Verse World · published 16 h ago ·
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World War 2 Explained: The 9 Gambles That Decided It
What the site found
Not propaganda · agenda: NATO prepares war against Russia
Belief the Pravda network pushes: NATO, led by Germany, is preparing for war against Russia with military exercises near its borders.
An animated historical documentary that retells World War II as nine gambles by Hitler and the Axis, from the Rhineland to the Battle of the Bulge.
The video says · at 0:51 · quote checked against the transcript
“In 1919, the winners of the first world war made Germany sign the treaty of Versailles.”
In 1919, the winners of the first world war made Germany sign the treaty of Versailles.
This is mainstream WWII history with no mention of NATO, Lithuania, the Bundeswehr or current exercises, so it does not repeat any of the three agendas and distorts no facts in their direction.
The Pravda stories it echoes
Closest stories from the Pravda network, by meaning. Each links to the site’s comparison with trusted Lithuanian news.
14 days ago · Germany will turn the 45th tank brigade in Lithuania into a Bundeswehr calling card
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14 days ago · Armor is strong and our tanks are fast - Germany is rearming
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15 days ago · Europe preparing for war. It remains to agree who will start it... While European politicians give solemn speeches about peace, military leaders tend not to waste time on talks
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43 h ago · Hitler in Lithuanian. How 'Mein Kampf' is being used against Russia
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28 days ago · Germans, shoot! Lithuania celebrates: four Lithuanian crews at Pabradė range fired from German Leopard 2A6 tanks for the first time
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Transcript (en, 718 lines)
0:00 In December 1944, Adolf Hitler pushed
0:04 the last of his tanks, his fuel, and his
0:06 soldiers onto the table and bet all of
0:08 it on one roll of the dice. His generals
0:11 told him it was madness. [music] He did
0:13 not care because he had done this before
0:16 again and again [music] and for years he
0:18 kept winning. World War II is usually
0:21 told as a list of battles. We are going
0:23 to tell it as what it really was. Series
0:26 of gambles, nine of them. Every time the
0:29 axis rolls the dice, we will stamp the
0:32 result and keep the score in the corner.
0:34 Watch what happens to a gambler who wins
0:36 his first four bets. By the end, more
0:39 than 70 million people will be dead and
0:41 the world will never be [music] the
0:42 same. To see how it started, we have to
0:45 go back to the last war.
0:51 In 1919, the winners of the first world
0:54 war made Germany sign the treaty of
0:56 Versailles. Germany lost territory, had
0:59 to pay enormous reparations, [music]
1:01 and was allowed an army of only a
1:03 100,000 men. In one region, the
1:06 Rhineland on the border with France was
1:08 to stay empty of German soldiers
1:11 forever, a buffer zone so that France
1:13 could [music] sleep at night. Then in
1:15 1929, the world economy collapsed. By
1:18 1932, around 6 million Germans were out
1:21 of work. People who had lost their
1:23 savings twice in 10 years were ready to
1:26 listen to anyone with an answer. The man
1:29 with an answer was a failed Austrian
1:31 painter and former corporal [music]
1:32 with a gift for speeches and a talent
1:35 for hatred. He blamed the treaty, the
1:37 politicians, the communists, and above
1:39 all the Jews. He had already tried to
1:42 seize power once in a failed uprising in
1:45 a Munich beer hall in 1923. It earned
1:48 him 9 months in a comfortable prison
1:50 cell where he dictated a book laying out
1:52 [music] exactly what he planned to do.
1:55 Almost nobody outside Germany took it
1:57 seriously. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler
2:01 became chancellor of Germany. Within
2:03 months, he had turned a democracy into a
2:06 dictatorship and he began secretly
2:08 rebuilding the army. Political opponents
2:11 were thrown into the first concentration
2:13 camps. In 1935, new laws stripped
2:16 Germany's Jews of their citizenship. In
2:18 November 1938, in a night of organized
2:21 violence across the country, synagogues
2:24 were burned and Jewish shops smashed.
2:27 >> If the French march, we cannot stop
2:30 them. We have almost nothing.
2:32 >> They will not march.
