World War Two A Timewatch Guide

The Second World War has gone down in history

as the greatest show of military power the world has ever known.

HE ORATES IN GERMAN

Since it ended over 70 years ago,

historians have pored over every detail of the battle...

..to understand what set it in motion,

what kept it going,

and the full truth of its legacy.

The events may not change,

but how we see them does.

In this film, I'll be looking at the way

we've reinterpreted the war since it ended.

And, in particular, I'll be investigating the role

documentary television has played

in unravelling the story of World War II.

Historical documentary has played a key role.

Whether breaking new discoveries

or re-examining famous events,

television has helped create a more definitive picture of the war.

Leading the way has been the history series Timewatch.

Over the course of 30 years,

BBC's Timewatch has examined just about every aspect of World War II,

bringing the most important and controversial events

and analysis into our homes and minds.

I'll be using Timewatch and 50 years of BBC archive

to show how our understanding

of the darkest hours and greatest victories

change over time.

This is a complicated history,

a story about morality and ethics

in the most devastating war the world has ever seen.

On September 3rd, 1939,

Britain declared war on Nazi Germany

and set in motion some of the most difficult

and turbulent years in our islands' history.

But they also created the iconic moments

that have come to define our nation

and the spirit of our people.

No other story looms larger than the Battle of Britain...

..when the seemingly undermanned RAF

tackles the mighty German Luftwaffe

and wins.

The victory stops a Nazi invasion of our shores.

The Battle of Britain has become part of our folklore,

one of our greatest stories.

It not only showed the heroism of the RAF,

but the determination of the British people as a whole -

which is exactly what Timewatch discovered

when it re-examined the story in 1998.

In the summer of 1940,

German fighters flew into the skies above southern England,

meeting the RAF head-on.

This was air-to-air combat.

But it would not stay that way for long.

Hitler had his eye on additional targets -

targets that included London.

GUNFIRE

Frankly, I thought I would never come out alive.

I don't know what other people felt,

I felt that there's no way that I can survive

this continual battering,

day after day, night after night.

EXPLOSIONS

During the first raid on London,

more than 300,000 kilos of explosives were dropped

on the East End and the docks.

More than 2,000 people died or were seriously injured.

The attack was the prelude to 70 consecutive night raids

on the British capital.

The Nazis hoped that the raids would break Britain's will

to continue the war.

Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary...

"The reports from London are horrific.

"An inferno beyond belief.

"Will England surrender? I believe so.

"More mass attacks are imminent."

ROARING FIRES

In popular myth, the German air offensive

is seen as the precursor to an invasion,

codenamed "Unternehmen Seelowe" - "Operation Sea Lion".

PLANES DRONE

It's an enormously strong instinct,

the protection of your patch.

And you did feel that they were intruders in our patch.

But you were absolutely convinced

that your home islands were under threat from whatever,

bombing or invasion or anything else,

and it really was up to you to do something about it.

By mid-September,

the RAF had forced Germany to scale back its air campaign.

The Allies had won the Battle of Britain.

On the face of it, Operation Sea Lion had been stopped.

But the programme also revealed an unknown part of the story,

and one which would change our view

of German intentions during the battle.

SHELLFIRE

No-one disputes that the Battle of Britain was crucial

to the British war effort.

But the Battle of Britain did not stop Hitler from invading,

for the evidence suggests that his intentions were already elsewhere.

Special research into the records of the German Army

conducted for Timewatch shows that

between July and the middle of September 1940 -

the earliest possible date for an invasion of England -

the Germans had removed or reallocated

more than half their divisions in the west to Germany

and the east of the Reich to become part of the preparations

for an attack on the Soviet Union in the following year.

On 31 July, 1940, Hitler ordered the commanders

of the Army and the Navy to a conference at the Berghof.

Hitler told the leaders of the Army that he was extremely sceptical

about the practicalities of an invasion,

given the strength of the British Navy.

Hitler then outlined an astonishing alternative strategy -

Britain was to be beaten in the east.

He told his generals...

"England mainly puts her hopes in Russia.

"If Russia is crushed, England's last hopes will have gone.

"Then, Germany will be the master of Europe and the Balkans.

"The sooner that Russia is crushed, the better."

While some believe Hitler's turn to the east was the deciding factor

that stopped Operation Sea Lion, others are not so convinced.

We need to be clear - the Battle of Britain was not simply a draw.

The Germans were unable to achieve air superiority

over southern England and any prospect of mounting

a quick, cheap invasion

in the autumn of 1940 was impossible.

Hitler was an opportunist and he was a gambler.

As late as the middle of September 1940,

there is evidence to suggest that Hitler, in the right circumstances,

might have given the green light to Operation Sea Lion.

