Britannia at Bay Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain

BOMBER DRONES

May the 28th, 1940.

After only 18 days of fighting,

the Allied armies in Europe have been smashed by the Nazis.

A German invasion of Britain now looks inevitable.

The five men of the British War Cabinet consider their options.

The former Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain,

and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax,

are arguing for peace talks with the Nazis.

This seems entirely sensible.

Britain might hang on to her independence and most of the Empire.

Winston Churchill has been Prime Minister just two and a half weeks.

He is contemptuous.

Hitler would reduce Britain to a slave state

with a puppet government.

Labour's Clement Attlee backs Churchill.

His deputy, Arthur Greenwood, a figure forgotten in history,

is with them too.

And so the decision is made, Britain will fight on.

Churchill then calls together the full Cabinet.

"If this long island story of ours is to end at last,"

he says, "let it end only

"when each one of us lies choking in his own blood on the ground."

There's a pause... A great roar, people are in tears.

This is a blood pact

drawing in not only the men in the room, but everybody.

Britannia, the old conqueror island isn't going to go down easily.

Stand together.

Fight to the end.

PHONE RINGING

It's ten past midnight on Monday the 27th of May 1940,

and the telephone is ringing at the home of a chartered accountant

called Basil Smith.

It's the Admiralty calling.

Operation Dynamo is under way.

Basil Smith set off

for the boathouse where his 24-foot motor launch, Constant Nymph, was moored.

Everything unnecessary - china, cutlery, pots and pans -

had already been stripped out and stored.

He was just waiting for his naval permit.

He said, "The officer in charge

"didn't seem to think there was any tremendous hurry."

GUNFIRE

Across the Channel, the British and French armies,

hundreds of thousands of men, were in full retreat.

Their only chance of escape was by sea.

German bombers were trying to close down the nearest port

still held by the allies...

Dunkirk.

After a 20-mile march, Private Fred Barker and his platoon

clambered to the top of the sand dunes.

"We stood stock still in astonishment," he said.

There were lines and lines of thousands of men,

all waiting to be evacuated.

Suddenly some of the men around him were seized by panic

and began to run down the beach towards any boat they could see.

Their officer roared at them to stop.

"Stand fast! Stand fast!

"Form ranks," he shouted.

But more men began desperately to run down the beach.

The officer then pulled his revolver

and threatened to shoot the next man who broke the line.

Basil Smith was now heading out to sea with a full tank of fuel

and a crew of two naval ratings.

Four months in the Navy and had never been to sea.

Took to it like ducks to water.

But was it was they were actually going to be doing, he had no idea.

Whatever it was, he'd been assured

by the pleasant-voiced man from the Admiralty, "It would be dangerous."

The men on the Dunkirk beaches could only be reached

by the shallowest craft.

Thousands were standing here in rows four-deep,

waiting day and night to be rescued,

and when the tides came in, they were up to their necks in water.

One young private said he counted three tides.

"We had to keep our cigarettes and matches in our helmets

"to keep them dry," said another.

"It was blazing hot and we had nothing to drink."

The little ships were coming to the rescue.

A motley flotilla of hundreds of yachts, cockle boats, fishing smacks

and pleasure cruisers with names like The Richmond, The Resolute

and Queen Boadicea, and no fewer than 11 boats called The Skylark.

Basil Smith reached Dunkirk at dusk.

Strafed by fighter planes, the little ships and hundreds of rowing boats

tirelessly ferried exhausted men from the beaches

to the larger ships waiting to take them home.

Under heavy shelling,

men fell overboard, some were crushed to death, many drowned.

Constant Nymph helped to get around 900 soldiers off the beach

before she had to be abandoned.

Basil Smith sailed home,

on a merchant ship, still under heavy fire.

"Plenty of hot tea and bread and butter and jam and a chance

"to light a pipe made me perfectly indifferent to anything Jerry did."

