Episode 559: The Battle of Britain

0:00Hello and welcome to Western Seas episode 559, the Battle of Britain. Today we tell the story of the year that Britain stood alone when literally the summer skies above London became battlefields, fought by a few thousand young men, most of whom you've never heard named. Of winter bombs that would come for cities and of a phrase that would follow the survivors for the rest of their lives, Britain can take it. That's the story of how just when the island had learned to endure, the whole shape of the war changed, literally overnight.

1:00When Adolf Hitler turned his back on the channel and hurled the largest invasion force in human history eastward into the vastness of the Soviet Union that he had just signed a peace treaty with. So to understand what the summer of 1940 felt like, you have to understand what had just happened because it's a story that happened so fast. People had barely stopped to breathe in the space of about six weeks between the middle of May and the middle of June 1940. The German army had done what it had failed to do in four years of the first world war. It had beaten France, not worn France down beaten it comprehensively in a campaign of armored columns and di bombers that would soon be called Blitzkrieg, lightning war. Although it's worth noting the German high command used that word a lot less than we do. It was much headline as a doctrine. The results though were not headlines. They were real. The Netherlands gone in five days, Belgium overrun, and the British army sent to defend France

2:03and been driven back to the beaches of the small port called Dunkirk and evacuated across the channel in a scramble of destroyers and pleasure boats and fishing ships, leaving nearly all its guns, tanks, and vehicles, forgot that part last time, behind in the sand. Another 22 June 1940, France signed an armistice. Hitler had himself photographed dancing a little jig of triumph outside the railway carriage where it signed the very same carriage where Germany had surrendered actually in 1918. And so by the high summer of 1940, a map of Europe looked pretty stark from North Cape of Norway down to the Pyrenees, the coastline of the continent is under German control or the control of German allies. The Soviet Union in the east remains Hitler's partner, found to him by a cynical non-aggression pack signed less than a year before. The United States is both neutral and an ocean away, determined to stay out.

3:05Italy has just entered the war on Germany's side, really just looking to take advantage. And there, across a strip of grey water in some places, only 21 miles wide sits the United Kingdom all alone, not quite alone if we're being precise. And we should be. Britain still had the Empire and the Commonwealth, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and troops and pilots and resources flowing from all of them. It still had the Royal Navy, the most powerful in the world. But in Europe, on the ground, against the machine that had just flattened France, Britain had no ally left standing. That's the reality of the summer of 1940, and it's the one that matters today for the story. A great many people in Britain outside it quietly assumed that Britain would be next, and that Britain would, in fact, lose. And the new Prime Minister did not assume that, or if he did, he certainly never let it show.

4:05Winston Churchill had been in the job for barely a month. Having taken over the very day that German offensive in the West began, he was 65 years old, a figure many in his own party regarded with deep suspicion. A man whose career had been written off more than once. And in June of 1940, he stood up at the House of Commons and gave a series of speeches that did something no army could do that summer. They give the British a story about themselves that they could survive inside. Now, I'm not going to quote these speeches at length. You know some of the lines, honestly, and you can hear the recordings elsewhere. What matters is their argument. Churchill did not promise victory. He promised endurance. He told a frightened country that the coming battle would be called by future generations, their finest hour. And if they held on, and only if they held on, the world might yet be saved. He was in the summer of 1940, essentially, selling time.

5:07Hold on long enough to endure. That was the unspoken message. Just hold on and something will change. He honestly didn't know what and neither did anyone else. But before Britain could just hold on, it had to survive the next few months. And Adolf Hitler, of course, had a plan for those next few months. Hitler did not especially want, honestly, to invade Britain. This is one of the quiet, strange truths of our story. His obsessions had nothing to do with Britain. They pointed to Russia, and I'll come to that. And a lot of this is, of course, tied up with the racist ideology of the Nazis. But Hitler had a strange respect for the British. He had none for those for the people living to the east. He certainly would have accepted a British surrender, even a British entant, of some way. Now he seems to have half expected the British having lost the army's equipment at Dunkirk

