could overwhelm any ship fast enough to overtake it,
15:54and it had the speed to escape from any battleship.
16:00The Graf Spee had slipped away from Germany before hostilities began.
16:08Soon it was cutting loose in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
16:16Finally, three British cruisers, Exeter, Ajax and Achilles,
16:21intercepted it off the river plate on the east coast of South America.
16:29The British ships damaged the pocket battleship so badly that it had to take refuge in the neutral Uruguayan port of Montevideo.
16:36The Germans were then fooled into thinking that a more powerful British force had arrived.
16:46When the Graf Spee was commanded to leave port, her captain scuttled her rather than risk annihilation.
16:52Back home, the Royal Navy crews were fated as heroes, but this was just about the only obvious success enjoyed by the British or French armed forces during the winter of 1939.
17:10Though the British did enjoy one secret victory in the technological war, which was to prove vital.
17:27As soon as the war began, Britain began to lose large numbers of ships to German mines.
17:32What was so mysterious was that the ships didn't seem to have actually struck them.
17:39The mines had simply exploded as the ships passed nearby.
17:44Then, on the night of November the 22nd, 1939, a German plane was spotted dropping a mine at low tide in the Thames estuary.
17:55Disarmed and rescued from the mud, the mine was found to be set off by the magnetic signature of a ship passing close by.
18:12The solution was to reduce a ship's magnetic signature by hanging a copper cable round the hull and then passing an electric current through it, a process called degaussing.
18:22Once degaussing was applied to all ships, the danger from the magnetic mine was massively reduced.
18:35But otherwise, as 1940 began, the war was quiet.
18:39The two sides did little during the winter except to patrol, train and try to keep warm, for it was a particularly cold one.
18:47An American journalist called it the Phony War. For the Germans, it was the Sitzkrieg.
18:56In the spring, the British Expeditionary Force took up its position towards the left of the front on the Belgian border.
19:08But it was dwarfed by its French ally. France had some 100 divisions along the Belgian and German frontiers, or in reserve nearby.
19:23This imbalance meant that the British commander, Lord Gort, had to go along with the ideas of the French General Maurice Gamelin.
19:33And these were entirely defensive.
19:36French hopes were pinned on the massive ramparts of the Maginot Line.
19:45A series of fortifications it ran from Switzerland to Belgium along the French-German border.
19:52The Maginot Line was considered to be completely impassable and would ensure that French territory remained safe.
19:59But otherwise, the Allies had no idea of how actually to defeat Germany.
20:10Instead, they brought up their forces and prepared for a repeat of World War I.
20:15They would blockade Germany to sap its strength, and they would dig in, ready to grind down the assault which they knew must come.
20:29None of their commanders seemed to consider that the Germans might have totally different ideas,
20:35or that the next moves might come in a completely different arena.
20:41Scandinavia.
20:45On November the 30th, 1939, a new theater of war was opened up.
20:56The Soviet Union invaded its tiny neighbor, Finland.
21:02Finland had only achieved independence from the Russians in 1918, and hated them.
21:08Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was convinced that one day the Finns might allow the Germans in to attack Leningrad,
21:14and the vital Arctic port of Murmansk.
21:19The Red Army outnumbered its Finnish opponents by more than ten to one.
21:24The invasion should have been a walkover.
21:26But its leadership had been devastated by Stalin's terrible purges.
21:36The Finns were led by General Gustav Manaheim.
21:39He fought back, using hit-and-run tactics amid the deep snow, often on skis.
21:49The Soviet troops, confused and poorly led, suffered massive losses.
21:52Finland's gallant resistance caught the imagination of the British and French.
22:02Soon they were planning to send help, via Norway and Sweden.
22:06The fact that this might suck two neutral countries into the war was ignored.
22:16But a renewed Soviet offensive at the beginning of February broke the Finnish defensive line.
22:23In early March, the Finns had to cede territory to Stalin.
22:32By now Hitler too had become interested in Scandinavia.
22:37The Nazi war machine relied on iron ore from Sweden.
22:41In the winter months, the only way it could get to Germany was via the Norwegian port of Narvik.