Basil Smith had just defined the spirit of Dunkirk.

Over nine days, the flotilla of 900 naval and civilian craft

rescued over a third of a million men from the beaches of northern France.

It was a resounding military defeat,

but it was also a kind of miraculous deliverance.

On Tuesday the 4th of June, Winston Churchill

turned the Dunkirk spirit into a founding legend of modern Britain.

CHURCHILL: We shall fight on the beaches,

we shall fight on the landing grounds,

we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,

we shall fight in the hills,

we shall never surrender!

The British Empire now stood alone

against the might of the German military machine.

But who was the "we" Churchill spoke of?

Who was British and who wasn't?

SMASHING

As darkness fell on the 10th of June 1940, Italian ice cream shops

and cafes were attacked during riots in Edinburgh, Manchester and London.

Mussolini had just joined forces with Hitler.

Britain was now at war with Germany and Italy.

There were 18,000 Italians registered as living in Britain

and when he was asked what should be done about them,

Churchill replied, "Collar the lot!"

Within two weeks, 4,000 Italians were rounded up.

Most of them ended up in hastily organised internment camps.

NEWSREEL: To be interned in Britain is like paradise

when compared with a Nazi concentration camp.

So there shouldn't be any complaints here.

Even if the internees have literally to make their own beds

and take in each other's washing.

The final destination for many Italians was the Isle of Man.

DRILLING

They were fenced in with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards,

interned in parades of Victorian guesthouses.

Almost all of the Italians who were interned

had done nothing more threatening to national security

than introduce the British to ice-cream, olive oil

and coffee you could actually drink.

George Orwell complained that you couldn't get a decent meal in London

because the head chefs of the Savoy, the Cafe Royal

and the Piccadilly had all been locked up.

But it wasn't just Italians.

Over 10,000 men and women of Italian, German and Austrian origin

were interned here.

One refugee said, "Put Viennese people together for long enough

"and they will do two things, found a university and open a patisserie."

And that's just what they did here.

There were cake shops, there were language lessons in French,

Portuguese, Hebrew and Italian, lectures in history and literature,

workshops from great Berlin theatre directors.

For a short period of time, one of the great centres

of European intellectual life was the Isle of Man.

By now, the Luftwaffe was preparing

for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain.

Stage one, destroy the RAF.

On the 16th of August 1940, Winston Churchill and his Chief of Staff,

General Hastings Ismay, stopped off here at RAF Uxbridge

on their way to Chequers.

This was 11 Group HQ, Fighter Command, responsible for air defence

in the southeast of England.

Churchill took every chance he could get to stomp down here

and watch Fighter Command in action.

ISSUING CO-ORDINATES

Each day as the battle in the sky developed, the German attacks

were plotted almost minute by minute on this giant map board.

The formations of attacking aircraft were shown by wooden blocks

marked with the approximate number of planes.

Their course was tracked by colour-coded arrows,

corresponding to the room's master clock.

Now it looks very complicated,

but in fact this was a masterpiece of clarity.

It's a dusty old room now, but this is really about information processing

and, the truth is, we were better at it than they were.

Plotting the enemy attacks day and night were members of

the Women's Auxiliary Air Force or WAAFs. They were known as "the beauty chorus."

Above them was what Churchill called the Dress Circle.

And up here, the senior commanders were playing a deadly game

of chess with the Germans,

taking split-second decisions about when to send squadrons up to fight.

RINGING

Timing was critical.

Fights in the air were won by a narrow margin of advantage.

So getting clear of the ground and up to the correct height for battle

could mean the difference between life and death.

By August 1940,

squadrons could be scrambled and in the air within 90 seconds.

This beautifully efficient system was masterminded by the head

of Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, also known as Stuffy.

If a democracy has any advantage in fighting a war,

it's that some people are prepared to take on

and challenge the supreme leaders.

Stuffy Dowding was exactly the kind of stubborn, flinty old so and so

quite prepared to challenge Churchill at key moments.