2:33 >> And if they do,
2:35 >> then we walk back out quickly.
2:38 On the 7th of March 1936, Hitler sent a
2:42 small force of German troops marching
2:44 into the Rhineland. It was a pure bluff.
2:47 His commanders had orders to turn around
2:49 if the French army so much as [music]
2:51 moved. The French army was many times
2:53 stronger, but France did not want
2:55 another war, and [music] Britain
2:57 shrugged that the Germans were only
2:59 walking into their own back garden.
3:01 Nobody moved. And Hitler was not the
3:04 only one testing the rules. [music]
3:06 Japan had seized Manuria from China in
3:09 1931. Billy invaded Ethiopia [music] in
3:12 1935. Each time the League of Nations
3:15 protested and did nothing, the dictators
3:17 were all learning the same lesson.
3:19 Gamble number one, the Rhineland. Hitler
3:22 later reportedly called those 48 hours
3:25 the most nerve-wracking of his life. He
3:27 bet that France would not fight and he
3:30 won. And he learned a lesson that would
3:32 shape everything that followed. His
3:34 generals were cautious and they were
3:36 wrong. He was reckless and he was right.
3:43 Two years later, he raised the stakes.
3:45 In March 1938, German troops crossed
3:48 into Austria, the country of his birth,
3:50 and swallowed it whole. Again, nobody
3:53 stopped him. Next, he demanded the Sudet
3:56 10 land, the fortified border region of
3:58 Czechoslovakia, where 3 million German
4:01 speakers lived. This time Europe really
4:03 was on the edge of war. The British
4:06 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew
4:08 to Munich to meet him. Britain and
4:10 France agreed to hand over the Sue Day
4:12 Tenland. The checks were not even
4:15 invited into the room.
4:17 >> I have here a paper signed by here
4:19 Hitler himself. So there will be no war.
4:23 I believe it is peace for our time.
4:26 >> Hitler had promised it was his last
4:28 demand. 6 months later, his army marched
4:31 into Prague and took the rest of the
4:33 country. Gamble number two, he bet that
4:36 Britain and France wanted peace more
4:38 than they wanted to keep their word. He
4:40 won again, two countries without firing
4:42 a shot. And this is the dangerous part.
4:45 Every win made the next bet bigger, and
4:48 every win convinced him a little more
4:50 that he could not lose.
4:56 The next target was Poland, but this
4:58 time Britain and France had drawn a
5:00 line. They publicly promised that if
5:02 Germany attacked Poland, they would go
5:04 [music] to war. Hitler answered with a
5:06 deal that stunned the world. On the 23rd
5:09 of August 1939, Nazi Germany and the
5:12 Soviet Union sworn enemies signed a pact
5:15 not to attack each other. In a secret
5:17 clause, they agreed to carve up Poland
5:19 between them. On the 1st of September
5:22 1939, Germany invaded. Fast-moving tanks
5:26 with dive bombers screaming overhead
5:28 tore through the Polish lines. On the
5:31 17th, the Soviet army invaded from the
5:33 east. The world had just seen a new way
5:35 of fighting. Instead of spreading tanks
5:38 out to support the infantry, Germany
5:40 packed them together, punched a hole,
5:42 and drove deep behind the enemy before
5:44 he could react. Journalists gave it a
5:46 name. Let's lightning war. Hitler had
5:50 bet that the British and French
5:52 guarantee was another bluff. On the 3rd
5:54 of September, Britain and France
5:56 declared war. According to his
5:58 interpreter, Hitler sat in silence, then
6:01 turned to his foreign minister and
6:03 asked, "What now?" But in the West, the
6:05 Allies did almost nothing. Within 5
6:07 weeks, Poland had been crushed and
6:09 divided. Gaml number three, he won
6:12 Poland. But notice what he lost. He had
6:14 wanted a small war. He now had a world
6:17 war against two empires. The stakes were
6:19 no longer countries. They were
6:21 everything.
