Rare Unseen Footage From The Battle Of Kursk

Six years and one day after Hitler invaded Poland, Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender. September 2nd, 1945. No one will ever know how many die. No one will ever know the name of the first or the last victim. But they are the story of the Second World War. Not the tanks that could not move, or the planes that could not fly, or the ships that could not sail without them. War is about people, in uniform or not. People in cities, villages, jungles. Strangers as allies. Neighbours as enemies. Hundreds of millions of people, for whom for six years and one day, there was hell on earth. In 1918, an armistice, rather than surrender, led to a peace treaty that satisfied no one. And a belief, amongst those who had lost the war, that they had not been defeated, but betrayed. In 1943, President Roosevelt made it clear that there would be no ambiguity this time. Unconditional surrender was the only thing that would stop the fighting. The day before the Casablanca Conference, at which Roosevelt announced his insistence on unconditional surrender, a decree was published in Berlin. Führer Decree on the Full Employment of Men and Women in the Defence of the Reich. It has become known as the Total War Decree. The following month, Joseph Goebbels was driven to the Berlin Sport Palace to deliver the Total War speech. He warned his hand-picked audience that Behind the onrushing Soviet divisions, we can see the Jewish liquidation squads. Goebbels made this famous speech about total war, and he actually for the first time admitted that the fatherland was vulnerable, that victory wasn't an absolute certainty. He asked his audience ten questions. He told them they were answering Especially for our enemies, who are listening to us on the radio. Do you want a war more total and radical than anything we can even imagine today? Goebbels was talking about much more than material production and industry. He was talking about the mindset of the German people as a whole. He was talking about we're all in this together and our fate lies together. The speech rose to its climax. Now people rise up and let the storm break loose. The affirmative din from the hand-picked audience continued for 20 minutes after Goebbels had left the building. The Soviet campaign in early 1943 had been thwarted by Manstein's counter-offensive, leaving a salient. Manstein recaptures the city of Kharkov, and that has created the southern end of a bulge, a bulge that was already evident in the northern part of the line, and it has now created a southern shoulder to what is now called the Kursk salient. The Germans decide that their next move should be to pinch out the salient. They call the operation Citadel. But the Kursk salient was as obvious a target to Stalin as it was to Hitler. Some 300,000 Soviet civilians are being mobilized to build these defenses. They will dig some 9,000 kilometers of trenches. They will have anti-tank ditches and anti-tank traps. They will have underground bunkers. They will have thousands of mines per square kilometer. The Soviets laid 503,993 anti-tank and 439,348 anti-personnel mines before the Luftwaffe started their attack on Kursk. In the opening 45 minutes of their assault, the Germans fired more shells than they had discharged during the Polish and French campaigns combined. The artillery was whistling. The rocket was flying. The artillery was bombing. The tanks were bombing. The command was not heard. I told the command to go to the right or to the left. We were pushing them with our legs. They said, to the right, and we said, to the left. On the day of the offensive, July 4th, Hitler sent a message to his troops. This day, you are to take part in an offensive of such importance that the whole future of the war may depend on its outcome. You feel that the Germans are flying. They are shooting. You lie down and hear the bullets flying into the ground. One is in front of you, the other is behind you. Someone is shouting. Someone is not shouting anymore and cannot shout. That is, he is killed. It was scary. The bomb was whistling. You couldn't see where it was whistling. The shells were firing from the mortars. The mortars were firing hard. I was talking about the machine guns and machine guns. I went to attack. He was not there. I was falling. I crawled back. He was lying. He was laughing. I looked, but he was not there. Everything was torn out. Everything was outside of him. In the weeks of continuous fighting, during which the Red Army fired 42 million rounds of artillery ammunition, the Germans were forced back 240 kilometers. I managed to break into the trenches. I was in a hand-to-hand combat. Who could kill whom? We had a lot of injuries. But, thank God, we were able to carry out our tasks Kursk, in my view, is absolutely not a turning point in the war. It's a turning point in the 1943 summer offensive. And Kursk is the end of the German initiative on the Eastern Front. But, in some ways, it's the