Of course, it might have been a disaster, the Royal Navy

might have come steaming down the North Sea and English Channel

and sunk the lot. But, in fact, that's not a guaranteed outcome.

Victory in the Battle of Britain gave the British confidence

that they would win the war.

Up to that point, everything Germany had done

had led to military success.

This was a German military failure,

it was a British military victory.

And because it took place in the skies over England,

it was a victory in which everybody could feel associated.

Examining the details of war can redefine history.

But it can also throw up complex questions.

Hitler's decision to bomb London -

a target with a massive civilian population - caused an outcry.

Surely, this broke the rules of war.

But as the balance swung in the Allies' favour,

the same accusation would be made against Britain.

In 1944 and 1945,

the Allies bombed Germany's industrial heartland,

annihilating cities like Essen, Hamburg and Dresden.

These attacks have remained contentious in Germany

where many see them as war crimes.

But they're also controversial here in Britain.

In 1992, a memorial was erected to Sir Arthur Harris,

the head of the RAF's Bomber Command.

He was the man responsible for bombing German cities,

targeting the infrastructure that underpinned the German war machine.

Shortly after its unveiling,

that memorial was vandalised and, ever since,

has become a symbol of controversy.

Spring 1943.

Bomber Command in action over the Ruhr,

the industrial hub of Nazi Germany.

Timewatch took on the debate in 1993,

inviting members of Bomber Command to defend their actions

to the men and women who bore the brunt of the raids.

Erika, you were in Dresden,

you experienced the consequences of that firestorm.

What is your most powerful sense of strategic bombing?

I detest it. For anybody.

It doesn't matter which nationality or which country.

I think it's the lowest form,

how soldiers can kill women and children,

especially in Dresden where the war was over -

it was more or less finished in a couple of weeks.

To get medals for this sort of thing,

I can see no reason whatsoever.

I really DESPISE people like that, who still have, today,

the idea about bombing of civilian people.

And that's no honour to any country.

Bob Nelson?

You were in Bomber Command.

You were bombing during the war.

You've heard that very powerful statement. Where are you?

Well, I was a wireless operator in a Lancaster bomber

during a tour of operations,

and Dresden was just another raid as far as we were concerned.

It took ten hours, 20 minutes, a round-trip.

We don't think at the time that we are going to bomb civilians,

although, of course, we know that if they don't get out of the way,

they're going to get into trouble.

But on the other hand, we are taking our time to look around

and make sure that we don't get shot down.

Is there any sense in which it could legitimately

be said there was something... effectively a war crime

committed in the process of the strategic bombing campaign?

Let me start, if I may,

with the Secretary of the Bomber Command Association.

Does the notion of war crime ring any bells at all for you?

Not at all.

I feel that, on a bombing mission,

the aircraft I flew in

was made by our civilians,

and the bombs we carried were made by our civilians,

the bombs that we dropped on the German civilians,

made the 88-millimetre guns, the FW 190s.

So the "civilian" suddenly has a different connotation.

I don't see it as, "I was dropping bombs

-"on actual civilians."

-What about the children?

They are the people who are making the arms to fight back.

Paul, you were brought up as a child in Essen in Germany,

just after the war. You're now a novelist and a journalist.

What does the notion of "war crime" in this context mean to you?

-Does it have any validity?

-It has validity.

I mean, validity is imposed on memories that will never die.

Words cannot quite convey the devastation of Essen -

the lifelessness, the smell of Essen,

the widespread suffering which is what I, as a small child,

was utterly bewildered by.

And the word "war crime", after all,

is a word I wouldn't have used in my experience at the time,

I was only a small child trying to make sense of it.

It's a word I use now reluctantly

because it suggests

naming the guilty.

But what was done was a crime -

that is not to say the people who did it were criminals,

those are two different issues.

But the bombing of a city, the destruction of life on that scale,

yes, that's a crime. What else can be a crime than that?

Vice-Marshal, on this, the bombing of civilians, of homes,

women, children, schools, hospitals.

Inevitable in the process of area bombing -

-is it far away from a crime?

-Of course it is.

Let me just take one point here.

Was it a crime for the Luftwaffe

to carry out its fire blitz of London?

-Yes, it was.

-Yes, of course.

-ALL SPEAK TOGETHER

And you make monuments!

ALL SPEAK TOGETHER

They're also for war crimes in Nuremberg.

Let the Air Vice-Marshal continue. Hold on a second,

I want to bring you back in.

-Why do you so confidently say, "No, not a crime"?

-Because we...

A crime, to be convicted of a crime,

you must have had the INTENT to commit it.

