Lesson video

So in today's lesson, we're going to be answering this question.

Okay, how did the Second World War end? And we know the buildup to the Second World War.

We know the roots in the Treaty of Versailles, and then, Hitler's rise to power, his foreign policy aims and the Second World War.

We're going to just now, move through the Second World War, the events of the Second World War, and find out today, how it ended.

Our lesson's going to look a little bit like this.

We're going to learn about the Battle of Britain.

Then we're going to learn about the Pearl Harbour attacks.

Then Stalingrad, then D-Day, and finally, the Manhattan Project.

You're going to learn all about this.

I know that lots of you already have a notebook and pencil ready.

If you don't have that equipment, get it.

And I know that lots of you have been taking lots of additional notes.

You've been doing the tasks, but also just writing, pausing the video and writing notes.

That's awesome, well done.

I really encourage the rest of you to do that as well.

Taking the time to write it down gives you good notes to go back and read so that you don't forget it, but it also allows your brain to process that information in a way that's going to make you more likely to remember it in the longterm, awesome.

So let's start with The Battle of Britain The Powers fighting in the Second World War were called the Axis Powers and the Allied Powers.

And you can see that the way that they were divided there.

So Britain and France declared war on Germany after they invaded Poland, and Germany and Italy teamed up as part of the war to begin with.

Russia, to begin with, or the USSR was its name back then, was actually on Germany's side.

They helped to invade Poland, but in 1941, Hitler turned on the USSR, invaded the USSR, another name for Russia, what we call Russia today.

And so from 1941, the USSR was also on the Allied side.

And in 1941 was when Japan entered the war, attacking the USA which brought the USA into the war from 1941 as well.

So Access powers, Germany, Italy, Japan.

Ally Powers, Britain, France, USA, and the USSR.

Those were the only Powers, they were the only countries.

Pretty much every country became involved.

There were Canada and China, Australia, and Commonwealth countries, African nations, all of the nations across Eastern Europe, pretty much every nation was involved in this war.

I'm just putting the main, the main participants in the war here.

So let's see if you can organise them.

I'm going to take them out of those boxes now, and see if you can categorise those and remember the two different sides.

That's your first task for today.

So here they go.

So can you organise those countries into the different sides? Was Japan an Access Power, or were they an Allied Power? Pause the video and have a go at that task now.

Great, let's see how you did.

I'm going to put the answers up now.

If you got any wrong, that's fine.

You can use this chance to edit and correct them.

And if you got them right, then give yourself a tick to make sure that you know your brain knows, yep, that's the correct one.

Great work, so, so many countries involved, and also so many areas involved.

It was genuinely, a world war.

Here's a map of Europe.

Let's zoom in so that you can have a quick look at that.

And this shows Europe and North Africa, and it shows the theatre of war.

So the theatre is normally somewhere we go to watch a play at, but within warfare, a theatre of war is an area where there's actual fighting happening.

And this was the European theatre of war, including North Africa as well.

So have a look here.

You can see all of these nations involved in the Second World War, in fighting in the Second World War.

That's a European nation of war.

I'll give you a moment to have a look closely at that.

And it wasn't only the European theatre of war.

There were theatres of war all over the world.

So I'll show you here, the Pacific theatre of war.

So I'll let you zoom in on that.

You can see here, Australia.

Here, you can see America, the United States of America and Canada.

You can see the USSR which was the name for Russia there, the Soviet Union.

China and Japan here, who became involved in the war.

And this is the Pacific Ocean.

You can see that there was this huge theatre of war in the Pacific Ocean as well, and around the Coral Sea.

So we'll often, when we're studying the Second World War in England and Great Britain, we'll focus on the European theatre of war, but it's important to know that there were other theatres of war and there were other nations involved.

How many theatres of war? Well, these were some of the main ones.

Let me go through them.

There was the theatre of war in Western Europe, but also across Eastern Europe.

There was the Pacific Ocean, which we just looked at.

There was fighting going on throughout Asia, in North Africa, on the Horn of Africa.

The Mediterranean, and the Atlantic Ocean.

Have a look at those theatres of war 'cause I'm going to ask you to write down as many as you can remember now, so that you have in your head all of the different theatres of war where fighting was taking place during the Second World War, really carefully.

Okay, so we have first question.

Can you name three theatres of war during World War II? If you want to write more, you can.

Awesome, let me put some answers up.

So you could have mentioned any of these theatres of war.

Now, across Western Europe, after invading Poland, and after England and France declared war on Germany, Germany moved straight in to attack France.

They used a tactic called Blitzkrieg.

Blitzkrieg means lightening war.

So very, very quickly using artillery, lots of artillery shells, bombs for long distance, and tanks, they would bomb a target or town, lots, and lots, and lots of bombs, and then quickly move their forces in amidst all the destruction, it was called Blitzkrieg.