end of the German initiative on the Eastern Front because the Soviets themselves sensibly decided not to attack. By the numbers, Germany had the best of Kursk. Total casualties 49,822 against the Soviet Union's 177,847. And Soviet armor lost to Germans in the ratio of 5 to 1. But numbers don't tell the story. Igor Grebshov was with the Soviet forces. It was probably the shortest battle as it started on the 5th of July 1943. On the 5th of August, there were fireworks. A couple of days earlier, on the other side of the planet and of the war, Japan declared Burma independent from British rule. The story in Burma, as in Malaya, was shock, speed, and panic. The Japanese moved from Thailand through jungle they were not supposed to be able to negotiate. I was terrified. There was a snake and it was poisonous. I was scared. I thought if I got bitten I would die. The scorpions in my house would come to me and say if you get bitten you will die. I didn't want that. They bombed Rangoon where the element of surprise cost the lives of a couple of thousand sightseers. A Chinese soldier watched the remnants of the British Empire fleeing from the Japanese. Corpses on the side of the road covered in gold jewelry but no one takes it. Someone asked a soldier to trade him a bowl of rice for gold jewelry. The soldier said gold is useless. Of the women, Yu Xiao said their whiteness was covered by the muck. The British retreat was agonizing. It was carried over hundreds of miles of largely difficult terrain in often terrible weather on roads clogged with hordes of refugees and most of the equipment had to be left behind. General, later Field Marshal Slim said of the men They looked like scarecrows but they looked like soldiers too. Soon there were no British troops left in Burma. Amongst the commanders according to a British liaison officer The general atmosphere of gloom was almost impossible to describe. And it was actually the longest retreat in the history of the British Army and it was said to be the road of bones. In July, Japanese headquarters ordered planning of a three-pronged thrust into India. But Wavell, commander-in-chief India, moved first launching the Arakan offensive in September. The Arakan campaign went wrong for a number of reasons. Fairly obviously jungle warfare training hadn't reached the point where the Allies could successfully take it on. On the other hand the Japanese were still reasonably fresh and they could meet the attackers not only with defence but with counter-attacks. By mid-May of 1943 at a cost of about 5,000 British casualties not including those struck down by sickness the British were back where they started and the Japanese, having taken less than 2,000 casualties were still in control. It showed the need for better training and above all the need to create a spree, morale, a sense of optimism and confidence. These are the first newsreel pictures of this great little soldier the man who trained British troops to live in the jungle and beat the Japanese at their own kind of fighting. No detail was too trivial for the inspection of General Wingate he knew that in war trivial details cost lives. The kit of a man who will live and fight for months cut off in the jungle is an all important factor. Major Ord Wingate one of the eccentric soldier mystic types that pop up in British military history proposed special units operating behind Japanese lines and supplied by air the Chindits. Here they are for the first time in newsreels the Chindits. Take a close look at them. Not that it will help you to recognise any of them their own mother couldn't. Approaching a village they prepare for action they look casual. Wingate argued for groups conducting long range penetrations behind the Japanese lines to wreak havoc in the Japanese rear areas. Incredibly mobile moving up their equipment by mule. The Japanese would then have to divert troops from the front line to deal with them. He called that having your hand in the enemy's bowels. It was a very radical idea that you could infiltrate forces behind Japanese lines in Burma and they would go in like the fingers of a hand in columns and then at certain points they would come together like a fist attack a target and then disperse again Very few prisoners were taken for the simple reason that mobile Chindit columns behind enemy lines had no way of taking prisoners and keeping them alive and the Japanese certainly didn't want to be taken prisoner. The first expedition crossed into Burma in mid February and returned in late April. It had lost almost 800 of its 3000 strong force. 