There was no intent on the part of anyone from the top leadership...

-May I speak?

-From the top leadership down to the poor chaps

-who actually drove the aircraft.

-Let me just take a vivid example.

When the bombing of Wuppertal took place,

liquid phosphorus was dropped.

Children, women, ran into the River Wupper

like torches to be put out by the waters.

How can that possibly not be seen as a crime?

Obviously, the infliction of a weapon like that,

it's deliberate policy,

and deliberate and appalling suffering took place.

I cannot find any word that is adequate but "crime" for that.

The debate over Bomber Command will forever rage.

But even in the days immediately following the war,

the campaign was contentious.

From the Second World War itself,

there were critical voices saying, "This is immoral,

"we shouldn't be doing this, it's unchristian" and so on.

And that was the view I think many people had

after the immediate end of the war.

Evidenced by Dresden and so on.

But over the course of the last 70 years,

that's become quite a complicated argument.

I think there are many people who say

that morality in war is relative.

This was a total war.

It's what the Germans call a "Weltanschauung",

a clash of philosophies of life.

When such profoundly important things are perceived to be at stake,

virtually any action is perceived as legitimate.

What makes a soldier in a battle not a murderer

is the concept of military necessity.

That he is acting under orders.

And the Nuremberg judgments qualified that by saying

there are some things for which

you cannot use that defence, you have to be in a position of saying,

"I take responsibility for this."

Simply because they are such appalling acts.

The most appalling of these acts is, without doubt, the Holocaust -

Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews.

Hitler's programme of extermination is perhaps

the most heinous act in history, and is, without question, a war crime.

It sets, moreover, a benchmark by which the morality of the Nazis -

indeed, all the combatants of the war - is judged.

Hitler's "Final Solution" would claim the lives

of an estimated six million Jews,

displacing millions more.

In 1995, Timewatch examined the legacy of the Holocaust...

..reflected in the families of those who survived.

When they got to Auschwitz,

the men and the women were separated immediately

and my father was the one who was closest to his little sister.

She was 14 at the time, and he was...

..I suppose 19 or 20.

And she was taken from him.

And somebody believes that they saw her being taken to the gas chambers.

Much of my information comes from my mother,

and she had said, even before my father died,

that when they were lining you up to take you to the work camp,

she watched in the midst this chaos, and noticed

that they were separating the spouses.

So she took off her wedding ring and told my father to do the same.

And said, "We don't know each other."

It was towards the end of the afternoon,

and it was time for his...barrack

to be exterminated.

When they arrived at the gas chamber,

the end-of-the-day whistle blew,

so there ensued an argument between

the guard who had marched them to the gas chamber

and the guard who was running the gas chamber.

Ultimately, the gas-chamber guard won the argument.

The barrack guard marched everybody back,

expecting them to be killed in the morning instead.

But that morning, early that morning,

someone arrived from a factory

or from the Gorlitz work camp to Auschwitz to requisition workers,

which was a common procedure.

And his barrack, being next in line,

was sent off to Gorlitz,

where he remained until that camp was liberated.

It was the Russians who liberated them.

Afterwards, my father was looking through the women's quarters

in the camp where they were

hoping to still be able to find his little sister.

And he didn't find her, but he met my mother,

and he liked her, so he came back the next day,

and they started to date, and that was that.

When we arrived in the United States, we had a railroad flat,

and when I say a "railroad flat",

it was literally over the railroad. It was...

The subway ran about ten feet below my bedroom window.

It was a very small place. For the first couple of years,

neither parent spoke English and my father had no means of support.

It wasn't long before I noticed

that my mother was particularly different.

She had difficulty handling stress, certainly -

I, as a six-year-old, could handle stress better than she could.

One of the major manifestations of her stress disorder

is that she hears voices,

usually Nazi voices.

For instance, we might be in the car, driving along,

and she might hear, or think she hears, Nazis in the next car,

and ask me to figure it out

because she didn't want to distract herself from driving.

SPEAKING IN GERMAN

My parents were very intent on creating as normal a life for us

as they possibly could.

Since we were living in Germany - I was born in Germany -

they insisted on speaking to us in German,

not teaching us Polish or Yiddish,

because they were concerned that if we were to go into the supermarket,

for example, and start speaking in Polish

that people would start looking at us.

They wanted us to blend in and be as normal as other German kids.

Part of that "being normal" meant not telling us

about what happened to them.

As a result, I didn't really find out what happened to them -

"really" meaning "consciously" -

until I was in my late teens.

Even later than that.

And yet I can't think of a time when I didn't know.

The way we perceive the Holocaust has quite clearly changed,

almost generation by generation, I think, since the Second World War.