6:10and having no allies left to see sense and negotiate. When they didn't, when Churchill's government made it brutally clear there would be no deal, the German war machine only kind of reluctantly turned to the problem of what to do with this island nation. And the plan was given a name, Uinterhum C1, Operation C. Lyon, roughly in German. On paper, the invasion looks like this. A fleet of barges and transports would carry German troops across the channel and land them along the beaches of southern England from roughly Kent westward. But there was a problem in every serious officer in the German high command knew it. To get an army across that water, you had to get it past the Royal Navy. And the Royal Navy vastly outnumbered anything the German Navy could put to see. A convoy of barges crossing the channel would be a target the Navy could not resist. And frankly, the Germans couldn't protect. Unless, unless you could take away the one thing that made the Royal Navy so dangerous

7:15in those narrow waters, which was the sky above it, warships in 1940 were terrifyingly vulnerable to aircraft. If the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, literally airweapon, could win command of the air over the channel in the invasion beaches, then its bombers could hold the Royal Navy at bay, and the barges might just get across. If it could not, C. Lyon was suicide, and the German admirals knew it. So the invasion of Britain, before it could be an invasion at all, had to be an air battle. Everything hinged on one question. Could the Luftwaffe destroy the Royal Air Force, the RAF? And specifically its fighter command in the skies over southern England in the space of a few summer weeks, before the weather turned, and the channel became impassable. That was the time frame that we're dealing with. Now the man who promised Hitler that it could be done was the head of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmartial Herman Gurring.

8:16A first world war-flying ace turned Nazi-grande, Vane addicted to pain killers, fond of metals and hunting lodges and brand pronouncements, Gurring assured the Führer that his air force would sweep the British fighters from the sky in a matter of days. It was a promise made by a man who didn't understand what he was doing. Because on the other side of the channel, the British had spent the last several years building something no other country in the world actually possessed. It wasn't a plane. It was a system. Here is the thing most people actually get wrong about the Battle of Britain. They picture it as a duel of aircraft. Spitfire versus Messerschmitt. Dashing young men in the blue skies, and that is part of it, of course. But the RAF didn't win the Battle of Britain because it had the better planes. In many respects, it actually didn't. The RAF won because, alone among the powers of the world, it had built an integrated nationwide real-time air defense network and then trusted the machine that it had built

9:20to run the war. It's called after the man who built it, the doubting system, after air-chief Marshall Sir Hugh doubting. He was prickly, aloof, deeply unfashionable, commander of the RAF command. His own nickname was stuffy. He wasn't a charmer. He was, however, possibly the most important single Allied commander of the year 1940. And he had spent years fighting his own government to build the very thing that was about to save the country. So let's talk about then how it worked. Because it's genuinely one of the great feats of organization in the history of warfare. Because once you understand it, the whole battle makes sense. So it all begins on the coast with radar towers. The British called it at the time, RDF, radio direction finding. The chain of tall masks along the southern and eastern coast, code named Chain Home, sent radio pulses out over the sea and listened for the echoes bouncing back off approaching

10:23aircraft. It was crude by later standards. It couldn't tell you exactly how many planes were precisely how high. But it could tell you minutes before you could possibly see them that something was coming, roughly where and roughly how much. Now minutes in an air battle are everything. So once the enemy formations crossed the coast where the radar pointed out to see could no longer track them, they were picked up by the observer corps, thousands of volunteers on the ground with binoculars and telephones and aircraft recognition charts, standing on the hill tops and church towers and calling in what they saw overhead. And here is the genius of it. All that information, the radar plots, the observer reports everything, flowed into central filter rooms where it was checked and combined and turned into a single coherent picture. That picture was pushed down to the operations room of the fighter groups where, and you've seen this in films, young men of the women's auxiliary air force stood around a huge map

11:26table, pushing wooded markers across it with long croopers rakes, showing in real time where every enemy formation was and where every British squadron was. The controllers reading that map could then do the one thing that made all the difference. They could send the fighters to the right place at the right time and the right height. They didn't have to keep aircraft circling uselessly in the sky, burning fuel and waiting. They could keep their precious few fighters on the ground, safe until the last possible moment and then send them straight into the incoming raid. This is why the numbers which look so lopsided are actually misleading. Yes, the Luftwaffe had more aircraft, but because of the doubting system, at the decisive point over Southern England, at the moment of contact, the RAF could meet often a raid something close to even terms. With fighters that had climbed altitude and were ready, the Germans flying over hostile territory blind to a waited for them, kept being met by defenders who seemed to know