6:23 [music]
6:27 For 8 months, almost nothing happened on
6:29 the Western Front. Newspapers called it
6:31 the phony war. The French army sat
6:34 behind the Majino line, a chain of
6:36 massive forts along the German border,
6:38 and waited. In April 1940, Germany
6:42 seized Denmark and Norway. In Britain,
6:44 the government fell and on the 10th of
6:46 May, a new prime minister took over,
6:48 Winston Churchill. On the very same day,
6:51 Germany attacked in the west. The Allies
6:54 expected the main blow through Belgium,
6:56 like in 1914, [music] and rushed their
6:59 best armies north. But the real attack
7:01 came through the Arden forest, hills
7:03 that everyone believed tanks could not
7:06 cross. It was an outrageous risk.
7:08 Columns of German tanks and trucks were
7:11 stuck nose totail on narrow forest roads
7:13 for days. If Allied bombers had found
7:16 them, the war might have ended there.
7:18 They did not. The tanks burst out,
7:21 crossed the river at SAN, and raced to
7:23 the sea, cutting the Allied armies in
7:25 half. The British army was trapped with
7:27 its back to the water at Dunkirk. Over 9
7:30 days, a fleet of warships, feries,
7:33 fishing boats, and pleasure yachts
7:34 carried more [music] than 330,000
7:37 soldiers back to England. They left
7:39 almost every tank and gun behind.
7:42 On the 14th of June, German soldiers
7:44 marched into Paris. France surrendered a
7:47 week later in the very same railway
7:49 carriage where Germany had surrendered
7:51 in 1918. One French general refused to
7:54 accept it. Charles Doul escaped to
7:57 London and over the radio he told his
7:59 countrymen that France had lost a battle
8:01 but had not lost the war. Gamble number
8:04 four. Germany had fought France for 4
8:07 years in the last war and failed. This
8:09 time it took 6 weeks, four bets, four
8:12 wins. Hitler was now master of Europe
8:15 and at [music] the peak of his power.
8:17 And he was completely convinced that his
8:19 instinct was better than any general,
8:21 any [music] expert, any calculation.
8:24 That belief was about to cost him
8:31 Only Britain was left. Hillar expected
8:33 it to make peace. It was the sensible
8:35 thing to do. Churchill refused. "We
8:38 shall fight on the beaches," he told
8:40 Parliament. "We shall never surrender."
8:43 To invade, Germany first had to destroy
8:45 the Royal Air Force. From July 1940,
8:48 waves of German bombers and fighters
8:50 crossed the channel every day. But
8:53 Britain had a secret advantage. A chain
8:55 of radar stations along the coast could
8:58 see the raids coming so its outnumbered
9:00 fighters could be sent to exactly the
9:02 right place at exactly the right time.
9:05 By September, the airfields were close
9:07 to breaking point. Then Germany switched
9:10 targets and began bombing London
9:12 instead. It was terrible for Londoners.
9:14 Around 43,000 British civilians died in
9:17 the blitz, but it gave the RF time to
9:20 recover. The pilots who held the line
9:22 numbered about 3,000. Never in the field
9:25 of human conflict said Churchill was so
9:28 much owed by so many to so few. Gamble
9:31 number five. Hitler bet that Britain
9:33 could be bombed into giving up. In
9:35 September 1940, he quietly postponed the
9:38 invasion. For the first time, he had
9:40 lost. Careful player would stop and
9:43 finish the job. Hitler did the opposite.
9:46 With Britain still fighting behind him,
9:48 he turned around and made the biggest
9:50 bet in the history of warfare.
9:57 Hitler was not the only gambler in the
9:59 axis. Italy's dictator Bonito Mussolini
10:02 had been in power since 1922 and he was
10:05 tired of watching his partner collect
10:07 all the prizes. So in 1940, without
10:10 telling Hitler, he launched his own
10:12 wars. He invaded Egypt from Libya and he
10:15 invaded Greece from Albania. He expected
10:18 two quick victories. [music] He got two
10:20 disasters. The Greek army threw the
10:23 Italians back over the border. In North
10:25 Africa, a British force a fraction of
10:28 the size took more than a 100,000
10:30 [music] Italian prisoners. Hitler had to
10:32 send troops to rescue him. To Africa
10:35 went a general named Irwin Raml with a
10:38 small tank force that would run rings
10:40 around the British for [music] the next
10:41 two years. Into the Balkans went armies
10:44 that Germany would badly [music] miss in
10:46 Russia. It was a warning about what
10:48 happens when you bet on a quick win and
10:50 get a long war instead. Hitler ignored
10:53 it completely.
