Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • I'm David Hoffman, filmmaker, and you're about to see a film that I made for high school students to understand a bit about World War two.

  • The job I got was for the MSM, a flight in Seattle.

  • They asked me to create these short films that would run permanently in the museum in this aviation exhibit.

  • So you're seeing airplanes from World War Two and they said to me, give a sense to high school students off what it is that caused this war and why the war was so important to fight Mussolini and Hitler is who I'm looking at and to some extent, Japan at the same time.

  • And as I was thinking about the script and looking at the footage, one word just occurred to me able, If this isn't evil, what happened here?

  • I don't know what is.

  • So this is a short documentary written by me trying to explain the young people why we fought that war, who we were against and what they will like these people, how they saw it and how they felt.

  • I hope it affects you, and maybe you'll bring your family and or pass it over to your sons and daughters to watch as well.

  • Evil.

  • Many people today are not comfortable with the idea of evil because of the widely shared belief that we humanity are essentially good.

  • And if other people don't like us or our ways, and even if they do things against us, it isn't necessarily because their innate Lee bad.

  • They simply have different interests, values and priorities that are, if you put yourself in their position valid.

  • But as the third decade of the 20th century dawned, something began to stir in the world a force so dark that even in hindsight, we cannot attribute it to mere differences of attitude, opinion or values.

  • It was more horrible than that.

  • Today.

  • People still define this force and what it wrought on the world as evil.

  • The force was violent nationalism.

  • Its leaders brilliantly used radio, newspapers and motion pictures to dominate the minds of their people, and they attempted to exterminate all opposition to themselves.

  • By the mid 19 thirties, violent nationalism was more than a political ideology.

  • It was an action plan for Germany and Italy and Japan that made them powerful military states with the power to force their will and to dominate the entire world.

  • They're insatiable drive to conquer and the rest of the world's resistance to and victory over them is the story of World War Two.

  • It is a story of evil and of the victory over it.

  • World war had ended when the soldiers came home.

  • The world that they came home two was coming to grips with the totality of what had occurred.

  • More than eight million soldiers and six million civilians had perished, and much of Northern Europe had been laid waste.

  • Out of all of this came Ah, hopeful feeling, a feeling that this horrible world war had not been fought in vain.

  • Woodrow Wilson, the American president, proclaimed that the world had been made safe for democracy, but sadly, he was wrong.

  • For after 1918 much of the world was not made safe for democracy.

  • Italy was not safe for democracy.

  • A new leader, Benito Mussolini, found that economically starved Postwar Italy was the perfect climate for his brand of totalitarian ism.

  • He said that the solution to Italy's problems was an old, powerful state, a state that controlled not only political and military institutions, but also education, finance, culture religion, a state that dominated the individual citizens life.

  • Mussolini created an aggressive Italy not to defend itself but inherently aggressive and violent.

  • Germany wasn't safe for democracy, either.

  • It felt that it had been humiliated by the victorious allies.

  • Almost a soon as the guns of World War had fallen.

  • Simon Adolf Hitler, an ambitious street agitator in war veteran, took over a small workers political party and renamed it the National Socialist German Worker's Party, the shorthand for which in German is not see.

  • Hitler appealed to the German people because he articulated their resentments.

  • He shared their shattered dreams.

  • He promised to elevate Germany to a new level of imperial greatness, to create a new German empire beyond any that had ever existed before.

  • To make this promise believable, Hitler made use of an old tool, disturbed the masses, and he made it the very centre piece of Nazism race.

  • Hitler said that the Germans, with superior race, the master race, the arians, a race that was destined to conquer and dominate the peoples that he said were inferior.

  • Japan had until recently been a feudal society, and it's still worship its emperor as a living god the Japanese military took power using violence and the power of the media.

  • They created a Japan that, like Germany, perceived itself as superior with right to create an Asian empire and to exploit its neighbors.

  • Natural resource is for its own benefit.

  • Germany, Italy and Japan agreed to form an alliance.

  • They all had built huge standing armies and new and more powerful weapons.

  • And they were all hungry for conquest.

  • 28th of July 1937.

  • Japan invaded China.

  • It was a brutal attack that killed tens of thousands of men, women and Children.

  • Many historians recognise this as the start of World War Two.

  • On September 1st, 1939 German forces invaded Poland from the air and on the ground.

  • Polls defended their nation as best they could.

  • Britain and France publicly demanded that Germany withdraw.

  • When Germany ignored this ultimatum, both declared war on Germany.

  • This began a war in Europe.

  • Swen stars up.

  • During this time, Theo United States felt removed from this European and Asian battling.

  • America was geographically isolated by great oceans, it saw itself is a great power, Yet without a global responsibility, Germany was on the march.

  • It overran Poland and Czechoslovakia, then conquered Denmark and Norway.

  • German forces then attacked and captured the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg.

  • On the 22nd of June 1940 Hitler's armies defeated France in just 44 days.