I think the first post-war generation,

people didn't really want to talk about it or think about it.

Europe wanted to forget the war, progress, move on.

Even in the state of Israel itself,

the first real attention to Holocaust survivors didn't start

to be paid until the early 1960s,

with the Eichmann trial in particular.

Prior to that, people were reluctant

to talk about what had been an unspeakably traumatic event.

There was a break point, I think, very much in the late '60s,

early '70s, associated, in some cases,

with television programmes about the Holocaust,

which really alerted people, for the first time,

to the dimension of the crime.

And that also encouraged historians

to reach out and begin to explore the Holocaust

in a more sophisticated, analytical way.

This analysis has often centred on the Nazi regime,

and more specifically, its leader.

Since the war, countless documentaries and films

have tried to work out what made Adolf Hitler tick.

What triggered him to commit such appalling atrocities,

and why the German people followed him,

regardless of his deeply misguided agenda.

In 2005, Timewatch examined the psychological motives of Hitler.

The film based its investigation on a psychological profile

produced at the height of the war

by Harvard psychoanalyst Walter Langer.

Over 60 years after it was written,

it was still clear that the state of Hitler's mind

held clues to his actions.

This was the public face of Adolf Hitler.

He'd risen to power in the 1920s

when the country was on the verge of economic and social collapse.

HE ORATES IN GERMAN

CHEERING

He pledged to revitalise and rebuild Germany,

and this was a message that the German people

were desperate to hear.

CHANTING

It's really, very important to understand

Hitler the Messiah, Hitler the saviour.

Indeed, he relished when people would say,

"Heil, Hitler, the saviour of the German people."

And he identified, in fact, with Christ.

If you take this notion of the empty self

which has built up

this compensatory grandiose messianic facade...

..what happens when that facade is shattered?

In the final months of the conflict,

Hitler made it known that total destruction

was the Allies' only option if he was to be defeated.

In the last weeks of the war,

Hitler issues his famous "scorched earth" directive,

where the party and the military had to destroy everything,

the Allies mustn't get anything.

He doesn't mind now about the German people -

the German people will starve. I mean, they have let him down.

In this sense, Langer is right.

Here is somebody who only really thinks in black and white,

life and death.

And Langer is spot on in this case.

That this is a suicidal personality.

He's not somebody who is simply going to give up,

lay down his arms and say, "OK, let's have an armistice."

If his dream of total glory,

of total power, were to fail...

..and that facade of grandiosity was to shatter,

underneath this, that empty self would emerge.

And that was intolerable for Hitler,

and he had to kill himself rather than be confronted by

this total shame and total humiliation.

The big question and the very frightening question was,

how had this happened?

With the rise in the 1930s of Hitler

and, indeed, the rise of Mussolini and the cult of Stalin,

we seem to have this strange idea

of a man appearing who certainly behaves as if he's mad,

but has this incredible influence.

It's really bound up with a strong sense of resentment

at what happened at the end of the First World War,

fears about national identity and survival,

and, by the time of the economic Great Depression,

a strong sense that Germany is going to go under.

And Hitler certainly seemed, then,

to be a kind of Messiah figure.

And that fear of the future of Germany

is what drove people to support Hitler.

Hitler's single-minded ambition would lead him to power...

..and to a bitter war with his enemies.

But the battlefield can reveal a different story.

When enemies meet, the outcome is sometimes surprising.

The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest military campaign

of the Second World War.

It's a story of hunter and hunted,

German U-boats stalking Allied convoys

in the cold and treacherous waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

And for both sides,

the consequences of defeat were nearly always fatal.

In 1973, the BBC revealed the story of when Otto Kretschmer,

one of the most successful U-boat commanders of all time,

met the renowned Royal Navy commander Donald Macintyre

face to face in the middle of the Atlantic.

I had, then,

some time to collect all my men on the conning tower

and tell them that this was the end of our war career

and that there was some possibility of us to get into captivity.

My second lieutenant took the Morse lamp

and I spelt out the signal in English to him.

It was...

I am thinking, "Please pick up my men."

And the last to come over the side

was obviously the captain in his brass-bound hat.

He was greeted by one of my lieutenants, Peter Sturdy,

whose eye was immediately caught

by his binoculars hanging around his neck.

In fact, he told me that the U-boat captain

tried to get them off and throw them away,

because he didn't want them to get into the possession of the enemy.

However, Peter Sturdy grabbed these

and brought them up to me on the bridge

where I promptly grabbed them from him

and made them my spoils of war.

And up there, they took

the life jacket from me

and the pistol...

I had a pistol pointed at myself!

And then, the binoculars

which I had no time to throw overboard, which I would've liked.

