For 4 long years, the morale, courage, and determination of the British public to live was put to the ultimate test. This World at War episode is all about the attacks the UK underwent from 1940 to 1944, what the people and government did to get through it, and how Hitler's blunder of deciding to fight a two front war took immense pressure off britain. In late 1940, the Luftwaffe shifted its focus from bombing London to attacking more provincial cities, the first of which was Coventry. As volunteers rose to the challenge of becoming firemen in order to combat the blazes German bombs would start, children were evacuated to the countryside as city after city was hit. Thousands of homes were destroyed. Shocking films showing the destruction wrought by german air raids weren't shown in wartime britain, for fear of being too demoralizing. What newsreels did show were clips of Churchill out in public, professing how britain will not rest until Hitler's abomination has been wiped from the Earth. Most importantly, he knew how to get his way in Parliament. Meanwhile, german submarines mercilessly sank any ships trying to supply britain with necessities such as oil and food, which badly hurt the country since (being an island) relies heavily on imports. Many people in britain, suspected of being enemy aliens working with the Axis, were imprisoned without trial. Strangely, britain had its own communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, whose adherents opposed the war effort because until Operation Barbarossa, Hitler was Stalin's ally. Once the Wehrmacht assaulted Russia, Churchill does all he can to get on Stalin's good side. In order to put britain's wartime output into overdrive, the government does something the Nazis would find disgusting: they conscript women, mostly for factory work. Lord Beaverbrook, a friend of Churchill's, flew to the USSR in order to reassure Stalin the british were doing all they could to provide the weapons, men and vehicles necessary to beat Hitler. Russia's government had been wanting the british to open a second front in europe for a while in order to give them time to recuperate. Because of this move, britain's communist movement now backed the war. The Libyan port city of Tobruk had fallen to Rommel's forces in North Africa in June 1942, and was a huge blow to british morale. Churchill was also facing opposition from within the government, with people claiming he wasn't a wartime leader. The british public suffered as well, as many things people took for granted before were now rationed. Many of the things that weren't had queues attached to them. Since everyone hates waiting in line, the public welcomed rationing. Each person could only have 4 ounces of bacon a week. The black market was rife during this entire time. Britain's wartime output eventually exceeds Germany's, but this pushed people to their limits both mentally and physically. In Kent, an infamous strike occurred when miners couldn't take bad conditions anymore. Churchill knew he couldn't jail all the strikers, so the government gave in and called up men to work in the mines. There was no getting out of it (no matter who your dad was). By 1944, American, Canadian and british soldiers were preparing for the Normandy invasion, but a new and terrifying threat comes into the open: the V1. Known as the buzz bomb, the Vergeltungswaffe (revenge weapon) 1 was basically the world's first cruise missile, a flying bomb equipped with a noisy pulse jet which would cut out a few seconds before it nosedived onto its target. The british public would be subjected to this horrible psychological torment for months as thousands of these things were launched from bases in France. Like always, World at War delivers a classic episode that still manages to look fresh 50 years later. We get some comedy relief in this episode, sometimes not in the form you would see coming. I thought it was hilarious how the british ambassador to russia said he knows from the words of Stalin himself that the soviet union has no desire to interfere with the affairs of any other country. We also see eerie footage of V1's hitting their targets as people take shelter. The Second World War was overall more brutal than the first, but this episode shows quite well how the First World War was probably a better time to be non-combatant. Way more civilians died in ww2 than soldiers, and not even island countries like britain were safe.
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