He'd built up Fighter Command almost from nothing in the 1930s

and was fiercely protective of his men and machines.

This entirely novel command

and control system was his idea, they called it Dowding's System.

Now there was only one question, would it work?

At 1700 hours on the day of Churchill and Ismay's visit,

radar detected 100 enemy aircraft crossing the south coast.

Their target, the airfields of Fighter Command.

RAF squadrons were scrambled immediately.

As he watched the attacks building up on the plotting table,

General Ismay, a grizzled old army hand, said he felt, "sick with fear".

But the attacks intensified. It seemed as if the RAF

had nothing left in reserve and Churchill became absorbed by the drama.

22 British aircraft were shot down, that day,

eight pilots lost, but 72 enemy aircraft were destroyed.

Dowding's system was keeping the Luftwaffe at bay

and the legend of the Battle of Britain was born.

As Churchill continued his journey to Chequers with General Ismay

he said, "Don't talk to me.

"I have never been so moved."

But a few moments later, Churchill himself broke the silence,

"Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed

"by so many to so few."

Later that evening when he got home, the General quoted those words

to his wife and four days later, in a morale-boosting speech

to the House of Commons, Churchill himself used them again.

CHURCHILL: Never in the field of human conflict

was so much owed by so many to so few.

All our hearts go out to the fighter pilots...

Churchill needed good words, his own position was hardly secure.

One British reaction to defeat in Europe was a shift to the left,

even in the strangest places.

This is Osterley Park, West London,

left-wing guerrillas are in action.

They're led by a revolutionary called Tom Wintringham,

a veteran of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil war.

Here at Osterley Park,

Wintringham used his Spanish experience to build a volunteer fighting force

to confront the Nazis when they arrived in England.

Britain was hopelessly unprepared.

Most of the Army's equipment had been left behind at Dunkirk.

There were just 463 tanks in the whole country.

Hitler had thousands at his disposal.

How would we fight back?

ANTHONY EDEN: We want large numbers of men in Great Britain...

On the 14th of May 1940, the Secretary of State for War,

Anthony Eden, broadcast an appeal for volunteers.

In the next 24 hours, a quarter of a million men came forward.

NOEL COWARD: # Colonel Montmorency who was in Calcutta in '92

# Emerged from his retirement for the war

# He wasn't very pleased with all he heard and all he saw

# But whatever he felt he tightened his belt and organised a corps

# Poor...Colonel Montmorency... #

To begin with they didn't have weapons

and they didn't have uniforms,

most marched with golf clubs, pickaxe handles,

"guns" they carved out of wood, even pikes.

The Local Defence Volunteers, or LDV, were soon known

as the Look, Duck and Vanish brigade, or the Long Dentured Veterans.

They were soon renamed the Home Guard.

We know them better as Dad's Army.

And they were mocked from the start.

COWARD: # Could you please oblige us with a Bren gun?

# Or failing that, a hand grenade will do

# We've got some ammunition in a rather damp condition

# And Major Huss has an arquebus which was used at Waterloo... #

Frustrated by the old boys in charge,

Wintringham decided to show his men what he'd learned in Spain.

MAN: Tactics of guerrilla warfare, this one's known as the monkey crawl.

Here is Ricky the Spaniard showing them how it's done.

Here they were taught, amongst other things,

methods of dealing with a dive bomber.

Wintringham also wrote a best-selling book,

which mixed his left-wing principles

with recipes for home-made grenades and Molotov cocktails.

-# In some secluded rendezvous...

-Whoopee!

# ..That overlooks the avenue

# With someone sharing a delight

# A chat of this and that And cocktails for two... #

NEWSREEL: Surely more schools of this kind are needed.

We all want to know the best way of handing out cocktails to unwelcome guests.

Another member of the team was the surrealist artist

and camouflage expert, Roland Penrose, who had his own special mixture.