22:49If the Allies landed in Norway, this vital supply could be cut off.
22:55So he ordered plans to be prepared for an invasion of Norway.
23:00Denmark, which was in the way, would also have to be seized.
23:04The Norway theatre heated up on February the 16th, 1940.
23:12The British destroyer Cossack boarded the German supply ship Altmark
23:17in a Norwegian fjord to release prisoners.
23:24Then, on April the 9th, German troops began landing at five ports.
23:29Oslo, Kristiansand, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik.
23:42At the same time, men of their newly formed German parachute division seized Davanga and Oslo airfields.
23:52The Norwegian defenders were swiftly overwhelmed.
23:54As were the Danes.
24:03German forces occupied their country within 24 hours.
24:10In Norway, the Germans moved swiftly to link up their beachheads and seize all the major towns.
24:18In the air, the Luftwaffe had total control.
24:24The Allies now responded.
24:26A landing force was dispatched to recapture Narvik.
24:32French and Norwegian forces achieved this on May the 28th.
24:37But a substantial German force was now approaching.
24:43So six weeks later, the Allies abandoned Norway to its fate.
24:48Hitler had spent most of that winter and spring at his country retreat, the Berghof in southern Bavaria.
25:01For him, the events in Scandinavia were a sideshow.
25:05Instead, he was preparing for his next major blitzkrieg against Britain and France.
25:10The first plan his generals brought him had a familiar ring to it.
25:17The Germans would advance into Belgium, aiming to swing down towards Paris.
25:22It was a repeat of the Schlieffen Plan, which the Germans had used at the start of World War I.
25:32The Allies were expecting this, and their main strategic discussion was how to prepare for it.
25:37When the Germans attacked, the Allies planned that their forces west of the Maginot Line would swing forward into Belgium to hold them on the shorter and more defensible line of the rivers Dail and Meuse.
25:52Then, on January the 10th, 1940, a German Liaison aircraft lost its way and crashed in Belgium.
26:05A copy of the German plan was found.
26:10This convinced the Allies that their dial plan must be right, and they deployed their troops accordingly.
26:16Unfortunately, the same event made the Germans alter their ideas entirely.
26:27Chief Planner General Erich von Manstein had always thought the original plan unimaginative.
26:33He was worried that the German forces would become bogged down, as in World War I,
26:38and that his country would lose a long, drawn-out war.
26:41So he proposed to Hitler that the main thrust should be made at the point where the Maginot Line ended,
26:49and where the Allies were most vulnerable as their western armies moved forward.
26:56Virtually all Germany's panzers would be gathered opposite the Ardennes in southeast Belgium.
27:03The Allies considered this hilly and wooded area almost impassable for tanks.
27:08It was, therefore, lightly defended.
27:14The plan was to drive deep behind the Allied armies, which would have advanced into Belgium.
27:19They could then cut them off, and all the forces sitting in the Maginot Line would be bypassed.
27:27It was a high-risk strategy.
27:30The German armour could become stuck in the forest, but Hitler loved it.
27:34So the German forces were redeployed without the Allies knowing.
27:41The Allies, meanwhile, prepared for their long defensive war.
27:48In addition to the formidable barrier of the Maginot Line,
27:52they had a slight advantage both in manpower, some 110 divisions available against 95 German,
27:59and in armour, about 3,000 vehicles against 2,700.
28:06The French also had the better tanks.
28:11Their 32-tonne Char Bay had both 75 and 47-millimeter guns.
28:17Its disadvantage was that the main gun was mounted in the hull,
28:21and so was difficult to aim.
28:22The other gun was in a one-man turret, from which the commander had to control the tank as well as man the gun.
28:35In contrast, the newest German design, the 17-ton Panzer Mark IV,
28:40had a 75-millimeter gun in a spacious three-man turret,
28:45so its crew could work as a team, though only about 100 were available.
28:53The other main French tanks also had guns which matched those of their German counterparts,
28:59but again the French had the one-man turret.
29:01The one area where the Germans had a clear advantage was in the air.
29:12The Luftwaffe had 2,000 bombers, the Allies just 800.
29:19The Luftwaffe had 4,000 fighters, including the ultramodern Messerschmitt VF 109.