600 of those who returned were unable to take any further part in the war. Two weeks later Ord Wingate was killed in an air crash. Wingate was very much a maverick. He had more enemies than friends in the British Army. He of course died and with it the spirit of the Chindits was very badly shaken. In January 1944 Chiang Kai-shek who had sent several of his best divisions to support the campaign to eject the Japanese from Burma warned his allies that a major Japanese offensive was imminent. It may be expected that before long Japan will launch an all-out offensive against China. The Chinese divisions remained in Burma but their success came at a terrible cost to China. Operation Ishigo, literally Operation Number One, was the largest action launched by Japanese anywhere during the war. The plan was to neutralize American air bases in China from which bombers attacked Japanese cities and open a supply corridor between northern China and Vietnam. Half a million Japanese were engaged. A greater number fought on the Chinese side. These pictures of the evacuation of Kualin might equally well be any one of a thousand other places in war-ravaged China. Almost the only transport was the single track railway and Kualin station was soon packed with about 20,000 would-be passengers. The entire Chinese defence collapsed in just two months. 34 Chinese divisions simply evaporated into thin air. Almost 100,000 Chinese were killed. Over 60,000 Japanese. A senior Chinese officer observed, Every time the enemy sets his foot down somewhere, that place is scarred. In every corner, every house is wrecked. A land corridor to Southeast Asia was never a possibility. And by the time of Ishigo, American aircraft were no longer dependent on Chinese bases. The only beneficiary of the campaign was the Chinese Communist Party, safely headquartered in remote Yan'an. Preserving its strength for the fight that would follow the war. At the beginning of April 1944, the Japanese 31st Division in Burma had closed on the British base across the Indian border at Kohima. It was held by a garrison of just 2,000, which had received a last man, last bullet order. Captain Jock Young from Glasgow said, Since my orders are to fight to the last man, I will be the last man. After five days of the siege, the garrison was reinforced by a battalion. A British captain said, The whole place is one big flap. The defence held, famously, at close quarters. The Japanese turned towards Impal, but the Allied response was now organised and effective. I was a forward scout. Then we had to court and lead in the rest of the section. You couldn't see anything. All you could see was a mess of greenery. That was real jungle up there. All of a sudden, a shot rang out. And I couldn't go forward then, because I didn't know how many how many Japs or whatever was there. There was just the one shot. And they shot their corporal. And I carried him back. I was expecting to get shot carrying him back. Never well supplied, the Japanese now battled an organised enemy, an almost total lack of reinforcements and the monsoon. When we got near Rangoon, the rains came. You can't believe it, but within one night, the fields were full of water and the teetop was visible. Otherwise, the trunk was not there. So you couldn't move. This forest-covered battlefront presents every kind of problem. It's not surprising the progress is often slow when you consider the immense difficulties of supply. We existed on parachute supplies, you know. They dropped you in the Russians by parachute, which the Japs never had nothing like that. So they really chased them. Then the order was push them back. They're not going to get any more supplies. They're not going to get any medicine. So they tried to push east. The Japanese could not get the villagers to give that much food. So they sometimes forced the villagers. So the word went around, get out of the village if they come. The Burmese will go after them now. That you Japs, you bullied us now. They start killing some of them. So they were in a terrible state. The Japs apparently used to go for these gold teeth. They used to have gold teeth, a lot of them. You come across dead Japs, you had to search them. See what identification I'm telling you they were. And the chap that we had in the West Kents, he used to look at them and collect their teeth. He got a little bag, gold teeth. Now this is true. I'm not making this up. The Japanese, they were never taken prisoner. They killed themselves. And as the Japs are so far not in the habit of surrendering, you can read it in the expressions of the prisoners too. I was beaten up so much. I was told to die. I had to live and face the shame of being a prisoner. I had to survive. I still remember it in my head. I still remember it. I was put through so much. I had to live and face the shame of being a prisoner. I had to go home. I had to survive. And if I survive, we're going to split. I know it's a big world in America. It's not just about war. There's a possibility of returning home. But, I was poor. The Japanese made a colossal effort to supply their army in Burma. They had surrendered control of the seas to the United States Navy, so they built a railway. Their eyes turned to a land link. There was a bit of railway at each end already, so it didn't seem too much of a problem. The Japanese succeeded in doing something that the British railway builders could not do, and that is to build a railway line that goes from western Thailand to eastern Burma. 