And then, I was taken down to the captain's cabin,

where for the first time, I saw his horseshoe sign on everything.

The U-boat captain noticed that our crest,

the ship's crest, was a horseshoe.

He said, "That was the crest of my U-boat, also, isn't that strange?"

But, of course, ours was the other way up. His points downwards.

"Ah," said my chief, "No wonder you've been captured.

"That's the way the luck runs out, we always say."

And there, I got warm trousers and some rum to drink

and everything which they could do for me, really.

And, immediately afterwards,

I had some dry clothes on and I went to sleep

in Donald Macintyre's wonderful armchair he had in his cabin.

When I woke up again, I saw him sitting on his desk

and looking at me

with his legs dangling in rubber boots, I remember.

And I congratulated him on his success,

but also telling him that it was good luck for him

because I had no torpedoes left.

Otherwise, things would have been a bit different.

And he said some polite things, too, to me, and so,

immediately, it seemed to be that we could be good friends.

As soon as the U-boat crews were safely onboard,

the two destroyers headed back

to rejoin the convoy, which we did about dawn.

I was allowed to sleep in the captain's bunk,

which was much better, of course.

But until we went to sleep, there was still some time,

and I don't know who it was

got the idea to play at cards.

And they looked for the fourth man, and that was myself.

So I played cards, I played bridge with the captains of the sunk ships

and officers of the destroyers.

While this 1973 film shows how enemies can become friends,

a film just four years later

would reveal the greatest secret of the battle -

and possibly the entire war.

What was the most secret place in Britain during the Second World War?

Perhaps the underground Cabinet room in Whitehall?

Or the Naval chiefs-of-staff map room?

Or what about the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough?

No, none of those.

It was this unassuming Brit country house in Buckinghamshire.

In 1977, this film would be one of the first

to tell the story of how Britain intercepted and broke

Germany's secret codes at Bletchley Park.

These huts sheltered what came to be known as the Ultra Secret,

or Ultra for short.

As soon as the Enigma messages were picked up,

they were sent by motorbike dispatch rider to Bletchley Park,

the nerve centre of Ultra.

The end result of all that activity -

these decoded messages, by the thousand, every day.

The thoughts and deeds of the operational command system

of the entire German Armed Forces.

Now, these messages were passed to the intelligence huts.

And Hut 3 included among its personnel

Peter Calvocoressi, head of the Air Force section.

Now, what we got was hundreds of pieces of paper like this

and each one of these is a separate message.

It's got letters in groups of five and it's in German.

You come into a run of letters which are really all mostly there.

And, in fact, here you have a complete German word, "meldet".

And that'll be "meldet sich", "is to report".

That's an S - "meldet sich".

S-O-F-O-R...

L is obviously a mistake for S-O-F-O-R-T.

"Sofort", "immediately" -

everything always happens immediately in messages like this.

And this is the important bit at the end.

So-and-so or Lieutenant So-and-so is to report where?

F-O-blank-blank-I-A.

It's not really terribly difficult.

It's Foggia.

He is to go to Foggia.

Our story has been confined to events that happened

more than 30 years ago.

And although cipher machines have gone a long way since then,

much of this subject is still secret.

And so the contribution made by Ultra can only be really be judged

by people who themselves had to use the information at the time.

The release at the end of the 1970s of the British intelligence files,

the so-called Ultra secret,

was tremendously important

and it was done deliberately.

Before then, historians always half-knew, half-assumed

that both sides were breaking each other's codes.

This is not exactly news, but it was never known how it was done.

But what was equally surprising was that the secret lasted so long.

For three decades, nothing was written or said about this work.

And yet thousands of people participated in the work

done at Bletchley Park or knew about it for some other reason.

Today, the men and women who worked at Bletchley Park

are revered for their wartime contribution.

There are countless heroes in times of conflict,

but out of the millions that fought in the Second World War,

only a select few are remembered for their courage.

Many stories have slipped from memory,

and often for political reasons.

The Indian Army fought gallantly

as part of the British Empire in the Second World War,

making major contributions in Burma, North Africa and Italy.

But as Timewatch discovered,

history would forget their bravery, both in Britain and India.

The Victoria Cross is the highest award for valour

in the British Army.

No less than 28 were won by the Indian Army

during the Second World War.

Without the Indian Army, the Japanese would've overrun India,

they would have linked up with the Germans in Iran,

and the whole world would have come under...

the domination of the Axis alliance.

You can't really believe

that we could have won the war without the Indian Army.

2.5 million troops from India,

Pakistan, and the rest of the Subcontinent,

formed the biggest volunteer army in the history of the world.

It is an army that some Britons choose to ignore.