10:59 The Soviet Union, the largest country on
11:01 Earth and on paper his partner. But
11:04 conquering it had always been his real
11:06 goal. Land for German settlers, oil and
11:08 grain for the German war machine. Stalin
11:11 had been warned again and again by his
11:14 own spies by Churchill, even by a German
11:17 deserter who crossed the lines the night
11:19 before. He refused to believe any of it.
11:22 And a few years earlier, he had executed
11:24 or imprisoned most of his own senior
11:26 army officers. We have only to kick in
11:29 the door, he is said to have told his
11:31 generals, and the whole rotten structure
11:33 will come crashing down. On the 22nd of
11:36 June 1941, more than 3 million soldiers
11:39 crossed the border along a front that
11:41 stretched from the Baltic to the Black
11:43 Sea. It was the largest invasion in
11:45 history. Its code name is Barbarasa. At
11:49 first, it looked like France all over
11:50 again. Whole Soviet armies were
11:52 surrounded. By the end of the year, more
11:55 than 3 million Soviet soldiers had been
11:57 captured. Most of them would die in
11:59 German camps, but the Soviet Union did
12:02 not collapse. It kept retreating and
12:04 kept fighting. Autumn rain turned the
12:06 roads into rivers of mud. Then came the
12:09 winter with temperatures of 30 below
12:11 zero. The German army had been so sure
12:14 of a quick victory that it had not
12:16 prepared [music] proper winter clothing.
12:18 In early December, German troops were
12:20 within about 30 km of Moscow. Then fresh
12:23 Soviet divisions, many brought from
12:25 Siberia, struck back and threw them into
12:28 retreat. In the north, the city of
12:30 Lenningrad was surrounded and starved
12:32 for 872 days. Around a million of its
12:36 people died, most of them from hunger
12:38 and cold. Gamble number six. He bet that
12:41 the Soviet Union would fall before
12:43 winter. It did not fall at all. Germany
12:46 was now trapped in exactly the kind of
12:48 war it could [music] not win. The long
12:50 one.
12:55 On the other side of the world,
12:57 Germany's ally was making a gamble of
12:59 its own. Japan had been fighting a
13:02 brutal war of conquest in China [music]
13:04 since 1937.
13:06 In 1941, the United States, still
13:08 neutral, cut off Japan's oil. Japan
13:11 bought most of its oil from America.
13:13 Without it, its navy and army would
13:15 grind to a halt. Within about 2 years,
13:18 Japan's leaders decided to seize the oil
13:21 fields of Southeast Asia and to knock
13:23 out the American fleet first. The
13:26 admiral who planned the attack, Yamamoto
13:28 Isoroku, [music] had lived in America
13:31 and he had no illusions. For 6 months,
13:33 he reportedly said, "I will run wild.
13:36 After that, I can promise nothing." On
13:38 the morning of the 7th of December 1941,
13:41 more than 350 Japanese aircraft launched
13:45 from six carriers struck the American
13:47 naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In
13:51 under 2 hours, eight battleships were
13:53 sunk or damaged, and 24,43
13:56 Americans were dead. But the fleet
13:58 aircraft carriers were out at sea that
14:00 morning. Not one of them was touched.
