Voices of WW2
@VoicesofWW2 • 90,028 subscribers
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![D-Day: Invasion of Normandy [Real Footage in Colour]](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2063206766624612604/amplify_video_thumb/2062672451918778369/img/DYyxg2VPT1PKA1xa.jpg)
September 1, 1939. At dawn, one and a half million German soldiers pour across the border into Poland, and the Second World War begins. Over the next six years it will kill somewhere between 70 and 85 million people and reshape the world. It starts here, on this grey morning, with a war built on a lie and fought with a brutality the world had not yet imagined. Yesterday I told you about the pretext, the staged attack at Gleiwitz, the murdered prisoners dressed as Polish soldiers. This is what the lie was for. The German plan was called Fall Weiss, Case White, and it was overwhelming. Two great army groups drove into Poland. Army Group North, under General von Bock, thrust down from Prussia to cut off the Polish corridor and drive on Warsaw. Army Group South, the stronger, under General von Rundstedt, smashed in from Silesia and Slovakia, aimed at Krakow and the capital. The Poles were nearly surrounded before the first day was out, attacked from the north, the west, and the south all at once along a border almost 1,750 miles long. And it came in a form the world had never seen. The Germans called it Blitzkrieg, lightning war. Instead of the slow, grinding trench warfare of the last war, they concentrated their tanks into fast armored spearheads that punched clean through the front and raced deep into the rear, while dive bombers, the screaming Stukas, flew ahead like airborne artillery, smashing strongpoints, cratering roads, and terrorizing refugees, and motorized infantry poured through the gaps behind the tanks. It was fast, coordinated by radio, and paralyzing. The Polish command could barely react before its units were cut off and surrounded. The Luftwaffe won the air war in days. It bombed Polish airfields, rail junctions, and cities, and destroyed much of the Polish air force early, some of it on the ground, and then owned the sky, free to hammer the Polish armies and the roads clogged with fleeing civilians. The Poles fought hard, and they fought bravely, but they were in an impossible position. They had been forced to spread their army thinly along that enormous border to defend the whole country, rather than concentrating behind a shorter, more defensible line, and so they were strong nowhere. Their equipment was largely a generation behind. And here I should kill a myth, because it is one of the most famous images of this campaign and it is essentially false. The story that Polish cavalry, in some doomed romantic gesture, charged German tanks with lances and sabers is German and Italian wartime propaganda. Polish cavalry were mounted infantry, armed with rifles, machine guns, and anti-tank guns, and they fought skillfully. The legend grew from a single engagement where Polish horsemen overran German infantry and were then caught in the open by armored cars, and correspondents brought to the scene afterward, seeing dead horses and German tanks nearby, spun the tale of the suicidal charge. It never happened the way the myth says. The Poles even managed to strike back. The largest battle of the whole campaign was the Battle of the Bzura, west of Warsaw, in the second week of September, where Polish armies caught in the German advance turned and launched a fierce counteroffensive that surprised the Germans and won some early success, before superior German numbers, armor, and airpower crushed it and destroyed two Polish armies. It was a last flare of Polish offensive spirit, and it failed. Then came the blow that sealed Poland's fate. On September 17, in accordance with the secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet Pact I told you about in August, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. The Poles, already reeling from the German onslaught, now had the Red Army pouring in behind them. There was no hope after that. The Polish government fled into exile, the army was caught between two invaders, and the country was crushed and, once again in its history, partitioned between its two great neighbors and erased from the map. Warsaw held out with astonishing stubbornness, besieged, bombed, and shelled, its civilians enduring terrible bombardment, until it finally surrendered on September 28. Isolated Polish units fought on into October. And behind the front lines, from the very first days, came a foretaste of what this war and this regime truly meant. Following the army into Poland were the Einsatzgruppen, the SS killing squads, and they went straight to work under an operation called Tannenberg, systematically murdering Polish civilians, the educated classes, priests, teachers, officials, nobility, anyone who might lead or resist, along with Jews. Thousands were shot at hundreds of execution sites in the opening weeks, tens of thousands by the end of the year. This was not a byproduct of the fighting. It was policy, the deliberate decapitation and terrorizing of a nation, the opening act of the campaign of mass murder that would define the war and lead to the Holocaust. Britain and France had pledged to defend Poland, and on September 3 they declared war on Germany, turning the invasion into a world war. But they could do nothing to save Poland itself, which was gone in a matter of weeks. So this is the day it all began. Every single thing I have told you about across these weeks, El Alamein and Stalingrad, Normandy and Guadalcanal, the camps and the bombers and the two atomic flashes, every death and every act of courage in the whole vast catastrophe, flows from this morning, September 1, 1939, when German tanks crossed the Polish frontier in the dawn and the deadliest war in the history of the world began.
