The History of the Twentieth Century

In the occupied countries of Europe and Asia, resistance movements developed to oppose Axis occupations. In most cases, the resistance movements were divided between Communist and non-Communist.

The U-boat war was going quite well for the Germans at the beginning of 1943, but by mid-year, the German Navy was on the verge of abandoning the effort.

The Hamburg bombing forced the German government to rethink its defense policies. In Québec, Churchill and Roosevelt cut a deal on atom bomb research.

After two years of trying, RAF Bomber Command at last perfected the techniques to inflict mass casualties and devastation on an enemy city. Meanwhile, the US Eighth Air Force struggled to develop their own strategies.

As the war turned against them, the Japanese attempted to create allies among the nations it occupied, declaring the independence of Burma and the Philippines, while the US embraced China as a peer of the main Allied powers, alongside the US, UK, and USSR.

The Japanese come to the reluctant conclusion that they have to abandon Guadalcanal and northeastern New Guinea. US submarine warfare begins to take a toll, and Admiral Yamamoto is killed.

The German offenive failed. Then it was the Soviets' turn.

Adolf Hitler begins his long-delayed 1943 offensive against the USSR, which fizzles in a matter of days.

Warner Brothers was one of the minor studios until they introduced the first talking picture, which made the studio into one of the majors. In the Thirties, Warner Brothers, led by the irascible Jack L. Warner, was known for its glitzy musicals and crime dramas. In the early Forties, the studio released two films that are now regarded as among the best American films ever made: The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.

The Japanese claimed to be liberating their fellow Asians from Western oppression, but Japanese rule proved to be brutal and murderous.

In early 1943, the remaining residents of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the SS. Farther east, the German Army uncovers the mass grave where the Soviet NKVD buried thousands of murdered Polish Army officers.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the American atom bomb project kicked into high gear. Fearful that the Germans were already working on a bomb and had a head start, the US government built a huge program meant to approach the problem of building an atom bomb from several different angles all at once.

The Allies invade Sicily, which leads to the fall of Benito Mussolini.

Hitler himself said that he had "never been a man of the defensive," but in the aftermath of Stalingrad, he had no choice.

RKO Radio Pictures had a reputation for producing second-rate films. Even so, this was the studio that signed Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn; it was the studio that released King Kong and Citizen Kane.

The first in a series looking at the American film industry in the 1930s and 1940s, the heyday of the "studio system."

The fall of Burma to the Japanese put India on the front lines of the war, posing hard questions for the Indian nationalist movement.

The BBC struggles to determine its role in wartime Britain.

Stalingrad falls and Joseph Goebbels tries to spark a program to ramp up the German war effort.

Roosevelt and Churchill met again in early 1943 to discuss the next stage of the war against the Axis, and they chose a provocative venue: Casablanca, a city their armies had only recently taken.

In October and November 1942, the Japanese began their final push to drive the Americans off Guadalcanal.

The Germans began an operation to relieve the siege of Stalingrad, but the Red Army was already prepared with a counter attack.

The battle for Stalingrad raged on for two months, then the situation was suddenly upended by a surprise Soviet offensive that surrounded the city.

The Anglo-American amphibious landings in French North Africa were not only a complex military operation. There was also complex negotiation going on behind the scenes. The Allies did not want to defeat French forces in North Africa; they wanted the French to join them.

In October 1942, Bernard Montgomery began his long-awaited offensive against the Italians and Germans in Egypt. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the Mediterranean, the Allies were preparing to open a new front in Africa.

The Battle of Stalingrad was a throwback to the kinds of battles fought in the last war. Like Verdun, the Germans were paying a heavy price. Would the gain be worth it?

As Bernard Montgomery plotted an offensive against Axis forces in North Africa from the east, Dwight Eisenhower was plotting one from the west.

When German soldiers began their assault on the city of Stalingrad, they expected a quick victory, but the Soviet defense was far tougher than they had imagined.

German forces advance on Stalingrad in August 1942, while Adolf Hitler becomes increasingly hostile and mistrustful of his military commanders.

The Nazis applied the experience they had gained from murdering disabled people and Soviet POWs to their project to exterminate Jewish people in Europe.

It started with the concentration camps.

In the first American offensive action of the war, US marines land on Guadalcanal.

The German 1942 offensive in the USSR began well, so well that Hitler split the offensive into two parts. The German Army was advancing on Stalingrad and threatening to cut Russia off from its oil fields in the Caucasus.

The US military went into the war just itching to invade France and take on the Germans ASAP. It was up to the British to talk them down, though the Allies did attempt a raid on the French coast at the port of Dieppe. Meanwhile, German intelligence infiltrated saboteurs into the United States.

The war against Japan brought the Nationalists and the Communists back into a new alliance, but it didn't last. Mao Zedong polished up his political writings and asserted his authority over the Party.

Adolf Hitler redeployed Luftwaffe units from the Eastern front to the Mediterranean. With Axis air superiority in the region established, shipments of equipment and supplies to Panzer Army Africa substantially increased. Soon Rommel was on the move again, this time driving the British deep into Egypt.

Rommel was surprised by a British offensive (Operation Crusader) and his forces were driven all the way back to where he had started from a year earlier. But in a few months, he and his army pushed the British back to where they had started.

When the United States entered the war, the German U-boats suddenly had many more targets.

Reinhard Heydrich was one of the most vicious of the Nazis. So much so that the Czechoslovak and British governments decided that he needed to be eliminated.

The Japanese execute their attempted ambush at Midway, and it fails catastrophically.

The US Navy sent two of its carriers into the southwest Pacific to thwart the Japanese campaign to take New Caledonia and isolate Australia. The Japanese responded by sending two of their own. The carriers engaged each other in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, President Roosevelt asked the military to find a way to strike back at the Japanese Home Islands. It took an unorthodox approach to make this possible.

For India, like Australia, the entry of Japan into the war meant it was no longer a distant, European struggle. By May 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army was at the Indian border.

In 1942, many Americans feared a Japanese invasion of the West Coast of the US or Canada was imminent. Regrettably, these fears led to the belief--unsupported by facts--that the ethnic Japanese population on the West Coast represented a dangerous fifth column of potential spies and saboteurs.

Sometime in the autumn of 1941, a decision was made among the Nazi elite to murder every Jewish person in Europe--or within reach, anyway. No record exists of how that decision was made, but we have a very detailed record of how it was carried out.

The winter of 1941-42 was not a happy one for the German Army. On the Eastern Front it was battered by a record cold winter and a Soviet counteroffensive. In North Africa, a British offensive pushed Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps all the way back to central Libya, from where he had begun.

After the sinking of Bismarck, the Germans abandoned surface raiding in the Atlantic and turned to their greatest naval strength: submarine warfare.

The Luftwaffe's bombing campaign over England did not force a British capitulation. Can RAF Bomber Command force a German capitulation?

The Japanese Army's greatest victory; the British Army's greatest defeat.

The attack on Pearl Harbor ended the political division in the US between interventionists and isolationists. Now the US was united as never before.

The Japanese attack the US naval base at Pearl Harbor.