Soot and flour, which makes a good paste that sticks to the face,

and he enlivened his lectures with a slide show

featuring pictures of his girlfriend, the photographer and model,

Lee Miller, cunningly camouflaged in a variety of nude poses.

Tom Wintringham's belief that the war would bring socialism

wasn't far off the mark,

but his revolutionary zeal was too much for the old guard.

And just three months after it opened,

Osterley Park was taken over by the Regular Army.

It was a compliment of sorts, but it wasn't the same.

Wintringham's dream of a people's army primed for total war was over.

The 7th of September 1940, a beautiful afternoon.

At 4:15, Londoners look up

and see what they've been dreading for months.

Almost 1,000 German aircraft were advancing up the Thames.

This flying terror stretched 20 miles wide across the sky.

600 fighter planes escorting 350 bombers.

An American journalist had heard them 20 minutes earlier over Kent.

"At first we couldn't see anything,"

he said, "but soon the noise had grown into a deep full roar,

"like the far away thunder of a giant waterfall."

"And then they came into view

"like clouds of insects moving northwest

"towards the capital."

WHISTLES

London's Docks were their main target.

Warehouses and wharves were soon ablaze.

The burnt toffee smell from the Tate and Lyle sugar barges

blazing on the Thames spread through the air.

The firefighters called for help from all round the country,

"Send all the bloody pumps you've got," said one.

"The whole bloody world's on fire."

They came back the next night and the next and the one after that.

The first offensive of the London Blitz

went on for 76 days and nights,

broken only by one quiet night.

Up to a point, Britain was ready for this.

Some public shelters had been prepared, but they proved grossly inadequate.

In Spitalfields, the locals took over the vaults

of the strongest building they could find.

This basement was supposed to have space

for up to 5,000 people sheltering,

but on the first night it opened,

twice that number crammed themselves in down here.

No water, no proper lighting, no ventilation, no sanitation,

no privacy, it quickly became a lice-ridden, stinking underworld.

And yet, in this dark and dirty chaos,

something rather wonderful happened.

# Streetlamps aglow

# And news boys calling... #

Someone decided to try and make the shelter work.

His name was Mickey Davis, but he was better known

as Mickey The Midget.

He was hunchbacked and only 3' 3" tall

and he was in the shelter from the first night.

# Bright coloured lights Palladium nights

# And a world that was always gay... #

Mickey established a democratically elected Shelter Committee,

a penny a week levy to pay for cleaning

and a scheme to pay for free milk for the children.

# Laughter and song and swing doors turning... #

Soon this budding underground welfare state

was being known as Mickey's Shelter,

and British government officials were introducing

visiting American politicians to it

as a practical example of democracy, Blitz-style.

In the first month of the Blitz, a quarter of a million Londoners

lost their homes,

12,000 were badly injured,

6,000 killed.

The Blitz was the first sustained attempt to break a country's morale

and make it surrender, by bombing its civilians.

This was now a People's War

and civilians became the heroes.

We've been bombed,

dive-bombed, high-level bombed, machine-gunned,

been through two invasion scares

and the last lot we had, we had the house down about our ears,

but we're still sticking it and we're going to stick it.

But for how long? Britain badly needed help.

On the morning of 29th August 1940, a young man hailed a cab

to Euston Station to catch the boat train to Liverpool.

With his luggage was a large black metal box.

His name was Edward "Taffy" Bowen, son of a Swansea steel worker,

and a research scientist in the top secret field of radar.

Taffy Bowen was off

on one of the most important secret missions of the war.

His metal case contained virtually every military breakthrough made

by British science. It really was, in 1940, the ultimate box of tricks.

And now the taxi driver insisted on tying it to the roof of the cab.

No time to argue, so off they went.

Bowen was part of the Tizard Mission,

named after its brilliant leader, the scientist Henry Tizard.

He was proposing an historic exchange of military

and scientific secrets between Britain and the United States.

