World War II ended with the collapse of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan through a combination of military defeat, strategic decisions, and the use of new weapons. In Europe, the Red Army's advance toward Berlin, combined with Allied forces crossing the Rhine, led to Hitler's suicide in the Führerbunker on April 30, 1945, followed by Germany's unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945. In Asia, the devastating Okinawa campaign (1945) with over 110,000 Japanese casualties and 40,000 American casualties led American leaders to conclude that invading Japan would cause 268,000 casualties. This prompted the decision to use atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), which, combined with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria on August 9, forced Japan's surrender on September 2, 1945. The Potsdam Conference established the post-war order, with the Soviet Union gaining control over Eastern Europe, creating the conditions for the Cold War.
The Final 100 Days Of WW2: How The Third Reich And Imperial Japan Collapsed
Added:[snorts] >> War ravaging the East since 1937 and Japan's [music] invasion of China reached Europe on the 1st of September 1939 with Germany's invasion of Poland.
It became global on the 7th of December 1941 when Japanese aircraft attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.
It touched every continent and lasted for 6 years.
It ended with a new weapon for a new age.
This is the history [music] of the greatest of all man-made events.
These men are part of that history.
They are eyewitnesses to the triumphs and tragedies of the war wherever it was fought.
Their testimony is part of the story of how our world was made by those who could pay and those who could no longer meet the price [music] of empire.
In the last episode of The Price of Empire with British and American forces crossing the Rhine with the Red Army surging over Germany's eastern border, the The of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich [music] is inevitable.
In the final episode, peace in Asia [music] will follow peace in Europe after the detonation of a terrible new weapon.
On the 28th of March, 1945, the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, [music] acting on his own initiative, advised the Soviet leadership that his troops would be advancing on the line Erfurt-Leipzig-Dresden.
[music] He made it clear that Berlin was not his objective.
Stalin, delighted, replied that he too regarded Berlin as of no consequence.
Churchill was appalled. He argued that the post-war settlement demanded that the Allies meet the Russians as far east as possible.
Churchill's influence, Britain's influence, was on the wane.
On the 28th, three army groups began their move towards the line Erfurt-Leipzig-Dresden.
The British second moved from its bridgehead at Wesel. The US first and third trapped the German 89th Corps around Giessen.
Four days later, the US ninth linked with the first at Lippstadt.
In a little over three weeks, they would make contact with the Red Army.
On April the 15th, after the Ruhr Pocket had been cut in two, Field Marshal Walter Model was invited to surrender.
Model replied that he was bound by his oath to Adolf Hitler, and a formal surrender was out of the question.
Instead, he dissolved his army group.
325,000 German troops were taken prisoner.
On the 20th of April, the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin publicly denounced Army Group B as traitors.
Model, who knew that the Soviets had indicted him for war crimes, shot himself in the head.
Also in April, Nuremberg, so symbolic of Nazism, fell to General Patch's 7th US Army, and American forces crossed the Danube.
On the 25th, American and Soviet troops made contact.
On the same day, the Red Army completed its encirclement of Berlin.
Hitler declared that Berlin was to be a fortress.
Defensive preparations were made in depth, but resources were far from elite.
The 12th Army, west of the city, comprised 12 divisions that were a grab bag of raw recruits, misfits, leftovers, and veterans. Von Manteuffel's 3rd Panzer Army, north of the city, comprised nine divisions, none of which was Panzer.
The total deployed in defense of the capital was some 50 indifferent divisions. Coming towards them were almost 200 divisions of the Red Army.
And as they came on, they scorched the earth.
Everywhere that men make war, there is a tragic toll of brutalized, raped, and murdered women.
Not even the most inspired apologist can suggest that these victims were paying for crimes they had committed.
Germany maintained 500 military brothels.
As the Red Army surged into Berlin, it is estimated that 80,000 survived rape, and 10,000 rape victims died, many by suicide.
The figures are, predictably, disputed.
>> I went on the hill to have a bit observation if I can see any Russian trucks and nothing.
And on the bottom, there was a lady. She was hiking high for goats she had.