12:30exactly where they would be. It was unnerving. Some German aircraft came to believe the British must have spies everywhere. They didn't, but they did have a system. Now let's talk about the planes and the men. The RAF fought the battle with two main fighters. The famous one is the Super Marine Spitfire, beautiful fast with those unmistakable elliptical wings, and it's kind of hogged the glory ever since. But the workhorse of the battle was the other one, the hawk or hurricane. It was less glamorous, slower, but rugged, stable and easy to repair. And here's the key. It was available in large numbers. As a fact worth putting in everyone's mind here, hurricanes shot down more German aircraft in the battle of Britain than every other British defense combined. The Spitfire got the legend that the hurricane did most of the work.

13:31As a rule of thumb, controllers like to send the Nimbler Spitfires up against the German fighters, and the sturdier hurricanes up against the bombers, though in the chaos of a real battle, that little division often dissolved. In the past, the Germans flew the Messerschmitt BF109, a superb fighter, and in more respects the equal of the Spitfire and superior and some. Man for man, plane for plane, the 109 was just about as good as anything the British had. But it had a fatal limitation for this particular fight that was about to unfold. And that was fuel. Flying from bases in France, a 109 could only spend a few precious minutes over Southern England before it had to turn for home or just fall into the channel. Pilots watched their fuel gauges with dread. And that short, reach shaped everything that happened. The German bombers, the Heinkl H111 and the Dornier Doe 17, it was a slim little bomber

14:34that the British named the Flying Pencil. And then the Jungers 88 carried the actual weight of the attack. And then there was the fearsome dive bomber I've talked about it before. The Jungers 87, the Stuka, who was screaming siren, terrorized refugees across France and Poland. Over Britain, though, the Stuka met fast fighters for the first time, and generally they lost that fight bad, slow, and helpless in its diver recovery. It was pulled out of the battle after only a few weeks of catastrophic losses. The terror of the weapon of the continent turned out to be a sitting duck over English skies. And the men who flew the British fighters, Churchill gave them a name in the speech that August. He called them the few. There were around 3000 men who flew in the Battle of Britain. The exact figure is debated, but that's the order of magnitude, roughly. And here's something you need to know. They weren't all British. Not by a long way, there were Poles, whose 303 squadron became, by some measure, the highest

15:39scoring unit in the entire battle. Men who had lost their own country and flew now with a cold fury. There were Czechs. There were Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians, South Africans, Rhodesians, and Irishmen are to a handful of Americans to find their country's neutrality. Belgians and free French. The few were actually a coalition of the exile and the far flung gathered on this one island to make a final stand. And they were also overwhelmingly young, many were teenagers, or in their very early 20s. They were being asked to climb to 20,000 feet several times a day to fight for their lives in a machine that can become a coffin within seconds and then land, refuel, and do it again before launch. And we'll talk about what it did to them. But first, let's talk about how the battle actually unfolded. Historians, mostly British ones, generally date the Battle of Britain from the 10th of July

16:41to the 31st of October 1940. Though, as always, I should note that the Germans never marked those exact dates. And any need to start to end point to a battle like this is honestly just for my convenience as a storyteller as much as it was a fact. What we can do is trace the phases, because the battle of Britain moved through distinct stages, each with its own character. Phase 1 were the channel battles. That was through July and into early August 1940. That was when the Luftwaffe went after British shipping in the channel and ports along the coast. The Germans called it Connell Kampf, the channel struggle. So what was the purpose behind this from the German perspective? Well, a couple of things. Partly it was to close the channel to British shipping. Partly it was to draw the RAF fighters out over the water. Where a downed pilot could drown and slowly grind down the British defenses.