But the stained glass at Sandhurst tells a different story.

During World War II,

Indian troops fought across three continents under the Union Jack.

They were at Dunkirk,

they fought at Monte Cassino.

They fought to save British democracy,

even though, under British rule,

they were denied it themselves.

It wasn't just the British who forgot them.

The fact that so many Indians

volunteered to fight for the British Empire

became an embarrassment after Independence.

The whole subject is still sensitive.

The Indian Government refused Timewatch permission

to film interviews in their country.

In India, it is the INA of Chandra Bose whose veterans are feted

as independence heroes and receive a freedom fighter's pension.

Those who fought for the British do not.

We feel that we are forgotten...

what we did

during the World War II.

The British have forgotten us, the Indian Army also forgotten us.

While this film highlights the story of Indian volunteers,

there are many more soldiers that have been overlooked.

It's a very curious fact, I think, from 1945 onwards,

the British public always thought of themselves

as alone in the war.

It's the one word you always hear about 1940, '41.

Britain "alone".

Britain is not alone. Wasn't alone.

It was supported by a huge empire, the world's largest empire.

The Commonwealth nations mobilised

something like five million men and women.

The Indian Army of the Second World War is the largest

all-volunteer army there's ever been in human history -

2.5 million service personnel.

Other countries including, for example, the East African

and the West African colonies - South Africa, too -

also made an immense contribution

to the Commonwealth effort in the Second World War.

And about 170,000 of these people died,

and that's a bitter sacrifice that should not be forgotten.

There's an aphorism of a famous 19th-century historian

that history is, on each occasion,

what one generation finds interesting about another.

And in 21st-century multicultural Britain,

there is going to be greater interest in soldiers

from the Indian Subcontinent in the Second World War,

or soldiers from the West Indies and Caribbean,

or soldiers from the Irish Republic,

or the contribution of women in Britain to the Second World War.

To be lauded by history, your story must become widely known.

But for some, keeping quiet was an essential part of their job.

An estimated 13,000 people

worked in Britain's Special Operations Executive during the war,

in jobs that demanded complete secrecy.

Spies are often the unsung heroes of history.

Whether carrying out sabotage missions

or relaying secret information,

their actions have often made the difference

between failure and victory.

As more information about the role of spies

during the Second World War has been released to the public,

their stories have captured the world's imagination.

Timewatch tracked down some of the intelligence operatives

that had worked in France,

taking them back to their old haunts

to lift the lid on their secret stories.

Tony Brooks was stationed in Lyon.

When you came in, you shook hands with half the customers.

Very much a solid working-class place.

And any talking shop would be very sort of covert.

I might say,

"We're hoping about five friends," -

we used to call them "mes amis" -

"will turn up at the end of next week."

Which meant we were going to have five parachute drops next week

or something like that,

which would enter into the ordinary conversation.

The proprietor used the cash register to raise the alarm.

LOUD CLANKING AND RINGING

He didn't use it as a till.

It meant that somebody had just come in the front door

he didn't like the look of.

Like a lot of these old houses in Lyon, there were lots of exits,

and you'd come out about three doors further down the street.

Unbeknownst to Tony, also in Lyon was his colleague in training,

the radio operator Brian Stonehouse.

He had found a chateau outside Lyon from which to transmit.

Over half a century later, he returns.

The owner's wife, Elsa Jourdan, had been a fashion model.

We had met - according to this cover story -

in Paris before the war in the fashion world.

And I was drawing for Vogue magazine in Paris.

Of course, none of it is true. But this was just a cover story.

His courier Christian brought him more and more messages

to encode and transmit.

The workload was getting dangerously heavy.

In Lyon, what happened was that so many radio operators

had been arrested before me,

and all their stuff came to me, you see,

to send to London through me, and I did.

And that's when I was on the air for hours.

I radioed London and told them that being on the air this long,

I was committing suicide.

Inevitably, the radio-detection vans pinned him down.

MORSE CODE BEEPS

This is the room where

I was transmitting.

And I think a piece of the antenna was up there.

I'd tried to pull it down and didn't take all of it.

Then, I buried... I hid the set in the bottom of the lift shaft.

But I forgot a piece of antenna with the insulator at the end,

and that was found, so...

I couldn't deny any more that I'd had a set here, a transmitter.

That's how it happened.

News of Brian's arrest

came into Special Operations Executive in London

and a grim addition was made to his file.

I thought I'd be shot as a spy and...

I wanted my family to be able to trace me after the war,

that was the reason, main reason, for declaring myself British.

Brian's parents didn't learn he was missing

until over a year after his arrest.

By then, he was on his way

to the first of five Nazi concentration camps.