The Americans were still officially neutral,

but only they had the manufacturing power

to make the weapons we needed to win the war.

Henry Tizard persuaded Churchill to let him offer up

the deepest secrets of British science.

In his words, "Everything the Americans wanted to know"

and this was material the Americans

didn't understand and desperately wanted.

In the words of the US Army's Chief of Staff, "a goldmine."

But if it was a gift,

it was a gift with a hook in it, because Churchill desperately hoped

that it would help lure the Americans themselves into the war.

The most highly classified item in Taffy Bowen's box

was the intriguingly named "cavity magnetron".

This device would revolutionise radar technology,

it had the potential to help decide the outcome of the war.

At Euston Station a porter grabbed the metal box,

stuck it on to his shoulder and vanished into the rush hour crowds.

Taffy Bowen was a long-distance runner,

but he struggled desperately to keep an eye on this priceless cargo.

At last, to his intense relief, it was safely delivered

to a first-class compartment on the Liverpool train.

But they weren't safe yet. As the boat sailed for North America,

Liverpool suffered one of the first night-time bomb attacks of the war.

The Captain had instructions to throw the box overboard

if the ship came under attack.

One American historian later called it,

"The most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores."

Over the next three months, there was a wary exchange of information

as the British opened their box of magic and waited to see

what the Americans would offer in return.

It was a kind of intellectual striptease.

In the end, the British didn't see anything very interesting,

but by then it didn't really matter, Britain had virtually run out of options

and, so far as most American scientists were concerned,

the Tizard mission had effectively ended US neutrality.

From now on, it could only be a matter of time before America

came to the rescue of the Old World.

Couldn't it?

Meanwhile, the Blitz went on, not only in London.

On the night of November 14th 1940, in an operation called Moonlight Sonata,

Coventry became a target too.

It was the most intensive bombing raid the world had ever seen.

There was panic, hysteria, chaos.

One woman wrote to her daughter, "Coventry is a city of the dead,

"utterly devastated."

NEWSREEL: They called it a reprisal.

In return for the bombing of military objectives by the Royal Air Force,

German planes flew above the city of Coventry

to broadcast death and destruction over the whole city.

Coventry lost a third of its houses, most of its ancient centre

and its cathedral.

Other cities suffered terribly too.

Merseyside...

Tyneside... Birmingham...

Bristol... Hull.

In Clydebank, just seven out of 8,000 houses were left untouched.

In March, 1941, Plymouth was gutted by 300 bombers

in a two-night assault.

Doreen Jessop was a 17-year-old ambulance driver

who went into a Plymouth shelter just after a hit.

"There were all these people just sitting," she said.

"Some with children still on their laps, people with glasses

"and the glass still intact,

"their hair, lifeless and dusty.

"They were all dead.

"Killed by the blast."

The taste of defeat

was sapping confidence in Churchill's leadership.

Some were pointing to Stalin's Russia, engaged in a bloody struggle

against the Nazis since 1941, as an example of real fighting spirit.

On the 23rd of October 1942,

British Commonwealth forces were about to face their greatest test,

against the advancing German and Italian armies in North Africa.

Between the two forces was a five-mile wide lethal strip,

planted with half a million mines.

It was known as The Devil's Gardens.

Erwin Rommel, the German military commander in North Africa,

was a dazzling strategist, famous across the world as the Desert Fox.

Even in Britain, Rommel became a kind of popular hero.

Churchill said in the House Of Commons he was a great general,

but Churchill badly needed a victory.

The man entrusted to deliver it was a rather spiky

but occasionally brilliant general

called Bernard Montgomery, better known as Monty.

Monty was an absolutely infuriating self-publicist.

Just the kind of man for the new age of the celebrity general.

He was said to be as quick as a ferret and about as likeable,

but he was a plain-speaking and charismatic leader

who cajoled and hectored,

and inspired his men in a way no British general had ever done before.