17:43It was also probing and testing. Now, doubting for his purposes, the British commander wisely refused to be drawn into throwing the entire British strength into these coastal skirmishes. He continued to hoard England's potentially limited resources. Phase 2 started which the Eagle attack. In mid-August, Herman Goring launched the real German assault, the Undelgrift, the Eagle attack. Depending on the day that the Germans were named Oveltog or Eagle Day, which was the 13th of August 1940. Now the target had shifted inland to the RAF itself. Its airfields, aircraft on the ground and its infrastructure. The goal was to try to smash the British RAF fighter command in a matter of days. But it didn't go as planned. The weather was poor, coordination was a mess, and crucially the Germans made a series

18:43of intelligence errors that would haunt them. They badly underestimated how quickly British factories were building new fighters. Production was actually rising through the battle. And they never fully grasped the importance of the radar chain. They bombed some of the radar stations, yes, and hurt them. But they concluded that the system was too hard to knock out. They fatally, largely left it alone. They spent the battle punching at the British air defense while never quite understanding the nervous system that was directing every blow against them. Phase 3 moved to the airfields in the crisis. From roughly the last week of August into the first week of September, the Germans found that the RAFs throated and they tried to squeeze at it. They concentrated on sector airfields of southern England, the vital nerve centers of 11 group, the fighter group defending London and the southeast, commanded by the brilliant air vice marshal Keith Park, a New Zealander who ran the battle day by day with cold and

19:46calculated precision. These two weeks were the crisis of the battle. This is the part that gets flattened in the popular memory, so let's slow it down a second. By your command from the RAF was not winning easily. In fact, it was being blood, airfields were being cratered and their buildings wrecked. And worse than the loss of the runways was the loss of the pilots. You could build a new hurricane in days. You could not build a new pilot in the same time frame. The training pipeline could not keep up with the casualties and the men still flying were beyond exhaustion. Flying multiple sorties a day, sleeping in their flight kit, some of them falling asleep in the cockpit the moment they landed. Even squadron leaders were being killed and replaced by boys with a handful of flying hours who were too often shot down on their first or second engagement. The precise loss figures on both sides were bains debated to this day. But the direction was clear.

20:46Through late August, the British RAF was losing pilots faster than it could replace them. Doubting was, in effect, watching a bank balance drain and calculating how many days he had left before there was nothing left. Had the Germans kept up that pressure on the airfields for another two or three weeks, some historians argue they might genuinely have broken 11 groups of ability to defend southeastern England. But they didn't keep it up. And the reason they did it is one of the great turning points of the war. And it turned in part on an accident. Late in August 1940. A small force of German bombers apparently, off course, dropped their bombs on the city of London. This was against Hitler's explicit orders at the time. German leadership had been avoiding the deliberate bombing of the British capital, wary of the escalation it would bring. It all seems to have been a mistake. But the British didn't know that it was a mistake.

21:51And Churchill ordered a response. RAF bombers were sent to raid Berlin. The damage was minor on both sides, to be honest with you. But the insult was enormous. Gering had reportedly boasted that no enemy bomber would ever reach the German capital. Now, night after night, small British raids were doing exactly that. Hitler became incensed. And in a speech he made, he promised of retaliation, vowing to erase British cities to repay every ton of bombs many times over. And so, in early September, the Luftwaffe made a fateful decision. It shifted the weight of its attack away from the RAF's airfields, away from the throat that had been squeezing, and on to London itself. For the RAF command, the shift proved to be salvation. The pressure came off the battered airfields at exactly the moment they were the closest to breaking. The sector stations could recover and repair.

22:52It's one of history's grim ironies. The switch to bombing civilians, which was about to inflict enormous suffering on the people of London, may well have saved the fighting force that would win the battle. The 7th of September 1940, a Saturday afternoon that the Eastenders of London, who lived through it, remember on Black Saturday, the German bombers came up the Thames in Honduras, and unloaded on the docks of London's East End. The warehouses of sugar and timber and tea burned so fiercely that some pilots reported they needed no navigation to find the city of the Nights that followed. London lit its own way for the bombers. This was the beginning of what the British press soon named the Blitz, from Blitz Creek, though the campaign that followed was nothing like lightning, it was the opposite. It was slow grinding and it went on and on and on. London would be bombed on 57 consecutive nights, and the war for the ordinary British civilian

23:55had truly begun. And now we come to the heart of our story today. Not the aces and the air marshals, but the people on the ground. Because here's what makes the battle of Britain and the Blitz different, from almost any other campaign that had come before it. The battlefield was home. The people fighting to endure it were not soldiers. They were the population of a modern city, going to work in the morning and going to war at night. Now let me talk about the shelters for a moment because that's where so much of this life was lived. If you have a garden, the government might give you an Anderson shelter, a curved corrugated iron hut half buried in the earth that you covered over with soil. And if you had any spirit at all planted with vegetables on the top. It was cramped and cold and flooded when it rained, but it would take almost anything short of a direct hit. And families crawled into them night after night, sometimes from months on end. Later, there was the morocent shelter.