14:03 The next day, President Franklin
14:04 Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war
14:07 on Japan. The vote in favor was almost
14:10 unanimous. Japan struck everywhere at
14:12 once. [music] Hong Kong, Malaya, and the
14:14 Philippines fell. In February 1942, the
14:18 Great British fortress of Singapore
14:20 surrendered [music] with around 80,000
14:22 troops. Churchill called it the worst
14:24 disaster in British military history. In
14:27 about a 100 days, Japan had conquered an
14:30 empire stretching [music] from the
14:31 border of India to the middle of the
14:33 Pacific. Everything was going exactly to
14:35 plan. America needed to hit back
14:38 somehow. In April 1942, 16 army bombers
14:42 took off from an aircraft carrier,
14:44 something they were never designed to
14:45 do, and bombed Tokyo. The damage was
14:48 small. The shock in Japan was enormous,
14:51 and it pushed the Japanese Navy toward a
14:53 decisive battle at Midway. And then
14:56 Hitler did something that still puzzles
14:58 historians. His treaty with Japan did
15:00 not require it. He was already losing in
15:03 Russia. But 4 days after Pearl Harbor,
15:06 he declared war on the United States
15:08 himself. It meant taking on the largest
15:11 industrial economy on Earth. American
15:13 factories that had made cars now made
15:15 tanks. By 1944, one giant plant near
15:19 Detroit was rolling out a 4engineed
15:22 bomber roughly every hour. With millions
15:25 of men in uniform, around 6 million
15:27 American women took jobs in factories
15:30 and [music] shipyards. In Britain and
15:32 the Soviet Union, women flew aircraft,
15:34 operated anti-aircraft guns, and fought
15:37 as snipers and pilots at the front.
15:40 There was a darker side at home, too.
15:42 About 120,000 Japanese Americans, most
15:45 of them United States citizens, were
15:47 forced from their homes and held in
15:49 camps for much of the war. By the end of
15:52 the war, the United States alone had
15:54 built about 300,000 [music] aircraft,
15:57 more than 80,000 tanks, and thousands of
15:59 cargo ships to carry them across two
16:02 oceans. For exactly 6 months, Yamamoto
16:05 ran wild just as he had promised. Then,
16:08 in June 1942, near a tiny island called
16:12 Midway, American dive bombers caught the
16:14 Japanese carriers [music] with their
16:16 decks full of fuel and bombs. Four of
16:18 them were sunk in a single day. Gamble
16:21 number seven. Japan bet that one great
16:23 blow would make America lose heart and
16:26 Hitler bet that America would be too
16:28 busy to matter. They had woken up the
16:30 one country that could outbuild them
16:32 both.
16:37 All of that American production had to
16:39 cross the Atlantic. And Britain itself
16:42 was an island that imported most of its
16:44 food and nearly all of its oil. Cut that
16:47 lifeline and Britain would starve. That
16:49 was the job of the German submarines,
16:51 the Yubot. Hunting in groups called
16:53 Wolfpacks, they [music] sank thousands
16:55 of ships. Churchill later wrote that the
16:57 Yubot peril was the only thing that
16:59 [music] ever really frightened him
17:01 during the war. The Ubot took their
17:04 orders by radio scrambled by a cipher
17:07 machine called Enigma, which the Germans
17:09 believed could not be broken. At a
17:11 country house called Bletchley Park,
17:13 thousands [music] of British codereakers
17:15 building on earlier work by Polish
17:17 mathematicians broke it. Among them was
17:20 a young mathematician [music] named Alan
17:22 Tyoring. With the codes read better
17:25 radar and long range aircraft, the
17:27 hunters [music] became the hunted. In
17:29 May 1943, Germany lost so many
17:32 submarines that it [music] pulled them
17:33 out of the North Atlantic.
17:40 Behind the front lines, a different kind
17:42 of war was being fought against people
17:44 who had no weapons at all. From the
17:47 first day the Nazi state had persecuted
17:49 Germany's Jews. [music] With the
17:51 invasion of the Soviet Union,
17:53 persecution became mass murder. Special
17:56 killing squads followed the army east
17:58 and shot more than a million people. In
18:01 January 1942, at a villa outside Berlin,
18:04 senior officials met to organize what
18:07 they called the final solution, the
18:09 murder of every Jew in Europe. People
18:11 were deported by train from all over the
18:14 continent to camps built for killing. At
18:16 the largest Oshvitz in occupied Poland,
18:19 about 1.1 million people were murdered.
18:23 By 1945, 6 million Jews had been killed,
18:26 2/3 of all the Jews in Europe. So had
18:29 hundreds of thousands of Roma disabled
18:32 people and millions of Soviet prisoners
18:34 and civilians. This was not a side
18:36 effect of the war. For the Nazi
18:38 leadership, it was one of its purposes.