On the day Dachau was liberated,

he was photographed among the mass of prisoners,

along with another agent, Bob Sheppard.

A week later, both were back in England.

Bob and I were in full uniform,

and somewhere near the Albert Hall - I don't know why -

and a funeral went past.

And we started laughing because we thought, you know,

"All that fuss for one corpse!"

And...

I think one used to laugh,

because that was one's only defence.

If you started crying, you know, it's, um...

Sometimes I feel now, if I start crying, I won't stop.

Spies were crucial to Allied victory.

Their work underpinned every major operation,

including our most famous, D-Day.

Certain stories capture the public imagination,

they are narratives we become obsessed with.

There have been, for example,

literally hundreds of films made by the BBC about D-Day.

And doubtless there'll be hundreds more.

The D-Day landings were an unprecedented success.

The largest sea-to-land invasion ever mounted.

But not everything went to plan.

The American landings on Omaha Beach were a disaster.

And, as Timewatch discovered in 2008,

historians are still trying to figure out what went wrong.

Their examination started with an assault on a gun battery

before the main landing on Omaha had even begun.

The Allied High Command believed that the mission here

at the Pointe Du Hoc was absolutely critical to the success of D-Day.

If the guns at the Pointe Du Hoc were still functioning,

with their range - which was 23,000 metres from this position -

there was a real danger that they might be able to shoot at,

damage, sink Allied shipping out in the Bay of the Seine.

So from the American point of view,

Army success at Omaha Beach

was integrally tied to the assault

at the Pointe Du Hoc.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

We were fired on while coming in.

This was not a surprise.

The enemy had had about 30 minutes

to get up out of his underground bunkers.

He was up there throwing hand grenades

down by the bushel or basketful, and firing right down on us.

And there was rapid-fire situations,

on either flank, they were firing into us.

So we have that to come into.

Ropes were fired up, there were grapple hooks.

Some of them pulled out,

the enemy - damn it - cut some of the ropes!

You see, that was not kosher, you know?

And there were two guys on the rope right in front of me, going up.

So I started in behind them, about 50 feet below them,

and the enemy was leaning over up there, throwing down grenades,

and I yelled up to these fellas, I said,

"Boys, put your faces in, and your butts out,

"they're throwing grenades!"

The main force had to go in on Omaha Beach,

and they were supposed to fight their way up to us by noon.

And they got up there at noon on the third day.

As they land, they're in a natural killing ground.

They're on beaches, they're completely exposed to enemy fire.

There is no cover, there's no trees, there's no trenches,

there's no nothing. The troops are out there in the open.

GUNFIRE

Imagine the shock. You're told that you are going to see

the greatest firepower show on earth,

and then you hit the beach there

and everybody's alive.

All the enemy forces are alert, and...

Yeah, it's going to be a bloody day.

It's going to be a bloody day... It WAS a bloody day.

The Americans had been given pre-landing support by air and sea.

But it hadn't been successful,

leaving the men defenceless.

As Timewatch revealed,

the scale of the slaughter took years to comprehend.

The casualty count on Omaha Beach, in retrospect,

was much, much higher than historians had previously thought.

Realistically, only in the last couple of years

have historians been able to figure out

that the count was probably twice as high as first thought.

In the range of 4,500 to 5,000 men

became casualties on Omaha in an 18-hour period.

It was not in any way foreseen

that the casualties would come with the intensity that they did

in the first couple of hours of the invasion.

From 6.30 in the morning to 9.30 in the morning on D-Day,

American soldiers were being felled on the beach like...

..stalks of wheat by a sickle.

Despite the carnage,

the success of D-Day has raised the event to a near mythic status.

But it's partly due to how the story's been told

and how it's changed.

There was a time, especially in the immediate aftermath of the war,

when D-Day was seen primarily as a function of the decisions

of great commanders - Montgomery, Eisenhower,

Rommel and people like this.

And I think what's happened in the last few decades,

is a sense of understanding

the broader experience of D-Day and the Normandy campaign,

as seen through the eyes

of thousands of ordinary servicemen and women

who either participated in or supported that great endeavour.

I've had, on a number of occasions -

and it is very humbling -

old veterans come up to me and say,

"I was 18 years old, can you tell me where I was and what I was doing?"

And taking them there, very often,

it will trigger a memory,

and they will then start talking about the experience they've had.

And for historians, this is invaluable.

It humanises the experience.

D-Day will forever be etched into our minds.

It's a pivotal moment in the Second World War.

But some stories are told for precisely the opposite reason -

because they did not become important.

In the 1980s, Timewatch investigated recently declassified documents

that showed how close we came to using chemical weapons

during the Second World War.