And then I went down.
Yeah, yeah, you come here. You've been already home? I said, "No."
Oh, then you don't know. I said, "What do you mean, don't know?"
Your sister has been raped by a truck of Russian soldiers.
And the last Russian soldier mutilated her and dropped her in the next grenade hole.
>> The Soviet offensive was designed to ensure the fall of Berlin no later than May Day.
May the 1st.
Soviet forces began to move on April the 12th.
On the 15th, Hitler issued a special order of the day.
"For the last time," it said, "our deadly enemies, the Jewish [music] Bolsheviks, have launched their massive forces to the attack." Hitler's order said that if every soldier did his duty, the last assault of Asia will crumple and Europe will never be Russian.
8,983 Soviet guns opened up.
And more than 6 million men and women of the Red Army began to move.
Zhukov's first Belorussian Front in the center, Konev's first Ukrainian Front in the south, Rokossovsky's second Belorussian in the north, raced each other for the prize.
Zhukov's offensive began when 140 searchlights operated by female soldiers [music] were turned on in the eyes of the enemy.
But the front line was found to be mostly deserted.
In the city, up to 10,000 [music] Germans were hanged for defeatism, many from lampposts.
April the 20th was Hitler's 56th birthday.
He decorated some members [music] of the Hitler Youth for bravery, then went into the Führerbunker [music] 16 and 1/2 m below the Chancellery Garden for the last time.
>> Now at last, after all the ghastly years of toil, blood, tears, and sweat, the climax of total German defeat is reached with the death of Berlin.
>> On the 28th, Hitler learned that Heinrich Himmler had been behind the opening of armistice negotiations in Italy.
Reichsmarschall Göring, who had slipped away south, signaled Hitler that since the Führer was trapped in Berlin, perhaps he should take control of the German state.
Hitler ordered both Göring and Himmler stripped of their rank and arrested.
He also ordered SS-Obergruppenführer Hermann Fegelein shot, which he was, for attempting to slip out of Berlin in civilian clothes.
He then married Fegelein's sister-in-law, Eva Braun, and drew up his last will and political testament, in which he explained that "I desire to share the fate that millions of others have taken upon themselves, in that I shall remain in this city."
"Furthermore, I do not want to fall into the hands of enemies [music] who, for the delectation of the hate-riddled masses, require a new spectacle promoted by the Jews."
On April 30th, after first successfully testing the poison on [music] his beloved dog Blondie, Hitler and his new bride bit down on cyanide capsules, [music] at which point Hitler, to be certain, shot himself in the temple.
The Red Army was 200 m away.
"The German wireless broadcasts serious important news," [music] said the announcer, and with Bruckner's Seventh playing as it had with the announcement of the fall of Stalingrad, the solemn voice continued, >> [music] [music] >> It is reported from the Führer's headquarters that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters.
Mrs. Goebbels murdered her [music] six children, then she and her husband committed suicide. The next day the Reichstag fell and the red [music] flag was famously hoisted on its roof.
>> [music] >> General Helmuth Weidling, commanding the military garrison, [music] surrendered the city.
The battle for the capital had cost more than 300,000 Soviet casualties.
Perhaps a similar number of German casualties and in addition 480,000 German prisoners who had failed in their attempt to break out west [music] to surrender to the American, British and French forces from whom they expected kinder treatment.
>> [clears throat] [music] >> Members of the Grand Alliance were by now making contact all along the front.
Montgomery's forces [music] met Rokossovsky's on the line Wismar-Wittenberg and on May the 4th, Montgomery received [music] the unconditional surrender of all German forces in Northwest Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.
I took by the arm.
Bottom >> On May the 7th, the Germans signed the unconditional surrender.
Before May the 7th, all of Germany's Axis partners but one had [music] already changed sides. Hungary, Romania, Italy were fighting with the allies by the time Berlin fell.
Only Japan remained to oppose the United Nations.
Churchill and Roosevelt's [music] successor, Harry Truman, were ready to declare May the 7th victory in Europe, VE Day, but their Soviet allies were not. They insisted on a separate surrender ceremony in Moscow. So VE Day became May the 8th.