18:45 In the summer of 1942, Hitler gambled in
18:49 Russia again. This time he drove south
18:51 toward the oil fields of the Cauasus and
18:54 toward a city on the vulgar river that
18:56 carried [music] his enemy's name,
18:58 Stalingrad. The battle turned into
19:00 months of savage fighting inside the
19:02 ruins, house by house, floor by floor. A
19:05 single railway station changed hands
19:07 again and again. Soldiers on both sides
19:10 called it the War of the Rats. And
19:12 behind the front, the Soviet Union had
19:15 done something astonishing. As the
19:17 Germans advanced in 1941, more than500
19:20 factories had been taken apart, loaded
19:23 onto trains, and rebuilt 1,000 miles to
19:26 the east, beyond the reach of German
19:28 bombers. By 1942, they were out
19:31 producing Germany in tanks. Then in
19:34 November, the Soviet army sprang a trap.
19:36 Two huge forces smashed through the weak
19:39 armies, guarding the German flanks and
19:41 met behind the city. A quarter of a
19:43 million Axis soldiers were surrounded.
19:46 We can still break out if we go now.
19:49 >> No, the army [music] stays where it is.
19:52 >> Then we will starve.
19:53 >> Not one step back.
19:56 The trapped army froze and starved
19:58 through the winter. In its final days,
20:00 Hitler promoted its commander, Friedrich
20:02 Powas, to field marshall because no
20:05 German field marshal had ever
20:07 surrendered. The next day, Powell
20:09 surrendered. About 91,000 men marched
20:12 into captivity. Only around 5,000 of
20:15 them ever saw Germany again. At almost
20:18 the same time, British forces defeated
20:20 General Ramul at alamagne in Egypt and
20:23 American troops landed in [music] North
20:25 Africa. By the summer of 1943, the
20:29 Allies had invaded Sicily and Italy's
20:31 dictator Mussolini had been overthrown.
20:34 In July 1943, Germany tried one last
20:38 great attack [music] in the east at
20:39 Korsk. It became the largest tank battle
20:42 in history. [music] The Soviets knew it
20:44 was coming and they were ready. After
20:46 Corsk, the German army in the east never
20:48 advanced again. This is not the end,
20:51 said Churchill. It is not even the
20:53 beginning of the end, but it is perhaps
20:55 the end of the beginning. Gamble number
20:57 eight. Hitler bet that sheer willpower
21:00 and an order never to retreat could beat
21:02 numbers, distance, and winter. He lost
21:04 an entire army. The score is level, and
21:07 from here on, the other side holds the
21:09 dice.
21:14 By 1944, everyone knew the Allies would
21:17 invade France. The question was where?
21:20 The obvious place was Callai, the
21:22 shortest crossing. So, the Allies went
21:24 to enormous trouble to make the Germans
21:27 believe exactly [music] that. They
21:29 invented an entire fake army opposite
21:31 Callai with inflatable rubber tanks,
21:34 wooden aircraft, and fake radio chatter.
21:36 It worked so well that Germany kept its
21:39 strongest divisions waiting there for
21:41 weeks after the real invasion. The real
21:44 target was Normandy. And this time it
21:46 was the Allied commander, General Dwight
21:48 Eisenhower, who had to gamble. The
21:51 landings needed a full moon, a low tide,
21:53 and calm seas. In early June, a storm
21:56 was raging in the channel.
21:58 >> There will be a gap in the storm, sir.
22:01 Tuesday, perhaps 36 hours. Perhaps
22:06 >> it is a forecast, sir, not a promise.
22:11 >> Okay, we will go.
22:14 >> The German forecasters with less data
22:16 from the Atlantic saw only the storm.
22:18 The weather was so bad that Field
22:20 Marshall Raml, who commanded the beach
22:23 defenses, went home to Germany for his
22:25 wife's birthday. On the 6th of June
22:28 1944, around 7,000 ships and landing
22:31 craft crossed the channel in the brief
22:33 gap of calm. By nightfall, about 156,000
22:37 Allied soldiers were ashore. The first
22:40 men into France did not arrive by sea.