When he took over command of the 8th Army, or the Desert Rats,

he told them, "There will be no more belly-aching, and no more retreats."

At 21:40, the battle of El-Alamein began...

SOLDIER: Fire! Fire! Fire!

..with over 800 Allied artillery guns assaulting the German and Italian lines.

The first round of shelling lasted for five and a half hours.

It was the most intense artillery attack since the First World War

and the noise was so extreme that the gunners' ears poured with blood.

Under cover of the bombardment, British troops

began to pick their way forward on foot through the heavily-mined desert

to create an eight-yard wide track,

along which the tank attack could begin.

Heavy German fire meant that

that job of trying to clear a safe path was incredibly difficult and slow.

The British tanks were becoming entangled

in a sand-blown bloody version of a London traffic jam.

Back in London, Churchill was becoming angry and worried,

"Is it really impossible to find a general who can win a battle?"

Montgomery knew he could afford to lose two or three tanks

for every German tank destroyed, and that's exactly what he did.

25,000 Germans and Italians were killed, wounded, or captured.

On the 4th of November, Rommel began his retreat into Libya.

BIG BEN CHIMING

NEWSREEL: This the BBC Home and Forces programme....

Back in Britain, the BBC news announcer was so excited

he forgot the corporation's traditional neutrality.

NEWSREEL: Here's some excellent news which has come during the past hour.

The Axis forces in the Western desert are now in full retreat.

-That'll show 'em.

-Plenty more where that came from.

# Shine on victory moon

# And guide our loved ones home... #

El-Alamein was a great British victory and it was a turning point.

Churchill summed it up,

"This is not the end,

"it is not even the beginning of the end.

"But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

And he ordered the church bells to be rung across Britain.

In many cases, the first time these bells

had been rung since the war started.

Later on, Churchill said,

"Before Alamein, we never had a victory.

"After Alamein, we never had a defeat."

# Shine on, victory moon... #

"He must have been most tiresome to play tennis against,"

said Lady Moseley, "but it amused me to watch."

The "he" was a former Wimbledon player

who would help Britain take the fight to the people of Germany.

He was an abrasive Oxford physicist and Churchill's favourite scientist.

Frederick Lindemann, known to friends as Prof.

Churchill loved having a boffin on hand.

One of his favourite party tricks was to ask Lindemann to calculate

the volume of champagne that Churchill had drunk

in the course of his lifetime, and then to work out the effect

of decanting all of that champagne

into whatever room they happened to be sitting in at the time.

"Would it lap at their ankles?

"Would they be wading in it?

"Would they be entirely submerged?"

Churchill made an occasional splash in Prof's home movies.

Lindemann played doubles with Mrs Churchill

and he always played to win.

Churchill used to say that Lindemann's brain was,

"a wonderful piece of mechanism."

And now that mechanism was tuned to destruction.

In March 1942, Lindemann sent a memo to Churchill based on his analysis

of the effects of the Nazi raids on Hull and Birmingham in 1940.

He calculated that every 40 tons of bombs dropped by British bombers

on German cities would make 4,000, to 8,000 Germans homeless.

He concluded that,

"There was little doubt that this would break the spirit of the people."

At the start of the war, the RAF had tried to avoid civilian casualties.

Lindemann was justifying a U-turn in bombing policy.

His memo became known as the "de-housing paper."

Fellow scientist Henry Tizard

had once been a great friend of Lindemann's.

The de-housing paper provoked a fierce battle between them.

Tizard's opening salvo was a direct hit.

"I am afraid that I think the way you present the facts

"is extremely misleading."

Lindemann hit back, "Mass bombing was the only way to hit the enemy hard

"and to open a second front to take pressure off the Russians."

Tizard countered, "I think too that you have got your facts wrong."

But Lindemann had Churchill's ear and Britain now began diverting

a huge proportion of her industrial resources

into the bombing of German cities.