The war in the west was over.
The prisoners of war were liberated.
>> We're in this camp and suddenly a tank appeared.
Next thing I know is the tank turned round and went went down the far corner of the camp barrier.
Smash the whole thing to the ground.
Coming here >> [cheering] >> I went and a fellow Brit, well, I think he was a Brit, was shot up.
Waved to us.
That was the end of the war for us.
>> The war in the west was over. Jewish people who had been hidden for years by brave countrymen could show their faces.
>> The day came when I was leaving and Jan Rosier went to his little money box and took out 100 guilders for me.
And he gave me 100 [music] guilders.
And he said to me, "For the train or the bus or whatever you need.
And don't forget [music] to write."
And uh so >> [music] >> write I did all my life.
>> [cheering] >> The war in the west was over. 160,000 collaborators were arrested. A thousand were executed. Most of those who had served went home.
>> Marvelous. A feeling of joy, really.
It had been a very long slog, so it wasn't a sort of tremendous celebration.
Uh, we just sort of rather said, "Ah, thank god that's over, you know?" That That was rather the feeling.
>> The war in the East continued.
A firebomb raid on Tokyo in March had killed 87,793 people and had destroyed 38 [music] square kilometers of the city.
>> [music] >> On April the 1st, American forces had landed on the largest of the Ryukyu Islands, an archipelago that stretches from Taiwan to the most southerly of the main home islands, Kyushu. They had landed on Okinawa.
>> We got our assignment first. I was going on watch at a 4:00 watch in the morning to 8:00.
And when you stand on watch, they come and call you cuz you can't get up. We don't have alarm clocks, you know?
But you better make that [music] watch or you're in big trouble.
>> For the invasion of Okinawa, 430 assault transports were loaded at 11 ports from Seattle to Leyte.
On April 1st, 1,300 ships were massed offshore and the 50,000 men of General Simon Bolivar Buckner's 10th Army went ashore against very little opposition.
General Ushijima, commanding the Japanese 32nd Army, having concentrated his force south of the Shuri line.
>> Just minutes after 4:00.
It hit the superstructure.
Everything went blank.
We were aft. All the machinery aft.
Machinery forward was still good.
>> Over the next few days, the Japanese launched kamikaze assaults on the invasion fleet, which did not wholly relent in all the weeks of fighting that lay ahead.
By the end of the Okinawa campaign, the suicides of 1,465 kamikaze pilots had accounted for 29 ships sunk, 120 damaged, and 3,048 sailors killed.
>> It was a kamikaze took us out.
We found his body with a parachute.
Couldn't understand why he had a parachute on.
Because he might have been shot down in Ie Shima.
That's the answer to that.
I will tell you this, and this is hard for me to tell you.
He did his job, [music] and he did it well.
I fired on planes.
I don't know if I have hit a plane because the sky lit up with the shells.
They do go down, but who did it, you don't know.
In time, as I got older, I realized he didn't mean it.
He did a job.
>> On the 9th of April, American invasion forces opened their main offensive against the well-planned fortifications of the Shuri line.
And it was terrible fighting and slow progress.
Okinawa north of the line was cleared with little real opposition. The Motobu Peninsula had been cleared by April 20th.
But it was deep into May before Japanese resistance was broken in the south.
The capital Naha fell on the 27th and Shuri Castle, [music] key to the defensive line, on the 29th.
On June the 18th, [music] with the battle almost won, General Buckner was killed by the effects of a shell exploding overhead.
He was the highest-ranking American to be killed in action.
To the surprise of the Americans who had not known it elsewhere in the Pacific, the Japanese began to surrender as their morale collapsed.
On June 22nd, General Ushijima committed suicide.
Casualty lists were catastrophic.
Japanese casualties exceeded 110,000.
Americans, 40,000 in battle and nearly 10,000 more to kamikaze.
>> This is just part of the price being paid for victory in the Pacific.
>> [music] >> It hurt you worse than it hurt them.
Remember is not pleasant.
I don't blame anybody.