22:43 In the hours before dawn, more than
22:45 20,000 paratroopers jumped into the
22:47 darkness behind [music] the beaches to
22:49 seize bridges and crossroads. Many
22:52 landed miles from their targets and
22:54 fought the first hours alone or in small
22:56 groups. On four of the five beaches, the
22:59 landings went better than feared. On the
23:01 fifth, Omaha American soldiers waited
23:04 into machine gun fire from the cliffs,
23:06 and more than [music] 2,000 were killed
23:08 or wounded before the beach was taken.
23:11 The German tank reserves that might have
23:13 thrown them back could only be released
23:15 by Hitler himself. He had gone to bed
23:18 late, and nobody dared to wake him. The
23:20 tanks did not move until the afternoon.
23:23 2 weeks later in the east, the Soviet
23:25 army launched an offensive even bigger
23:28 than D-Day and [music] destroyed the
23:29 heart of the German army in Russia.
23:32 Germany was now being crushed from both
23:34 sides. Some German officers could see
23:36 how it would end. On the 20th of July
23:39 1944, a colonel placed a bomb in a
23:42 briefcase under Hitler's conference
23:43 table. It exploded. Hitler walked
23:46 [music] away with burst eardrums.
23:48 Thousands of suspected plotters were
23:50 arrested and many were executed. In
23:53 August, Paris was liberated. By autumn,
23:55 Allied armies stood on the border of
23:57 Germany [music] itself. Almost everyone
24:00 believed the war would be over by
24:02 Christmas.
24:07 Which brings us back to where we
24:09 started. Hitler, sick, shaking, and
24:11 losing on every front, decided to do the
24:14 one thing that had always worked. attack
24:16 through the Ardan forest exactly as in
24:19 1940. The plan was to smash through the
24:22 thin American line raised to the port of
24:24 Antworp and split the Allied armies in
24:27 two. His generals said they did not have
24:29 the fuel to get there. The plan depended
24:31 on capturing American fuel along the
24:34 way. On the 16th of December 1944, more
24:38 than 200,000 German soldiers attacked
24:40 out of the fog and snow. The cloud kept
24:43 the Allied air forces on the [music]
24:45 ground. The American line bent back into
24:47 a great bulge which gave the battle its
24:50 name. At the crossroads town of Baston,
24:53 American paratroopers were completely
24:55 surrounded. The Germans sent a message
24:57 demanding their surrender. The American
25:00 commander, General Anthony Mauliff, sent
25:03 back a reply of one word, nuts. The next
25:06 day, the weather cleared. Thousands of
25:08 Allied aircraft filled the sky. German
25:10 tanks ran out of fuel and were abandoned
25:13 by the roadside, some of them within
25:15 sight of the river they had been ordered
25:17 to cross. It was the bloodiest battle
25:19 the United States Army fought in the
25:22 entire war. Around 19,000 Americans were
25:25 killed. Germany lost men, tanks, and
25:27 aircraft it could never [music] replace.
25:29 Gamble number nine. He bet that the
25:32 trick that won in 1940 would [music] win
25:34 again. But in 1940, he had the tanks,
25:37 the fuel, and the sky. This time he had
25:39 only the dice. Four wins, five losses,
25:42 and the losses were the ones that
25:44 counted.
25:49 In February 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt,
25:53 and Stalin met at Yala to decide what
25:55 Europe would look like after the war.
25:58 Roosevelt was visibly dying. He would
26:00 not live to see the end. As the armies
26:03 advanced into Germany and Poland, they
26:05 began to find the camps. Soviet soldiers
26:08 reached Oshvitz in January 1945.
26:11 In April, American and British troops
26:13 entered camps like Bouen Vault and
26:16 Burgeon Bellson. Harden soldiers wept at
26:18 what they saw. Eisenhower ordered that
26:21 everything be filmed so that nobody
26:23 could ever deny it had happened. From
26:25 the east came 2 and a half million
26:27 Soviet soldiers. From the west, the
26:29 Americans and British crossed the Rine.