Voices of WW225,608 views • 3 days ago
September 2, 1945. On the deck of an American battleship anchored in Tokyo Bay, under a grey morning sky, representatives of Japan sign a single document, and the Second World War is over. Not the fighting, which had stopped weeks earlier, but the war itself, formally, legally, finally ended. Six years and one day after German tanks crossed the Polish border, the deadliest conflict in human history comes to its close. The setting was chosen with care and meaning. The ceremony was held aboard the USS Missouri, a mighty American battleship that had fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, anchored in the bay right off the enemy capital, surrounded by the vast Allied fleet, hundreds of warships filling the water where, a few years earlier, Japan had reigned supreme. General MacArthur presided. The deck was crowded with Allied officers and sailors and the world's press. The Japanese delegation came aboard in formal dress, the foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, who had lost a leg to an assassin's bomb years before and climbed the gangway painfully on his cane and his artificial leg, and General Umezu for the army, and their small party, defeated men in a sea of their conquerors, faces set, enduring the moment. There were small, deliberate touches everywhere. On a bulkhead nearby hung the very American flag that had flown over Washington on the day of Pearl Harbor. And there was another flag on display, a faded, 92-year-old American flag that Commodore Perry had brought into this same Tokyo Bay in 1853 when he first forced Japan open to the world, brought out of a museum and flown across the ocean for this day. MacArthur opened with a short speech, and it was not a gloating one. He spoke of a better world to be built out of the blood and carnage of the past, a world founded on faith and understanding, and he called for justice and tolerance rather than revenge. Then Shigemitsu was directed to the table, and he sat, and signed the Instrument of Surrender for Japan. Umezu signed for the army. Then MacArthur signed for the Allied powers, and one after another the representatives of the Allied nations who had fought Japan, the United States, China, Britain, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, and the rest, added their signatures. The whole ceremony took only about twenty-three minutes. And then it was done. MacArthur said simply, these proceedings are closed. As the Japanese party departed, the clouds were said to have broken, and a great formation of Allied aircraft, hundreds and hundreds of planes, roared low over the bay and the battleship in a final, overwhelming display, the sound of it rolling across the water. That was the end. The war that had begun in the fog on the Polish frontier on September 1, 1939, and had spread to consume the entire world, killing somewhere between 70 and 85 million people, laying waste to nations, and bringing the Holocaust and the atomic bomb into history, was over at last. Six years and one day. It began with a lie and a battleship's guns at Westerplatte, and it ended with a signature and a battleship's deck in Tokyo Bay. Across all these weeks I have walked you through what happened in between. This is where it stops.
Voices of WW215,197 views • 2 days ago
Joseph Goebbels kills his wife and shoots himself - Downfall (2004)
Voices of WW2423,328 views • 4 months ago
August 9, 1945. Three days after Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb destroys a second Japanese city. But Nagasaki was not even the target that morning. It died largely by chance, because of clouds over another city and a few gallons of fuel. The bomb was called Fat Man, a plutonium weapon, more powerful than the one that hit Hiroshima and of the same design as the one tested in the desert three weeks before. It was carried by a B-29 named Bockscar, flown by Major Charles Sweeney. The primary target that day was not Nagasaki at all. It was the city of Kokura, which held a large arsenal. Almost everything went wrong on the flight. A fuel pump problem meant Bockscar could not use some of its fuel, leaving it dangerously short for the long mission. When the aircraft reached Kokura, the city was covered in cloud and haze and drifting smoke from a conventional raid on a nearby town the day before. The crew had strict orders to bomb visually, by eye, not by radar. They made three passes over Kokura trying to find a gap in the cloud, flak coming up at them, fuel running down, and they could not see the aiming point. So they turned away. To this day, to have a narrow escape is called in Japanese the luck of Kokura, though the people there never knew how close they came. Running low on fuel, Bockscar flew on to its secondary target, Nagasaki. There too the city was mostly covered by cloud, and they had nearly decided to bomb by radar in violation of orders, or to give up and ditch, when a break appeared for a few seconds. Through that gap the bombardier caught sight of the ground and released. The bomb missed the planned aiming point by a wide margin and detonated instead over the Urakami valley, a district that happened to contain the largest Christian community in Japan, its great cathedral, schools, and hospitals. The hills around the valley confined the blast somewhat, which spared parts of the city, but where it struck, the destruction was total, the same searing flash and fire and shockwave as at Hiroshima. Around 40,000 people were killed almost instantly. By the end of the year the dead numbered perhaps 80,000, out of a city of around 250,000. Among the many killed were, in a bitter irony, thousands of Japanese Christians at prayer and Allied prisoners of war held in the city. Within days of Nagasaki, and of the Soviet invasion that had begun the day before, Japan surrendered. Nagasaki was the second atomic bombing in history, and it remains, so far, the last. A city that was not the target, hit through a gap in the clouds in the last minutes of a failing mission, and tens of thousands of people who died because the weather over Kokura happened to be bad.
Voices of WW289,113 views • 26 days ago
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Sturmtiger and Siege Artillery in Action during The Warsaw Uprising | 1944
Voices of WW265,270 views • 1 month ago