But people don't know your problem.
I have to excuse myself because I'm usually a jolly fellow, a fairly wise guy.
>> The Okinawa casualties formed the basis for American projections of casualty rates for the invasion of Japan.
The estimate was that taking Kyushu, the first of the home islands, would cause 268,000 American casualties.
Double the total battlefield deaths suffered by America in the war to date.
That figure weighed heavily in the debate that would resolve the next phase of the war, the use of a new weapon.
The leaders of the Grand Alliance met [music] at Potsdam.
But not the familiar faces.
Harry S. Truman was now president of the United States, and by the time the conference adjourned in July, Winston Churchill would be missing from the lineup.
The 1945 election, Winston Churchill and his party would be dumped in a landslide.
>> Mr. Attlee summed up for Movietone the situation as it appeared to a man about to be Prime Minister.
>> The Labour Party's great victory shows that the country is ready for a new policy to face new world conditions.
>> The The that was reached at Potsdam was the last between the members of the grand coalition.
Shared out influence in Europe.
The consequences were famously described less than a year later by Winston Churchill.
"An iron curtain has descended across the continent." He said.
"Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of [music] Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, [music] Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia."
And he might have added the cities of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states for these had not always been part of the Russian Empire.
At [music] Potsdam, the leaders faced the opportunity to create a peace based on compassion and cooperation. [music] Instead, they replaced World War with Cold War.
Their priority was the Soviet Union's agreement to enter the war against Japan.
Price they were prepared to pay was the temporary occupation of the countries of Eastern Europe, which continued until 1990.
Potsdam issued a demand for Japan to surrender which said, "The alternative for Japan is prompt and [music] utter destruction."
Words composed in the knowledge that on the 16th of July, the first atomic bomb had been successfully detonated at Alamogordo in New Mexico.
Among scientists working on the project were eight refugees from Nazi persecution.
When leading scientist Robert J.
Oppenheimer saw the blast, he recalled a verse from a Hindu sacred book.
If the light of a thousand suns were to rise in the sky at once, the decision whether to use the new super bomb rested with the commander in chief, Harry S. Truman.
Truman ordered that the first special bomb be dropped as soon as conditions allowed in early August. So, on August the 6th, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped Little Boy from 9,600 m.
It detonated 575 [music] m above the city, generating a blast of 300,000° C for 1/10,000 of a second.
It was not designed [music] to blow a city up, but to knock it down.
>> I don't know.
>> [music] [music] >> 100,000 were killed, up to 100,000 more doomed. It was, said Harry Truman, the greatest thing in history.
Though no one really knew whether it would shorten the war.
>> [music] [music] >> Despite Hiroshima, there was no response from Japan to the Potsdam [music] declaration. So, Truman ordered the second attack.
>> That's the atomic bomb exploding at Nagasaki.
The film was taken in a B-29 many miles away.
>> Fat Boy was [music] detonated over Nagasaki.
35,000 were killed according to the Americans. 74,800 according to authorities in Nagasaki.
On the day that Nagasaki was bombed, the Transbaikal and Second Far East Fronts of the Red Army invaded Manchuria.
>> [music] >> The First Far East Front moved from Vladivostok.
>> During the campaign in Manchuria, the Soviet Union took 674,000 Japanese prisoners. Half survived their captivity.
Of the Japanese who had settled in Manchuria, they had been promised fresh virgin plains ready to welcome armies of fresh migrants.
67,000 starved to death and 11,000 died at the hands of vengeful Chinese.
When the Supreme Council for the Conduct of the War met in Tokyo on the 9th of August, there was bitter conflict between those arguing for peace and the war party.
It was the Soviet invasion, rather than Hiroshima, which forced the issue.
On the 10th, the day after the Soviet invasion, the Japanese [music] sent a Morse code signal to the effect that they accepted the Potsdam demands subject only to there being nothing which would compromise the role and sovereignty of the emperor.
On the 11th, Japan received the Allied reply. On the 14th of August, the emperor ordered acceptance of the terms and recorded the [music] message that was broadcast to his people the next day.