26:31 In late April, their patrols met at the
26:34 Elba River and shook hands. Berlin
26:36 became the last battlefield. The city
26:38 was defended by exhausted soldiers, old
26:41 men, and boys of 14. Deep under the city
26:44 in a concrete bunker, the gambler had
26:47 nothing left to bet. On the 30th of
26:49 April 1945, with Soviet troops a few
26:52 streets away, Adolf Hitler killed
26:55 himself. A week later, Germany
26:57 surrendered without conditions. The war
26:59 in Europe was over. The thousand-year
27:01 empire he had promised had lasted 12
27:09 In the Pacific, the war was not over.
27:11 Since midway, American forces had been
27:13 fighting their way toward Japan, one
27:16 island at a time. Every island was
27:18 defended almost to the last man. On
27:21 Ewoko, Gimmar, and Okinawa in 1945, the
27:25 fighting was so savage that American
27:27 planners feared an invasion of Japan
27:29 itself could cost hundreds of thousands
27:31 of lives. Meanwhile, American bombers
27:34 were burning Japan cities. A single raid
27:37 on Tokyo in March 1945 killed around
27:41 100,000 people in one night. It had
27:44 started in 1939 with a letter to
27:46 Roosevelt signed by Albert Einstein
27:49 warning that Germany might build an
27:51 atomic bomb. The American project that
27:54 followed cost about $2 billion and
27:57 employed well over a 100,000 people. Its
28:00 first test in the New Mexico desert lit
28:03 up the sky before dawn in July 1945.
28:06 Roosevelt had died in April. The new
28:09 president, Harry Truman, learned only
28:11 then about a secret project that had
28:13 just produced a new kind of bomb. On the
28:16 6th of August 1945, an atomic bomb
28:19 destroyed the city of Hiroshima. 3 days
28:22 later, a second destroyed Nagasaki.
28:24 Well over 100,000 people died, most of
28:27 them civilians. In between the Soviet
28:30 Union declared war on Japan. On the 15th
28:33 of August, the Japanese people heard
28:35 their emperor's voice on the radio for
28:37 the first time announcing the surrender.
28:40 The Second World War was over.
28:47 Now the bill came due. Somewhere between
28:49 70 and 85 million people were dead.
28:52 About three in every hundred people who
28:54 had been alive on Earth in 1939. [music]
28:57 The Soviet Union lost around 27 million
29:00 people. China perhaps 15 to 20 million.
29:04 Poland lost about one in every six of
29:06 its [music] citizens. Most of the dead
29:08 in every country were not soldiers. Out
29:10 of the ruins came a new world, the
29:12 United [music] Nations. Trials at
29:14 Nuremberm, where the surviving Nazi
29:17 leaders answered for their crimes. And
29:19 two superpowers, America and the Soviet
29:21 Union, staring at each other across a
29:24 divided Europe. Europe and much of Asia
29:27 lay in ruins with tens of millions of
29:29 refugees on the roads. Within a few
29:32 years, American money would help rebuild
29:34 Western Europe and the old European
29:36 empires in Asia [music] and Africa would
29:39 begin to break apart. Though, look at
29:41 the score one last time. More wins than
29:43 five losses. Notice the pattern. Every
29:46 win was against an opponent who backed
29:48 down. Every loss came against one who
29:50 refused to. That is the trap of a
29:52 winning streak. The rhinland, Munich,
29:54 Poland, and France did not make Hitler
29:57 strong. They made him certain. And a
29:59 gambler who is certain will keep raising
30:01 the stakes until there is nothing left
30:03 on the table. Though, here is my
30:05 question for you. Which of the nine
30:07 gamles do you think really lost the war?
30:10 Britain, Russia, or America? Tell me in
30:12 the comments and tell me why. If you
30:14 enjoyed this, subscribe to Verse World.
30:17 And to see the war's final days from the
30:19 other side of the world, watch our film
30:21 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki next. Thanks
30:24 for watching.
Judged by claude-sonnet-5.5-eu on 2026-11-14 16:45 UTC. A flag means “worth a look”; a person decides.