In fact, Lindemann seems to have deliberately

distorted the statistics about the effects of German bombing

on Hull and Birmingham.

His de-housing memo fudged the numbers and overestimated

what the bombers could achieve by around 600%.

It was a piece of shabby evidence-tweaking to lend authority

to his dodgy dossier.

And it would have horrendous consequences.

In February that year, Arthur "Bomber" Harris

became head of Bomber Command.

Like Lindemann, Harris believed fervently in "terror" bombing,

but it came at a price.

His crews would suffer worse losses than almost any other fighting force,

and some of them called Harris, simply "Butcher".

Arthur Harris was once stopped by a police constable

for racing his Bentley at breakneck speed

between his headquarters at High Wycombe and London.

"You might have killed somebody, sir," said the constable.

"Young man," replied Harris, "I kill thousands of people every night."

On the nights of February 13th and 14th 1945,

one of the most beautiful cities in Europe was the target...

Dresden.

The intensive bombing unleashed a firestorm.

25,000 people are believed to have suffocated or burned to death.

It's estimated that half a million men, women and children

were killed by British and American bombing in the course of the war.

In his memoirs, Arthur Harris described the carpet bombing of Germany as

"a relatively humane method

"that saved the youth of this country from being mown down by the military,

"as it was in the war of 1914-18."

Now, there's no way of knowing those battles

that the terror bombing avoided, nor whether it shortened the war at all,

but what is certain is it didn't break the spirit of the Germans

any more than the Blitz broke the spirit of Britain.

WOMAN: Here is Learie Constantine, the world famous cricketer.

Learie used to be just a summer visitor, but when the war began

he became a welfare officer to the Ministry Of Labour.

Hello, everybody.

This is Learie Constantine.

In July 1943, the man who helped the West Indies

win their first test matches against England,

came down to London from his home in Lancashire.

He had booked a room at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square,

but when he and his family arrived the manager told them

they could stay one night but no longer.

Learie Constantine refused to budge.

His boss at the Ministry Of Labour,

Arnold Watson, arrived and asked what was going on.

"We can't have these niggers in our hotel," said the manager.

"He can stay tonight, but he has to go tomorrow morning."

When Watson demanded to know her reasons,

she replied, "Because of the Americans."

By the spring of 1944, 1.5 million Americans were in Britain,

preparing to liberate Europe.

About 130,000 of them were black.

America, in the 1940s, still had racial segregation.

US military police were supposed to enforce laws keeping blacks

and whites from socialising together, but it wasn't easy.

There were flashpoints, pub brawls,

even shootings.

Despite their attachment to segregation,

the Yanks were convinced they were bringing democracy

as well as military aid to a quaintly class-bound Britain.

The GIs certainly looked like the future.

They were taller, louder, better dressed and richer.

They had chocolate and cigarettes

in their pocket and plenty of money for the pubs and clubs,

but they brought with them from America things that were worth more than money -

millions of condoms and razor blades and stockings.

Their comics were passed from hand to hand until they became ragged

and their slang spread like a fever.

This looks like an interesting corner.

Hiya, babe, watcha doin' tonight?

Firewatching. What are you having?

You're really a hep tomata,

I'll have a slug of Bourbon.

Not surprisingly, all this went down badly with British soldiers,

with their sparse pay packets and their baggier, browner, dowdier uniforms,

as wives and girlfriends ogled something better.

I guess I'd better blow.

And there was a lot of ogling going on.

A young Canadian soldier wrote in his diary,

"A lot of men were going to die.

"Everyone knew that Hyde Park and Green Park at dusk and after dark

"were a vast battlefield of sex."

If sex was the battlefield,

Piccadilly Circus was the front line.

In the near absolute darkness of the blackout, the prostitutes of London

would light matches or shine torches on their faces,

and then down towards their stockings and high heels.

They were known as the Piccadilly Commandos.