250 miles of metre-gauge track constructed in an incredibly short time, really. From Mulmaine in Burma to Bangkok in Siam, they built the railway of death. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Malays, Burmese and Indians, and 25,000 allied prisoners of war. And of those, about 12,000 prisoners died. Hundreds of thousands of Indian slaves, they won't tell you the truth, of mostly Tamil Indians and the poor Malayans and all that. If we had a bad time, they had a shocking time. They had no organisation, they had no one to lead them, no one to help them, and they died in their tens of thousands. They were at the mercy of tropical diseases. I think the death toll of Asian labourers was about 80,000. All were driven like slaves to work. They were beaten if they even paused. Some were beaten to death. They were driven to toil in the tropical sun. Men died like flies. They say a man died for every sleeper laid along this track. No chap that was there died on his own. He always had somebody beside him. You'd talk to him, you'd do everything you could for him, even though you knew you couldn't do any more for him, but you'd talk to try and comfort him and everything like that. You'll be right, mate, don't worry about it. You'll be right, you'll be right, you know. Most probably they knew themselves they weren't going to be right. Men were not the only victims of what became known as the Death Railway. One Australian prisoner recalled the night a train arrived. Young women got out. The Japanese guards lined up with tickets. The women who arrived were comfort women. They were also prisoners of war, of what some have labelled rape warfare. They were part of the most elaborate system of sex trafficking in history. On an official basis of 20 women for every 700,000 Japanese soldiers, women from Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines were enslaved in a state-controlled criminal activity. Those who survived bore witness. I was nearly killed several times. There were men who were drunk and who were brandishing swords at me while making demands for perverted sex. There was a German equivalent, the Einsatzfrauen, using women who had chosen life in a brothel over death as a slave labourer, or women already imprisoned. A woman in a camp brothel at Buchenwald said, Not even the weather was on the agenda. Everything was so mechanical. They finished their business and left. The Holocaust, too, encompassed sexual violence. Eyewitnesses to mass shootings reported the killers first raping their victims. And when the Soviet army reached German territory, rape warfare was again common. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped because the Soviet army, Stalin, he said, You think that the Soviet army is an army of heroes, but you should always remember that this is the ordinary occupation army. I went on the hill to have a bit of 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 there and, Oh, you come here. You've been already home? I said, No. Your sister has been raped by a whole truck of Russian soldiers. And the last Russian soldier mutilated her and dropped her in the next grenade hole. Total war is not one hell on earth, but many. Sexual violence was one. Another, away from the bullets and bombs, was the deadliest weapon of the war, taking the lives of 20 million. The hell of hunger. In India, in China and Vietnam, Japan's expansion, directly or indirectly, contributed to the deaths of not less than 5 million people. India, more famine in a land swept by starvation. The death rate already 1,000 a week rises. The reason for the Bengal famine, man-made or natural causes, continues to be debated. The effects do not. British efforts to deter a Japanese invasion by the destruction of food stores and of many thousands of river craft, along with hoarding and speculation by grain traders, are among the causes listed for the famine. But some point to the effects of a cyclone, of falling harvests, of a major crop failure in 1942. What is certain is that when Burma fell to the Japanese in the spring of 1942, India lost 15% of its rice supply and at the beginning of 1943 faced a food crisis. Which is when Winston Churchill ordered a 60% cut in both military and civilian shipping to the Indian Ocean. He said, There is no reason why all parts of the British Empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the mother country has done. Biswa Chakrabarti, a schoolmaster, wrote, The whole population seems to be moving silently towards death. He was not, of course, talking about the mother country. But Churchill's attitude to India, and particularly to Indian independence, is well known. As he famously said, India is no more a nation than the equator, that it had no meaning as a nation. So he completely dismissed Indian nationalism. In a famine, no one wants extra mouths to feed. The desperate but common ploy of selling children was no longer possible and peasants