Nerve, mustard and chlorine gas were all readily available

to both the Allies and the Axis powers.

But they were never used - turning the story

into one of the big "what if" questions of the conflict.

In Timewatch this month, the terrible weapon

of the Second World War that was never used - gas.

You can pick up gas masks today in junk shops

and second-hand stores from one end of the country to the other.

They're probably the most prevalent

of the surviving flotsam of the last war -

which isn't surprising, as the year before war broke out,

millions were distributed.

One for every man, woman, child and baby.

Gas attacks were expected daily.

The Ministry of Home Security posters on every street corner

gave instructions on what exactly to do

when the gas rattle sounded and an attack began.

Hold your breath.

Put on mask wherever you are.

Close window.

If out of doors,

take off hat, put on your mask.

Turn up collar.

Put on gloves or keep hands in pockets.

Take cover in nearest building.

In the 1930s, poison gas occupied a place

rather like the atom bomb occupies nowadays.

This was science at its most advanced

waiting to be applied to the protection of the National Security,

the destruction of the human race - whichever way you look at it.

This factory has never been filmed before.

It lies in the Welsh village of Rhydymwyn,

and, during the last war, it was codenamed "Valley".

Valley was one of Britain's three wartime mustard gas factories.

The others were at St Helens and Runcorn.

Valley was run by ICI and at its peak

was producing over 100 tonnes of mustard gas a week.

The gas was stored in an underground arsenal

tunnelled into a nearby hill,

capable of holding 5,000 tonnes of chemicals.

Valley began production in 1941.

By the spring of 1942,

Britain was employing 6,000 munitions workers and scientists

who had produced over 20,000 tonnes of chemical weapons.

It was here in the British War Cabinet offices

beneath Whitehall in the summer of 1940

that the first serious consideration was given

to the question of using chemical warfare.

Here, for more than two weeks that summer,

a fierce debate raged among Britain's military commanders

about the wisdom of using gas to defeat a German invasion.

The argument between gas's advocates and opponents was finally settled

by the Prime Minister on 30th June, 1940.

One of the striking features of the papers which have been released

is the light they shed on the extraordinary personal interest

taken in chemical warfare by the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

These, for instance, are the monthly gas production figures

of Britain's munitions factories.

And these had to be submitted regularly to the Prime Minister

for his personal comment.

"We could drench the cities of the Ruhr,

"and many other cities in Germany,

"in such a way that most of the population

"will be requiring constant medical attention.

"It may be several weeks, or even months,

"before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas."

"And if we do it, let us do it 100%."

Germany, perhaps more than any other power,

was impressed by the threat of retaliation,

because it had persuaded itself that it was weak in this area itself.

One has to remember that the Treaty of Versailles

had placed strict limits on German chemical warfare preparedness,

so that it could see itself ten, 15 years behind its enemies.

So there's an irony here. You're saying

that the one belligerent power upon which deterrence had an effect

was actually Nazi Germany?

Because it believed itself to be so inferior, it, as it were,

persuaded itself into a situation of sensitivity towards this threat.

The Germans' overestimation of Allied superiority

was probably the decisive factor in their decision not to use gas.

In the 1980s, documents revealed the hidden strategy

as Churchill prepared for chemical war.

70 years after the war ended,

it's tempting to think that we now know what happened.

Given the vast documentary record of the Second World War,

and the amount of effort that's been expended

on trying to understand it and turn it into books

and television documentaries,

it seems difficult to imagine

that we don't know all that there is to know about the Second World War.

But in fact, I think this is very far from being the case.

People often say to me, when I say I'm going to write

something else on the Second World War,

"Not the Second World War again! What else can there be to say?"

And as a historian, of course,

I always say, "There will always be new things to say."

You always put things into a different relation,

you will always find different perspectives.

You'll also find new material.

It's being uncovered all the time.

The final history of the war can never be written

and never WILL be written.

It's a constant process of re-examination

as the present moves forward.

The past is dead and doesn't exist.

What we have is evidence that exists in the present

and we call that evidence "history".

Less than a century ago, a global war gripped our nation.

For over five years, both at home and abroad,

Britain gave her all in the fight against Nazi Germany.

Since it ended, World War II has been examined and re-examined.

Stories have been discovered and debates have raged.

And still, the narrative evolves

as new theories and fresh research

reshape the events we thought we knew.

And it's all been captured on our screens,

making us part of the debate,

making us part of history.

In the years ahead, there will be many more disagreements

as we grapple with our past,

but there will also be incredible discoveries of stories still untold,

new facts coming to light,

and long-forgotten heroes revealed to us for the first time.

The Second World War may have ended over 70 years ago,

but its history is still alive and constantly changing.