The History of the Twentieth Century

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.