24:58Essentially it was a heavy steel cage that you put inside the house that doubled as a table by day in a fortified bed at night. Mente to hold up at the house around you came down. And then the recourse was the underground. The London government had initially been reluctant to let people shelter in the tube stations. They worried about a shelter mentality that people would go down and never come up that the trains would be blocked. But the people simply overruled their government. They bought a cheap ticket, went down and refused to leave. And so the deep stations of the London underground became by night, vast dormitories. Tens of thousands of people bedding down on the platforms, on the stairs, on the tracks. So the current was switched off. There were bunk beds and canteens on wheels and libraries and in prom two concerts. Bites over territory and astonishingly humbling ordinairiness of human beings just trying to make a life in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

25:59Now we should be careful here because there's a myth that we need to handle. The myth is the blitz spirit. The cheerful, uncomplaning, we're all in it together, Britain of legend, singing around the piano while the bombs fell, keeping calm and carrying on. Now that image was, in part, deliberately manufactured by a government propaganda machine that badly needed the population to hold together. And later, by a nation that wanted a story itself could be proud of. The reality was more complicated and more human. There was tremendous courage and solidarity. That was real and we shouldn't be so knowing that we sneer at it. Because Doug each other out of the rubble, strangers shared what little they had. Rescue workers went into burning, collapsing buildings again and again. But there was also fear and exhaustion. And that grief broke people. There was looting. There was profiteering. There was class resentment, a fury in the bombed out East End that the wealthy could flee

27:02to country houses or shelter and deep basements of grand hotels while the poor just kind of got stuck suffering. In the war zone records, there were nervous breakdowns and that were suicides. Whole districts of terrified people who would trek out into the countryside at night to sleep in fields and barns rather than face another raid. The authorities called them trekkers and worried about them constantly. Moral wobbled badly in some cities, especially after savage raid. Now it did not in the end collapse. That's the key part. That it held was not a foregone conclusion. And it was not because the British were magically stoic people. It held because night after night ordinary people chose to get up the next morning and chose to go to work. And because crucially, the bombing was never quite heavy enough or accurate enough to make that impossible. The bombing itself did spread beyond London. On the night of the 14th of November 1940, the Luftwaffe concentrated on the industrial

28:07city of Coventry and the Midlands. And in one night, gutted its center and destroyed its medieval cathedral. The raid was so intense that the Germans coined a chilling verb from it. Coventryn to Coventrate, meaning to obliterate a city from the air. Other cities followed through that winter and into the spring. The ports, especially, were talking about Liverpool, Bristol, Southampton, Plymouth, Hall, and Belfast. Now, how many died? And here we have to be honest with ourselves. We don't have the best numbers. The best modern estimate put the civilian dead across the whole blitz from September 1940 to the following May, at somewhere in the region of 40 to 43,000, around half of those deaths coming from London. More than a million homes in London alone were damaged or destroyed. These are estimates reconstructed from imperfect records. Honestly, you'll see different figures and different sources.

29:08The point is the scale, tens of thousands of civilians killed in their own cities, in their own beds, and through it all, the RAF fought on above them. Because the daylight battle had in fact been decided, even if nobody could quite say so, at the time. Let's go back up into the sky for a moment. To the young men we loft exhausted to their airfields. And to the day the battle is often said to have turned. The day I'm talking about is the 15th of September 1940. That day the Germans launched two great daylight assaults on London, believing because Goring had told them so, that the RAF was worn down to its last few dozen fighters, that one more push would finish it. Instead, the German bombers were met over and over again, my wave after wave of British