The Sunday Pictorial newspaper described the mile around Piccadilly Circus

as "a Spiders web of vice".

Hello, Darling, you like my little dog? Yes?

No.

And at the heart of it all was Rainbow Corner,

headquarters of the American Red Cross in the West End.

Here at Rainbow Corner there was a barber shop,

hot showers, ice cream sodas, a shoe shine parlour and a juke box.

There was a basement called Dunker's Den where you could devour

doughnuts and coffee and much else.

NEWSREEL: Fraternisation on the dance floor and off it.

See what I mean?

It was a hive of 24-hour a day all-American action.

This was where the goods and attitudes from the United States,

that would later colonise the world, first arrived in Britain.

The Americans invaded us, right there.

17th of November, 1943, a village postman in Dorset

is doing his rounds.

Today, he's taking the same letter to every house.

The letter, from Major General CH Miller, was an eviction notice.

"In order to give our troops the fullest opportunity to perfect

"their training in the use of modern warfare,

"the Army must have an area of ground

"particularly suited to their special needs."

That area of ground included the little parish of Tyneham,

whose villagers were given 28 days to pack up and go.

NEWSREEL: Evacuation in the path of war has come

to the peaceful south west of England.

Not the feverish exit from an enemy invader,

but an orderly removal out of cottages, farms and village stores.

Tyneham really was Olde England.

Some of the villagers had never even left for a day-trip

to the nearest town, never mind going to live somewhere else.

But Olde England was also intensely patriotic.

Bessie and Helen Taylor were hanging out the washing

when the postman came with the eviction letter.

Helen Taylor said later, "We loved Tyneham

"but we also loved our country,

"and if it was our duty to leave for the war effort, so be it."

Some villagers were hoping to be back for the harvest in May.

They would never return.

Tyneham remains a military training area to this day.

NEWSREEL: Invasion stretched its long lines of tanks and guns and vehicles

down the rolling English roads.

Times have certainly changed since those days when invasion

implied invasion of Britain.

By April 1944, southern England had become one vast military camp.

The greatest invasion force in history was preparing for battle.

The location and timing of the attack

had become the most crucial secret of the war.

On June 6th 1944, German troops finally faced the surprise assault

on five Normandy beaches by American, British and Canadian forces. D-Day.

And so the secret, the most important secret held.

The Germans were caught off-guard,

but this was still a horrendously dangerous operation.

The huge Allied armada

was limited by the size of the landing craft and the size of the beaches.

In the first wave of the attack, only nine Allied divisions

could reach France, where they would be confronted by 58 German divisions.

After news of the heroic landings, the liberating Army's advances

were frustratingly slow.

The Germans fought cleverly and bravely and hard.

From the hedgerows of Normandy to the banks of the Rhine,

the Allied armies never had it easy.

NEWSREEL: May 4th 1945...

On Luneburg Heath, five German officers surrender

the German Armies of the North. The war is over.

When Victory In Europe finally came, the people's joy knew no bounds.

But afterwards, the full horror of the war dawned.

The British people were waking up to a new world order.

And there'd be little room for a British Empire,

or even an independent British voice,

in the post-war world.

Britannia's Imperial red-jacketed adventurers had become the crumpled,

relieved bolshie democracy of the VE Day celebrations

and even as the people cheered,

and an excited young Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen,

mingled anonymously with the crowd,

one of the least likely empires in the history of the world was dying.

Just 44 years after the death of Queen Victoria,

Imperial Britannia's final flare was her finest hour.

She'd faced down defeat, destruction and death

and the British people had refused to fall apart.

Instead, they came together in a way

they'd never really done before and sacrificed dreams and homes

and lives to keep hope alive around the world until the final victory came,

and by doing all of that they made Modern Britain,

and then they gave it to us.

DAME VERA LYNN: # There's a land of begin again

# And there's not a cloud in the sky

# Where we'll never have to grieve again

# And we'll never say goodbye. #