29:26They faced just 2,500, mainly older aircraft.
29:32The Royal Air Force did have about 800 excellent Spitfire and Hurricane fighters,
29:38but it was keen to keep them for home defence.
29:44But the main difference between the two armies was in philosophy.
29:48Everything the Germans did was focused on the possibilities of Blitzgruppe.
29:53All their armour was grouped in 10 independent Panzer divisions.
29:57But the French were preparing for a repeat of the static fighting of World War I.
30:05They saw tanks as infantry support and distributed them piecemeal instead of concentrating.
30:11They had noticed the success of Germany's panzers in Poland, so they were assembling three armour divisions.
30:22But by the start of hostilities none was fully operational.
30:25Two totally different ways of military thinking were about to go head to head.
30:34Blitzkrieg against static warfare.
30:39The summer of 1940 would soon show which was correct.
30:44On May the 10th, 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain.
30:55He couldn't have picked a worse day.
30:57That was the day Hitler chose to launch his Blitzkrieg against France and Britain.
31:06At dawn, a whole German airborne division parachuted into Holland to seize bridges and airfields.
31:13Simultaneously, the massive Belgian fortress of Erbanemal was assaulted.
31:23Paratroop engineers were dropped on top by swooping German gliders.
31:30They swiftly silenced its guns.
31:31Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe attacked Dutch and Belgian airbases.
31:42Then the frontier barriers were pushed aside.
31:47And Hitler's Army Group B, under General Fedor von Bock, now drove into Holland and Belgium.
31:53As planned, the French and British armies along the Belgian border moved forward to their new defensive line along the Dile and Meuse rivers.
32:10But none of the Allied commanders seemed to have noticed that German Army Group A, which had the bulk of the panzers,
32:16after brushing aside the Belgian frontier troops, had now begun driving through the hills and woods of the Ardennes to their south.
32:31Meanwhile, the Germans were pushing rapidly through Holland.
32:34The obsolete Dutch Army was no match for the highly tuned German warm-sheet.
32:47And it was under continual heavy air attack by the Luftwaffe, which roamed the skies unchallenged.
32:56On May 14th, the Germans demanded the surrender of the port of Rotterdam.
33:00A large force of bombers took off as the Dutch hesitated.
33:10While they were airborne, the Dutch agreed to surrender the city.
33:14But apparently a recall message never reached the bombers.
33:23Rotterdam was devastated.
33:27The Dutch capitulated the next day.
33:31Then came the hammer blow.
33:36The thing that British and French planners had thought impossible had happened.
33:40German panzers were through the Ardennes and had reached the Meuse by the evening of May the 12th.
33:45Among the first to arrive at Sedan, well north of the Maginot Line, were the men of the 19th Panzer Corps, commanded by General Heinz Guderian, fresh from the triumphs in Poland.
34:01Guderian now showed how blitzkrieg should be done.
34:06He ignored the troops in the Maginot Line, and he didn't wait for his own infantry to catch up. He pushed straight on.
34:17The next day assault troops crossed the river Meuse.
34:23Engineers began building bridges for the armour while under heavy French fire.
34:33On the 14th, the panzers began crossing.
34:34That evening Guderian's bridgehead was eight miles deep.
34:48The French troops, stuck in the Maginot Line, were too immobile to intervene.
34:59Allied bombers made despairing attempts to destroy the German bridges.
35:03But most were shot down.
35:20All the while, German artillery pounded the French defences while the Stuckers screamed it.
35:25Just three days after the attack had been launched, the French defenders around Sedan broke.
35:42Guderian's panzers began racing westwards.
35:45By nightfall, they had advanced more than 40 miles behind the northern group of Allied armies.
35:49These had been holding firm on the dial line.
35:54But now the French Supreme Commander, General Gamelin, realized that they were about to be encircled.
36:00He ordered them to fall back.
36:05This sudden decision to withdraw bewildered the Allied troops, who had no idea what was going on behind them.
36:11As they fell back, they were hindered by a growing flood of refugees clogging the roads.
36:24That day, the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, phoned Churchill.