30:09fighters. Fighter command threw up seemingly endless squadron. Keith Park committed his reserves, the neighboring 12 groups sent down his controversial big wing, large mass formations of fighters, whose real combat value historians to argue about, but whose psychological effect on the day was profound. To the German air crew who had been assured that the RAF was finished, the site of so many British fighters still coming, still fighting, was the moment that the illusion of all of this finally died. That date, the 15th of September, is still commemorated in Britain as Battle of Britain Day. Two days later, on the 17th, Hitler postponed Operation C-Lion indefinitely. The barges, gathering in the Channel ports were quietly dispersed. The invasion of Britain turned out would never come. But why did the RAF win? Not because it was braver necessarily, the German air crew were brave to. In one because of that system that I talked about in the beginning, the radar, the control

31:11rooms, the ability to be in the right place at the right time, it won because it was fighting over home ground. So a British pilot who bailed out could be flying again the next day. Well, the German who bailed out became a prisoner the next day. In one because British factories outpreduced German expectations. It won because the BF 109 couldn't stay over England long enough. And at one, in part because the Germans kept changing their minds, well, what the heck they wanted to achieve, they wanted to attack the shipping, then the airfields and the cities. And they never sustained one strategy that might have actually broken the RAF. But let me be careful about using the word one, because this is where the popular story gets tidy and the truth stays messy. The battle of Britain was not a victory in the sense of like, Trafalgar or Waterloo. Nothing was conquered. No enemy army was destroyed. While Britain won was something subtler, and in a way more important, it wanted survival. It won the right to keep fighting.

32:12It denied Hitler the quick knockout that he needed, and proved to the world and to the still neutral United States, above all to the British themselves, I suppose, that the German war machine could be stopped. After the fall of France, that was obvious at all. After the summer of 1940, it became a fact. Then the cost of survival was paid disproportionately by a very small number of very young men. On 1500 RAF Allied crew were killed in the battle. The precise figure varies by how you count it, so take it with a grain of salt, I suppose. Many more were terribly wounded and burned. The plastic surgeon Archibald Mickendu rebuilt faces in hands of so many burned airmen at his hospital, as patients formed a club, half gallows, humor, half brotherhood, and called themselves the guinea pig club. That's the reality behind Churchill's beautiful phrase of the few. Behind quote, never was so much owed by so many to so few.

33:13And quote, are men in their early 20s, some of them who had spent the rest of their lives, with faces that surgeons had built. Here's something that the movies rarely convey. Winning the battle of Britain did not end Britain's ordeal. It began the long, gray grinding middle of the story, that year of standing alone. Because I mean the calendar kind of matters. Let me lay out where things stand. It's now, let's say, the winter of 1940 into the spring of 1941. The daylight air battle is over, sure sea lion is dead. But the night blitz grinds on into May 1941. Out in the Atlantic, German U-boats are trying to strangle Britain's lifeline of imported food and fuel. The battle of the Atlantic, a slow and desperate campaign that Churchill later said was the only thing that ever truly frightened him. Because if the convoy's failed, the island would simply starve. Then the deserts of North Africa, British and Commonwealth troops are fighting the Italians

34:15and soon the German general Erweng Rommel and his Africa corps in the Balkans and Mediterranean, the war sputters and spreads. And across the Atlantic, the United States is watching. It's still neutral, but honestly no longer indifferent. President Franklin Roosevelt could not bring his country into the war. The American public just wouldn't have it. But he could bend neutrality to the breaking point. In March 1941 came Lendlyce, a scheme by which the United States would simply supply Britain and later others with weapons, ships, food, materials and defer the question of payment. Roosevelt described it to the American public with a homely image. If your neighbor's house is on fire, you lend him your garden hose. You don't haggle over the price of the hose while the fire spreads. Lendlyce was the garden hose. It meant that Britain, though standing alone in the fighting, was no longer standing alone in the supplying. The arsenal of a still neutral America was very quietly tilting toward the island. But an arsenal is not an ally.

35:17Through the first half of 1941, Britain still had no great power fighting at its side. Churchill's whole strategy, his whole gamble, had been to hold on until something changed, until the war stopped being Germany against Britain alone and became something bigger, something Germany could not win. He did not know what would change it. He suspected, as many did, that would eventually be America coming in. He did not expect that the thing that would transform the war would come not from the West but from the East. And that bizarrely, it would be launched by Hitler himself. To understand what Hitler did in the summer of 1941, I think you really have to understand that for him, the battle against Britain was in some sense a distraction from the war that he actually wanted to be fighting. Let's think about ideology, alright, because as I've said time and time again, the difference between World War I and World War II is that World War II is ideological.