  • The Germans had beaten what was then believed to be the best army in Europe.

  • Now Britain was the only obstacle to the German conquest of the European continent.

  • Hitler was confident that the British would soon ask for surrender terms and give up without a major fight.

  • Britain had a strong leader in Winston Churchill.

  • Churchill asked his people to rise to the occasion and to fight the impending invasion of their country to the last man and woman.

  • By the middle of August 1940 Hitler realized that Britain was not going to surrender.

  • In what is now called the Battle of Britain, Hitler sent his massive fleet of planes to destroy the smaller British Royal Air Force.

  • British fighter pilots led the fight to defend their nation because of their commitment and Britain's use of radar.

  • This battle, which Germany said would last only a few days, went on for 3.5 months and marked Germany's first setback.

  • Hitler decided to change tactics and turned the might of his military machine eastwards to fight his ultimate enemy.

  • The Soviet Union thing became the largest invasion in history, involving three million German troops along an 800 mile front in America.

  • The public still resisted entering the war.

  • President Roosevelt felt certain America would have to fight.

  • And they pushed hard to get Congress to support Britain in its fight and authorized the formation of the American Volunteer Group to help.

  • The Chinese imperial Japan, armed with modern air and naval forces, had plans to dominate Asia and the South Pacific.

  • In order to achieve this, it needed to remove American presence in the Pacific.

  • On December 7th, 1941 Japan sent six aircraft carriers with their combat planes tow launch a massive attack on the American naval forces in the Pacific, including America's largest naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

  • Information.

  • This attack killed over 2400 American servicemen in one morning and forced America to declare war against the Japanese.

  • Four days later, Germany declared war on America.

  • Wars in Europe and Asia had merged to become World War Two.

  • World War Two was fought in three major areas of the world.

  • Europe and the Mediterranean, Soviet Union and Asia and the Pacific Ocean.

  • In Europe, the Allies relentlessly attacked Germany.

  • From the air and on the ground.

  • Huge air forces of allied bombers and fighters crossed Europe day and night to hit at the German homeland.

  • This struggle lasted more than four years.

  • On Soviet Russian front, horrific battles were fought.

  • One was the battle for stomping ground.

  • After six months of fighting, including street fighting City, Russia defeated the German army, but at a cost of millions of its own people, many of them civilians.

  • The Russians were assisted by the extreme winter of 1943 which brought the German war machine toe a halt and also because of their aviators, both men and women, many of whom died in defense of their country in July of 1943 at the battle, of course, in the largest tank battle in history, the Russian army was again victorious, stopping Germany's last major offensive in the East.

  • Third area of conflict covered Southeast Asia and much of the Pacific Ocean millions of square miles in June of 1942 at the Battle of Midway United States Navy, led by three aircraft carriers, defeated the Japanese.

  • This was the turning point in the Pacific war.

  • Japan was now on the strategic defensive on dozens of Pacific islands.

  • The battles raged on for more than three years.

  • These battles involved naval and air forces and thousands of Allied and Japanese troops.

  • As they slowly move towards Japan, allied forces deployed a steady, island hopping campaign, goal of which was to quickly secure island airfields so that fighters and bombers could provide air cover for the next island invasion.

  • In southern Europe, allies took Sicily and then invaded all of Italy in September of 1943.

  • Italy surrendered.

  • On June 6th, 1944 d day Allied soldiers landed on the French coast at Normandy.

  • Nazi Germany was now trapped between Russian army in the east and the Western allies in France and Italy.

  • On October 23rd 1944 at Les Take Gulf in the Philippines, the American Navy for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the largest naval battle in history.

  • In this battle, Japan attempted a new strategy suicide pyres Mama Kaze.

  • But Japan lost back and was left with no navy to protect its home islands.

  • In the final stages of World War Two, America's beloved president Roosevelt died.

  • He did not live to see victory over Germany and Japan.

  • All of Germany's major cities have been destroyed by bombs, and millions of its soldiers and civilians had been killed.

  • But only when Soviet forces entered the German capital city of Berlin and fought a brutal street to street battles did Adolf Hitler killed himself and his nation finally give up.

  • On May 7th, 1945 Germany surrendered.

  • Japan continued fighting.

  • And had it not been for the invention and use of a secret weapon, the most horrible and powerful weapon the world had ever seen, this war would likely have cost the lives of many millions more Americans and Japanese.

  • It is an awful responsibility which has come to us way, Thank God that it has come to us instead of to our enemy.

  • It was left to the new American president, Harry Truman, to make the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities.

  • He agreed to this in the hope of shortening the war and saving lives.

  • At the same time, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria.

  • Japan finally surrendered on September 2nd, 1945 World War Two It was finally over.

  • Eastern War.

  • Time for the Japanese have accepted our terms Way this'll, ladies and death is the end of the second way.

I'm David Hoffman, filmmaker, and you're about to see a film that I made for high school students to understand a bit about World War two.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it