36:29He said, we are beaten. We have lost the battle.
36:35But for all the brilliance of the Blitzkrieg, the Germans were vulnerable.
36:39As the panzers raced westwards, they created an ever longer corridor just a few miles wide.
36:48The Allies realized that this was open to counterattack.
36:52The bulk of the German army was still totally dependent on horsepower or its own feet for transport.
36:59So the gap between the rampaging panzers and the follow-up infantry grew with every hour.
37:04On May the 17th, Colonel Charles de Gaulle, commander of one of the newly formed French armor divisions, made the first of two attempts to cut through the German line near Cris.
37:18But the cumbersome French command system meant that units were sent into battle piecemeal, not in a coordinated thrust.
37:28The Germans had little difficulty warding off both attacks, inflicting heavy casualties.
37:42It seemed that nothing could now stop Guderian.
37:50He plunged on further and further into France.
37:54By the 19th, his lead units were past Perron.
37:57On the 20th, in an extraordinary 56-mile dash, Amiens had been taken by lunchtime.
38:06Abbeville, just 14 miles from the English Channel, was seized by nine that evening.
38:13And at midnight, the battalion of the 2nd Panzer Division reached the coast at Noir.
38:26The Germans had split the Allied front in two.
38:30Everything now depended on whether they could defend this long, thin corridor,
38:34or whether the Allies could successfully counterattack.
38:44So now the British got ready to break the German lines.
38:51On May the 21st, two armoured battalions prepared to launch an attack south of Arras.
38:56The British tanks were even more unsuited to fast-moving armoured warfare than the French.
39:05Their most effective machine, the Matilda II, had been designed for infantry support.
39:13Although well armoured, it was slow and under gun.
39:26The Germans had little trouble in repulsing the attack.
39:33But it did have an effect.
39:38By now, the German High Command were becoming worried by their extended lines of communication.
39:47So, for the time being, driving south into the rest of France was put on hold,
39:52until the infantry had caught up.
39:53The priority was to turn north and eliminate the British Expeditionary Force
39:59and the French First Army fighting beside it.
40:06On May the 22nd, Guderian and the Panzers began their attack to destroy the Allied armies.
40:14These were now pulling back to the ports of Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk, but they were tracked.
40:20On May the 23rd, General Allen Brook, Commander of British II Corps, wrote,
40:26Nothing but a miracle can save the British Expeditionary Force.
40:31Two days later, the Germans seized Boulogne.
40:36It was beginning to look as if even a miracle would be too late.
40:46May the 25th, 1940.
40:50The situation of the British Expeditionary Force and the French First Army was desperate.
40:58The port of Boulogne had been overrun.
41:02German troops had isolated Calais.
41:06The British were being forced back to the port of Dunkirk.
41:09Lord Gort, the British commander, advised his government that the only hope of saving even a fraction of his troops was to organise an evacuation by sea.
41:21But as the dive bomber screamed down and the Panzers were poised for the final assault, evacuation seemed a forlorn hope.
41:34The British anticipated that Dunkirk would be overrun within a day.
41:39But unknown to the British, Hitler and the German High Command had made a decision which was to save them from total annihilation.
41:53The Germans were only too aware that their Panzer crews were exhausted and their machines needed urgent repairs.
41:59Those attacks by de Gaulle and the British may have failed, but they have shown very clearly how vulnerable the German lines of communication were.
42:10This was the great weakness of Blitzkrieg.
42:16So the High Command made a fateful decision.
42:19It decided to stop the Panzers' advance to save them from further damage and wait for the infantry to come up.
42:24Only then would the Allied pocket around Dunkirk be eliminated.
42:34So the Blitzkrieg was halted and the Panzers lay idle.
42:39They would not advance for two days.
42:42Just enough to buy the British in particular a little time to prepare.
42:50As the tanks waited, the only major action was in Calais.
42:54There the British and French garrison refused to surrender.
43:00Instead, they had to be overrun in three days of bloody hand-to-hand fighting.
43:09When the Panzers got going again two days later on May the 26th, the weather had changed.
43:14The Germans became bogged down in the heavy rain, again giving the Allies more time.