36:18And the whole ideological core of Hitler's movement laid out years before in his writings and speeches had two great obsessions welded together. The first was Liebensrum, living space. The belief that the German people needed vast new territory to the East to settle farm and rule. And that land would be sea-vaced from the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia. The second ideological basis of the Nazi movement was the genocidal hatred of what Hitler called the Judeo-Bolshevism. This conspiratorial fusion of Jewish people and the Soviet communist state into a single supposed enemy that he intended not merely to defeat but to annihilate. For Hitler, the Soviet Union was not just a strategic rival. It was a destined battleground of a racial and ideological war of extermination. The East was the point of the whole thing, which makes that pact of 1939 so strange in

37:20August of that year on the very eve of war, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact, the Malta-Ribbentrop pact, named for the two foreign ministers who signed it. It carved up Eastern Europe between them in secret. Look, it was a marriage of pure cynical convenience. It let Hitler invade Poland without fear of a two-front war. And it gave Stalin time and territory, neither man trusted the other for a moment, both expected sooner or later to fight. For Hitler, sooner or later became right now with pretty astonishing speed. Even as the blitz was still falling on British cities, he was turning his mind east. His strategic reasoning ran kind of like this and note how it kind of circles back to Britain. Britain, he believed, was only holding out because it hoped for two possible saviors, the United States and the Soviet Union. Knock out the Soviet Union, remove Britain's last possible continental ally, seize the oil of the Caucasus and the grain from Ukraine and make Germany invulnerable to blockade, and

38:25then surely Britain would have to give up. In Hitler's twisted logic, the road to defeating Britain bizarrely ran through Moscow, and beneath the strategy always burned the ideology, the destruction of the Soviet state and the conquest of its lands, which had been the goal all along. In December 1940, while the bombs were still falling on London, Hitler signed the order, your directive number 21, codenamed Operation Boberosa after Frederick Boberosa, the medieval Holy Roman Emperor. Its opening declaration was blunt. The German armed forces must be prepared to crush the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign. A rapid campaign. They genuinely believed they could defeat the largest country on Earth before winter came. As one German planning assumption chillingly put it, the only way to do it was to get the German army to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure would come crashing down. The invasion was set for spring of 1941.

39:28It was delayed, partly it's often argued by German operations in the Balkans in Greece, though historians debate just how much delay is really mattered. The launch slipped to the 22nd of June 1941. And so, in the pre-dawned darkness of that day, along a front that stretched roughly 1800 miles from the Arctic and the North to the Black Sea in the South, the German war machine and its allies fell upon the Soviet Union. The scale is almost impossible to even grasp in your mind and the precise figures are still debated. So let me give you the order of magnitude and just hedge it as we go on. Something on the order of 3 million or more Axis soldiers, German and alongside the Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Finnish and others, supported by thousands of tanks, thousands of aircraft, and thousands of horses, yes horses, because as I talked about in two episodes ago, the German army was never as fully recognized as the myth suggests. It was, by most reckonings, the largest single invasion in the history of the world.

40:32Nothing before it had approached the scale and nothing since has matched it. The Germans came in three great army groups, Army Group North, driving toward Leningrad, on a day St. Petersburg, the cradle of the Russian Revolution, Army Group Center, the strongest, drove east along the historic invasion round toward Minsk, Smolensk and beyond that Moscow, and then Army Group South, which drove into Ukraine toward its grain fields, the great city of Kiev and beyond at the oil of the Caucasus. In the first few weeks, it was a catastrophe for the Soviet Union, almost beyond the description. This is one of the strangest facts of the whole war. Stalin had been warned, he had been warned by his own spies, by intelligence from the British, by defectors, by the clear visible massing of German forces on the border. And he just refused to believe it, or refused to act on it. Apparently convinced Hitler would not be so insane as to attack while Britain was still undefeated, or fearful that an Soviet mobilization might itself provoke war.