resorted to renting their daughters out for the night. Arangamohan Das reached a bazaar on the banks of a river. Then I saw nearly 500 destitutes of both sexes almost naked and reduced to bare skeletons. I had the misfortune of seeing eight people breathe their last before my eyes. It shocked me to the bottom of my heart. D.C. Majumdar wrote on behalf of his village to the Bengal Relief Committee. There are hundreds of little children, both orphans and those deserted by parents. They require milk, barley, water, etc. if the innocent creatures are to be saved. Archibald Wavell, at last, shone. Appointed Viceroy, he acted swiftly to impose price controls and other measures. But he received little support from London, whose attitude he described as... short-sighted and callous. When he learned how supplies were being airlifted to relieve a food shortage in the Netherlands, Wavell said that it was... a very different attitude towards feeding the starving population when the starvation is in Europe. Action to alleviate the famine was finally taken out of concern for the effect the famine was having on the troops being massed for the reconquest of Burma, 60% of whom were Indian. There is little controversy about another famine, the one that devastated Tonkin, the north of Vietnam. It was man-made. In Tonkin, there's a terrible famine. About 2 million people die of famine as a result of the Japanese stripping away their food and taking it off and then basically wasting it. 5% of the population died. In Henan province in China, at least 2 million more starved to death. The Henan peasants endured a series of biblical afflictions, drought, frost, hail and a plague of locusts. The harvest fell to three quarters of its normal level and had to sustain not just the population, but 300,000 nationalist troops garrisoned on them. In February 1943, the American journalist Theodore White visited Henan. He learned from a doctor that a woman had been caught boiling her baby. When the nationalist army poured back through the affected areas in the face of Operation Ishigo, the peasants took revenge, disarming as many as 50,000 of their own soldiers and murdering perhaps a fifth of them. Europe too lost millions to starvation. By January 1942, the death rate in Greece was 2,000 a day and infant mortality had risen to over 50%. Churchill was steadfast in refusing to allow food aid past the Royal Navy's blockade. The British Minister of State in Cairo, Oliver Lyttelton, telegrammed to his government, History will, I believe, pronounce stern judgment on our policy. The final death toll in Greece was 300,000. But the Soviet Union dwarfs all of these tragedies. As many as 9 million died of starvation during the war. Between 6 and 7 million in areas under German control, including prisoners of war. Three, four weeks is enough to almost finish a person mentally and then it takes probably one more week to kill him or her physically. And that's what we saw on Eastern Front. They didn't care about nutrition, didn't care about shelter. There was just not enough food for people, especially for small children. Those who die of hunger are one statistic. Those who survive with development compromised by malnutrition or who die from diseases associated with famine are another. Their number is unknown. The invasion of Sicily, just part of the biggest invasion armada in history. Department from the sea proceeded to land. They would at night drop flares on the ships to light it up like you were on a stage. So the dive bombers would come in. They made a screech that would scare you and they would attack the convoy. But there were a couple of ships that were sunk. Some with troops. The Allies had landed and were winning the battle in Sicily. Even while the troops were coming ashore, a rebellion was catching fire in Rome. Il Duce had had his moment of glory. His goose-stepping, black-shirted legions had held the center of the stage for over 20 years. But their day of reckoning was now at hand. On July 24th, 25th, the Fascist Grand Council had voted for the removal of Mussolini. They voted 19 to 7. And such was his level of psychological protection that he didn't quite register what had happened. He went home, went to sleep, and he came back to the office the next morning as though nothing had happened. And waiting there, instead of his car, was an ambulance with windows covered up to take him into imprisonment. The first dictator is knocked out and Italy, even under martial law, cheers Il Duce's fall. General Jodl told Hitler, The whole fascist movement went pop like a soap bubble. Fascist emblems came down. The people who had suffered three and a half years of unwanted war made a carnival of their celebration. Soon they would be at peace with the world, or so they thought. Soon Italy would become the sunny, happy place it had been, or so they thought. Italy signed an armistice on September 3rd. The news was made public on the 8th, the day troops began landing at Salerno. This captured enemy