The History of the Twentieth Century

An eventful period in July-August 1943, when there were major developments on the Eastern Front, in the Mediterranean, and in the Pacific.

The history of Paramount Pictures, one of the oldest and most prominent film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age.

The end of the Battle of Kursk did not mean the end of the Red Army advance. The Germans withdrew, but the Red Army just kept coming.

Hundreds of thousands died in Leningrad during the winter of 1941-42, but with spring came new hope. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich's latest symphony became a patriotic anthem, and not only in the USSR.

As war raged around the globe, the city of Leningrad suffered under a German siege that lasted 872 days.

In this episode, we look at Twentieth Century-Fox, John Ford, Shirley Temple, John Wayne, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Resistance against the Nazis could take many forms.

Some of the biggest successes (and biggest failures) of European resistance movements and their guides in Britain.

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...

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.