History Channel - Last Days of World War II (2005) Part 4 March 11-17
Here is the ultimate synchronisation of details and events which signalled the last six months of the greatest conflict the world has ever known. It involved over 100 countries, it killed 50 million people and absorbed six years of struggle and bloodshed for the peoples of half the globe. It started with the thirst for revenge by a Germany humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. Humiliation which turned into a need for national reconstruction and respect, urged on by the nationalistic rantings of the most evil dictator world history has ever produced. The fact that Britain stood alone in 1940, with its empire and commonwealth, was not by itself sufficient to defeat the tyrant and his Allies and it was only when America joined the struggle that its factories, raw materials and shipyards, eventually produced a numerical superiority of aircraft, ships and tanks that the Third Reich's days were numbered. The great war leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin committed the largest forces ever assembled in order to defeat the combined might of Germany, Italy and Japan. Forcing Hitler to die by his own hand, was the only way to rid the world of his particular brand of genocidal fascism. The series commences in mid-February 1945 with the Allies already victorious on D-Day and pursuing the Germans back from whence they came, through France, through Belgium, through the Netherlands, through the Ruhr to Berlin, to the very heart of Hitler's evil empire. The Russians expended the lives of millions of men in their last desperate attempt to reach Berlin first and Germany was split into two by an Iron Curtain. Meanwhile, in the Pacific, the Allies, mainly with American air and seapower, captured the islands which gave them the springboard into the very home islands of Japan itself. Each bloody island encounter demonstrated the fanatical tenacity of the Japanese defenders and the Allies were left with no alternative but to develop an ultimate weapon system, so terrible that it would render major wars obsolete for another 60 years. Even when America freed the Philippines in barbaric hand to hand fighting, the Japanese would still not surrender and rather than lose over 1 million Allied soldiers in landing on Japan itself, the Allies gave warning to the Japanese war leaders that they were prepared to use the ultimate weapon. In fact, the Atomic bomb had to be used twice in order to secure eventual Japanese surrender. Each week is minutely examined with high technology maps, rare archive film, the recollections of servicemen and state of the art 3D computer graphics which bring alive for today's viewer, the tactics and strategy employed to free the world by August 1945 from those who sought to destroy it. Week by week the series builds to the inevitable and exciting climax which culminates in the final Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay in August 1945.
Part 4 March 11-17
The Battle for Iwo Jima
The B-29s blitz and the U.S. Air Force's new low-level bombing tactics using incendiary bombs prove deadly for the Japanese. General Curtis LeMay hopes to force a Japanese surrender before American ground forces are scheduled to invade the mainland. Meanwhile in Europe, the Allies are closing in. With the Rhine breached, most Nazis realize their days are numbered and the end is inevitable. Hitler leaves the Reich Chancellory for the last time, and 16-year-old Anne Frank succumbs to typhus in the Belsen concentration camp.
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