They had never heard his voice.
Now they heard Hirohito speak.
>> [music] >> "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage." He told them.
"Therefore, our empire accepts the provisions of the joint declaration."
Hirohito did not say what the joint declaration was. So when he had finished speaking, a popular announcer came on air to explain that it meant that the war was over.
People went home and waited. When polled after the war, only 4% of Japanese believed that they would be humanely treated. The [music] others believed what they had been told, that all they could expect was starvation, torture, and death.
Shortly after dawn on August the 28th, 45 US C-47 transports touched down at Atsugi Air Base.
US Colonel Charles Tench stepped onto the tarmac. He was the first conqueror ever to set foot on Japanese soil.
>> I just want to say America no hate Japan.
I just came to die.
>> [music] >> On the deck of the USS Missouri, 6 years and 1 day after Hitler had launched his invasion of Poland, General MacArthur called forward General Wainwright who had surrendered his command in the Philippines and General Percival who had surrendered his command in Singapore.
They stood at his shoulder as he accepted [music] Imperial Japan's unconditional surrender.
The war in the East was over.
After 8 years [music] of fighting, the Japanese released all of their Chinese prisoners of war.
All 56 of them.
And the Allied [music] prisoners of war who had survived were liberated.
>> Four corvettes [music] in the Australian Navy entered Ambon Harbor.
I can still see them coming down that bay to recover us.
By this time, there was only a 101 of us left.
I forget just where where I would have been, but I it was on the ship anyway coming home.
I heard we heard Bing Crosby singing, "Don't fence me in."
I kid you not.
>> [cheering] >> Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above.
Don't fence me in.
>> Those who had fought could go home.
>> Let me ride the wide open [singing and music] country that I love.
Don't fence me in.
>> Return of peace after the world's most devastating war.
VJ Day, victory in the second half of the global conflict.
>> I got off the trolley car with my big duffel bag on my back and my army uniform. I've been away for 2 years and here is my sister with her newborn baby [music] and my little mutt along side of her. Pulls away from me, comes running up the block and my sister is screaming, "I'm sorry, sir. I'm sorry. She's never done that. My dog is a good dog." And the dog is running, running and he's all over me and I'm crying in tears [music] and she didn't know me till she got within like 5 ft. My little dog knew me.
Came home and lived happily ever after.
>> The greatest man-made event in history [music] was a war of such colossal proportion that the cost in money is hard to comprehend.
>> The tally in human life even more difficult.
For every two people that the United States lost in the war, Britain, her Commonwealth and Empire lost three.
The Japanese, 12. The Germans, 22.
The Soviet [music] Union, 184.
The aggregate figure of 27 million dead for the Soviet Union [music] is probably the best guess.
And for China, more than 20 million.
No one can accurately calculate the final death toll, but it is surely dwarfed by the total of lives not lost, but permanently affected by a war which can never be understood in statistics.
>> I don't speak for the army, or what I was involved in.
I just gave you the general outlook of how we progressed.
But the individual fighting, with bayonets, hand grenades, that that is the war.
That is war.
>> [music] >> For so long a display of colors defining this or that nation's sovereignty over others, the map of the world has now become a great patchwork.
The vast land empires are no more.
The great maritime empires, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, the British, all gone.
But why?
Empires are acquired, conquered for trade, resources, territory, and because of a conceit common to all empire builders.
That because their cultural and political DNA is superior, they are right to inseminate other societies.
This has been the story of such a conceit.
Two imperial dreams drove their people into the Second World War.
The Japanese and German empires expanded violently.
They collapsed, bankrupt.
And their collapse sounded the death knell of the old imperial system.
The price of empire can be expressed in monetary terms, but the price also involves [music] values which have nothing to do with money.
The enormous convulsion of the Second World War, infected as it was in every part by the bacillus of racism, allowed people to see that independence and identity are incorruptible values.
To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire.
Wrote the Roman historian Tacitus 2,000 years ago.
Those who could have been embraced as liberators were loathed as conquerors.
They misnamed their conquests empire and they paid the price.
>> [music]
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