43:25So it was, that at 7.57pm on May the 26th, Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsey, Flag Officer Commanding Dover, received a signal that he was to put Operation Dynamo into action.
43:42Operation Dynamo was a plan to withdraw the British expeditionary force by sea.
43:51He had prepared it more in hope than expectation that it could ever be used.
43:55The following day, a makeshift fleet of destroyers, tugs and passenger ferries crossed the English Channel.
44:08But by the end of the day, less than 8,000 of the over 300,000 troops at Dunkirk had been rescued.
44:15The port was under such heavy air attack that it could not be used.
44:22And the ships could not get in close enough to the beaches.
44:32So Ramsey now sent out a call for any boats of shallow draft that were over 30 feet long.
44:39Hundreds of cabin cruisers, fishing boats and barges were gathered from harbours all over southern England and sent across the Channel.
44:48Often crewed by their civilian owners.
44:50The little ships worked on the beaches of Dunkirk, ferrying troops out to the larger boats, waiting to take them to safety.
45:06All the time, they were under constant air attack.
45:13The British Air Force threw every fighter it possessed into the battle to drive the Luftwaffe off.
45:18Even so, seven French and six British destroyers were sunk together with 24 smaller warships.
45:37A quarter of the 665 small boats never got home.
45:46But when the evacuation was halted on June the 4th, over 300,000 men, 41% of them French, had been rescued.
45:55None of this would have been possible without the heroism of the French army.
46:05It played a vital role in slowing down the German advance.
46:08The French rear guard didn't leave its positions around Dunkirk until the last boats had pulled away from the beaches.
46:22One British officer compared them to the last stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae.
46:37Even so, the British army had lost most of its heavy weapons.
46:40It wouldn't be fit to fight the Germans again for a long time.
46:49France still had to fight on, but it had lost more than half its army.
46:54Against them, the Germans had 92 divisions, including masses of armour.
46:58At four in the morning of June the 5th, a short bombardment began the final destruction of France.
47:15Assault troops crossed the Somme and the Aisle.
47:18At first, the French resistance was fierce, and the Germans struggled to break out of their bridgeheads.
47:26But, once again, the Luftwaffe helped crush the defences.
47:35Soon the panzers were pushing south.
47:38And the trickle of surrendering French troops turned into a flood.
47:42By the 9th, the panzers had reached the river Seine, and the infantry were only a few hours behind.
47:55Once across the river, the Germans fanned out into the interior of the country.
48:03On the 14th, the German army marched into Paris.
48:07The swastika was raised on the Eiffel Tower.
48:21Hitler had secured the prize which had eluded the Kaiser in 1914.
48:30The Parisians could only watch in stunned horror.
48:37Throughout the period of the French collapse, Winston Churchill paid five visits to France, trying to bolster French resistance.
48:46On June the 16th, he even offered Paul Reynaud a union with Britain if France stayed in the fight.
48:53But it was too late.
48:55Reynaud's cabinet rejected the proposal, and the Prime Minister resigned that evening.
48:59He was succeeded by Marshal Philippe Pétain, who immediately asked the Germans for an armistice.
49:09It was only now that the Germans finally began to attack the Maginot Line, which had been left isolated.
49:20After a heavy artillery bombardment, the French defenders offered only token resistance before the German troops occupied the forts.
49:32On June the 21st, Hitler went to Compiègne, where the railway carriage in which the Germans had signed the armistice in 1918 was kept.
49:46As a French delegation entered the carriage, he handed them his terms and then left.
49:56The French insisted on consulting their government, but the next day they were told that if they didn't sign immediately, the panzers would roll again.
50:03They signed, and the humiliation of France was complete.
50:16For Hitler, his control of Western Europe seemed absolute.
50:21He felt sure that Britain must now seek peace, and that soon he could turn to the next stage of his master plan.
50:27But even though the Blitzkrieg had achieved so much so fast, it hadn't won him the war.
50:40The British, battered and wounded, had escaped to fight another day.
50:57The British, commander of the English world.
51:00Jesu the British.
51:02The British.
51:05The British.
51:12The British.
51:17The British.
51:19The British.
51:22The British.
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