newsreel film shows the escape of the Duce, the ex-Duce, to be more correct, and very ex-he looks. Paratroops rescued him from captivity in Italy and a German plane flew into Hitler's headquarters. After meeting Hitler, Il Duce returned to Italy as head of a puppet regime based at the small town of Sarlo on Lake Garda. Hitler ordered a staged withdrawal up the Italian peninsula based on a succession of well-prepared defensive positions. The first was the Gustav Line, halfway between Naples and Rome. The Germans came in force and we opened fire on them and the battle started. They quickly assessed that we didn't have very much in the way of weapons to fight them back. And the mortar started coming down. And they were on the higher ground than where we were. They gave us a very, very rough time. At one stage, they were that close to us. A German officer walked through with his map board and he was shouting about a company or something and he passed not very far from me until he was shot. But he didn't know where he was, he thought he was amongst his own people. So that's how close they got. The Allies launched five offensives against the Gustav Line, anchored at Monte Cassino between October 12th, 1943 and January 17th, 1944 and four more from February 2nd to May 17th against the monastery itself. General Alphonse Joanne's Free French, led by Moroccan Irregulars, skilled in mountain warfare, opened the way for the Polish II Corps to carry Monte Cassino in a final assault on May 17th. With my friend, I explored the area at night and we found German helmets and with German helmets, we pretended to be Germans. They asked questions and we would say, Jawohl! Jawohl! And there were 12 cement bunkers with one window each from which they were shooting. We managed to disable them by throwing grenades into the bunkers and that's why we managed to destroy them. American armour and British infantry finally moved forward on May 23rd, the same day that the bottled up forces broke out of the Anzio beachhead. The Anzio landing, an attempt to outflank the Gustav Line, had gone in on January 22nd. Operation Shingle on the surface was a really good idea. The idea was to land on the coast and outflank the Gustav Line, which the Germans were holding in the south of Italy. Major General P. Lucas had a beachhead 24km wide and 12 deep with armour ashore by the 24th. By then, the Germans had brought up six divisions to oppose him. He was focused on building up his beachhead rather than advancing from it. He sat on the beach and entrenched, which essentially was the correct thing to do, but of course it wasn't what was wanted, which was a quick, rapid advance inland. In late February, General Lucas was replaced. On May 11th, the Allies launched Diadem, a major offensive towards Rome. I set my machine gun up. There was a tree in there. It wasn't a big giant tree, but it was a tree. All of a sudden, a bullet comes through the tree, and when it comes to exit, wood splatters me all across the face, and it knocked me back. They treated me, wanted to put me up for a Purple Heart, and I said, oh no, no, no, I don't want that. I don't want my people to get no telegram, you know. On May 15th, Kesselring, commanding German troops, ordered a withdrawal to the next prepared position, now called the Dora Line. The Germans, of course, under Albert Kesselring, who's one of the greatest German commanders of the war, used the Italian terrain and its climate to brilliant effect. All of a sudden, these Germans were flying over us, dropping pamphlets. 10th Mountain Division, welcome. You will be all killed. You will never come back alive to your country. It puts a scare into you. Allied troops entered Rome on June 5th. It was not the triumphal progress they had dreamed. Most Romans, for their own reasons, remained indoors, and most newspapers soon turned to events further north. Even before the fall of Rome, Kesselring had decided to withdraw to his next position, the Gothic Line. The Allied assault began in late August and continued until the terrain and weather together brought a halt to the campaign at Christmas. It was renewed in April 1945 when the fighting was to last for less than a month. Like they say, you had to kill or be killed, do you know what I mean? I remember this German bunker, a bunch of it hit with an artillery shell, and this gun was yelling for help. One of the guys went with a grenade. He pulls the pin and throws it right in there. Boom. And everything was quiet. I tried to stop him, you know, but maybe, in a way, he was right. SS General Karl Wolf, in defiance of Berlin's orders, approached the Allies, and an instrument of surrender was signed on April 29th. The day before Hitler's suicide and the day after partisans shot Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci. As the war blazed through its last act, in Western Europe, on the Eastern Front, and with the Allies moving closer and closer to Japan's home islands, the price to be paid soared beyond imagination.