41:36So when the blow fell, the Red Army was caught in the worst possible posture. War deployed, poorly prepared, its command structure gutted by a purge of the previous years, in which Stalin had executed or imprisoned a huge proportion of his most senior and experienced officers. And with no one to lead them, the result for the Red Army was a disaster. Soviet aircraft were destroyed in the our hundreds on the ground on the first morning before they could even take off. German armored spearheads punched through the Soviet lines, and then curled around behind them, beating up deep in the rear to trap huge pockets of Soviet troops. Adminsk, at Smolensk, and later, most catastrophically a Kiev, entire Soviet armies were encircled and destroyed or captured. The number taken prisoner in those first months ran into the millions. By any conventional military logic of 1941, the Soviet Union should have been finished. The German generals allowed themselves to believe their own promise. They had to merely kick in the door.

42:37But here's the thing, the door didn't actually fall off his hinges. And now we can kind of only glimpse what's coming, because behind the vast encirclements and millions of prisoners, something that German planners had not counted on was happening. That is that the Soviet Union was enormous, space that swallowed advancing armies and stretched supply lines until they just frayed. It had reserves of manpower that Germans had wildly underestimated. For every Soviet army destroyed, another just seemed to crop up like a hydra. And it had, waiting in the calendar, the oldest ally of Russia. The autumn rains that would turn the roads into bottomless mud, and behind them the Russian winter, for which the German army, expecting to win before the leaves fell, had not even packed warm coats. There's one more thing, and it's the darkest strand of the whole story. Barbarossa was not and was never intended to be a conventional war. It was, from its planning, a war of racial annihilation.

43:39The orders that went out to the German forces stripped away the normal restraints of warfare against the peoples of the east. Behind the frontline troops came the special killing squads, the Eitensin group, whose task it was to mass murder Jews, communists, and I guess anybody else they wanted to. In the fields and forests, ravines of the newly occupied Soviet territories, in the second half of 1941, that's when the Holocaust enters its most murderous phase. I'll get into that more deeply in a future episode, but I couldn't at least start to talk about Operation Barbarossa and leave it out. So I'm going to mark it here. The invasion that began on the 22nd of June, 1941, was not only the largest military operation history, it was the beginning of one of the biggest crimes. Now, let's go back to the island of Great Britain and to what all this means. Because on the evening of that same day, the 22nd of June 1941, Winston Churchill went

44:40on the radio and did something that must have astonished a great number of his listeners. Churchill was and always had been one of the fiercest anti-communists in British life. It's been decades denouncing Bolshevism in the harshest terms. And now, he stood before the microphone and pledged Britain's wholehearted support to Stalin, Soviet Union. He did not pretend to have changed his mind about communism. Privately, he made a famous remark to the effect that if Hitler invaded hell, he would find something kind to say about the devil in the House of Commons. His logic was simple and total. Anyone fighting Hitler was, at least for that moment, Britain's friend, the enemy of my enemy. He'd spent a year gambling on the hope that the war would grow until Germany could not win it. And now, in a single morning, it looked like it had. Think about what changed for Britain on that day. For over a year since the fall of France, the island had stood as the only power actively fighting Germany and Europe. All of Hitler's might or dearly all of it could be directed against it.

45:41And now overnight, the overwhelming bulk of the German army, millions of men, had turned. Turned its back on Great Britain and marched off to the east into a struggle so vast, it would consume the greater part of German strength for the rest of the war. The pressure on Britain eased. The threat of invasion already gone, just receded into memory. Britain was still fighting, still bombed, still stretched across the Atlantic in the desert, but it was no longer a lollin. And that's where we're going to leave it for this time. And it's important to note, I really do want to point this out, it's not yet a world war, not fully, because one enormous piece is still on the board and still officially at peace. Across the Atlantic, the United States is arming Britain, escorting convoys, edging ever closer to the fight, but its soldiers are not yet in. And its people are still for a couple months yet determined to stay out. But that's not going to last.

46:42As we'll see next time, in the far Pacific, quite unnoticed by most people in the story. At least today, a Japanese fleet and a slow burning crisis are moving toward the collision that will in one single December morning drag the last great power into the war and complete the alliance that will finally and eventually destroy the Third Reich.