It allowed them to move very, very quickly like a lightning storm.

And so using Blitzkrieg, the Germans very quickly took France, defeated France and took all of France.

At this point, the USSR was on Germany's side.

And so Europe was controlled by the Nazis at this point.

And Britain, who had declared war on Germany, no longer their ally France to rely upon, were standing alone, standing alone in the war with Germany controlling all of Europe.

Now, when we last looked at Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain was the prime minister, he had that policy of appeasement.

In 1940, Neville Chamberlain wasn't prime minister anymore.

We had a new prime minister called Winston Churchill.

And he gave this speech after France had fallen and Britain stood alone.

I'd like you to listen to this.

So Winston Churchill there, and you can hear steadfast.

He said, "We will fight them on the beaches.

"We will fight them in the streets.

"We will not give up." And what he was talking about there was an invasion.

An invasion that was coming from Germany.

And for the Nazis to invade Britain, the first thing they had to do was gain aerial superiority.

The reason they had to do that is if they tried to go across the Channel, because we were in Ireland, if they tried to send their troops across the Channel in boats, then our air force, the Royal Air Force, could bomb those boats very, very easily from very high.

So the first thing that Hitler had to do was send his Luftwaffe, which is the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe across to Britain and defeat the air force so that the only planes in the sky were German planes and they would be able to parachute in, and they would be able to go across the Channel without getting damaged.

And so the Battle of Britain began.

And you can see there, that Churchill famously said that, "The Battle of France is over.

"The Battle of Britain is about to begin." And it did.

And there was a period in 1940 known as the Blitz, where German bombers came across and dropped bombs all over England and Great Britain.

And there's an iconic picture there of a plane called a Spitfire.

You can see that it's this famous sort of like wing design.

This sort of like a oval wing design with the target on their Spitfire.

A brilliant plane, which the RAF pilots would use to fight the German Messerschmitts.

And these would be sort of, they called them dogfights because they would sort of fight these planes, would sort of fight each other in the air.

And the RAF was almost overwhelmed a number of times.

You can see the huge destruction that was done to Britain during the Blitz.

People not knowing when the bombs would fall, having to run into air raid shelters in case a bomb would destroy their homes or their towns or their villages.

And that Blitz lasted for months.

Due to a number of factors, including some pretty poor errors from Hitler and some pretty clever tactics from the British, Germany never gained aerial superiority.

They never managed to take the skies and they never managed to beat the RAF.

And so they weren't able to invade Britain.

And Britain, German soldiers never stepped foot on Britain.

They were never able to gain aerial superiority.

So they had Europe, they'd taken over France.

They had all of Europe, but Britain had not been invaded, and had managed to defend its skies.

So it wasn't going to be invaded.

So that's 1940, the thing is though, Britain was pretty much standing alone.

It had its empire, its Commonwealth nations, standing with them, but Britain was pretty much alone at this point.

And so the Nazis just had France and had all of Europe.

Then something happened in 1940 when that changed everything, big turning point in the war.

And for some people, this is the time, the event that made the tide shift from Germany winning the war to the Allies starting to win the war.

Up until this point, America had not got involved in the war.

Congress, the sort of American parliament, they didn't want to send American troops to a European war.

They thought, "It's not our war." And they can still remember the horror, and the destruction, and the damage of the First World War.

They thought, "There's a huge ocean in the way.

"Why would we go across and get involved "in that war in Europe," but then something happened.

And that something was Pearl Harbour.

So this is a picture of the Pacific Ocean, the ocean between Asia and America, the Americas.

And right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean here, you can see that there's some teeny islands, and that's Hawaii, you might've heard of it.

And Hawaii is a state of the United States.

It's one of the United States.

And on Hawaii, there is a naval base.

There's an important naval base and an aircraft base, because if the aeroplanes wanted to go from the United States to Asia, they needed to stop off halfway because the Pacific Ocean is so large, and they could stop off by stopping off at this naval base.

You can see on the other side here, there's Japan and China.

In 1941, something incredible happened that nobody was expecting.

In 1941 on the Island of Hawaii in a place called Pearl Harbour, the Japanese sent bombers, aeroplanes , and in a surprise attack, dropped bombs all over Pearl Harbour.

You can see one of the ships being destroyed there.

The Americans didn't realise that it was coming.

So the attack looked something like this.

You can see two waves of Japanese bombers on that tiny island.

And the destruction was huge.

2,400 Americans were killed.

12 of their big battleships were sunk, 9 more were damaged.

160 aircraft were completely destroyed.

150 other aeroplanes were damaged.

This was the first attack on US soil.

So the US had been involved in wars in the past, but this was the first time that somebody had struck the US soil.

And it meant that the US now, were ready to get involved in the war.

Now Congress said, "Okay, we do need to be involved "in the war because it's going to affect us.

"And we will join with the Allies "to fight against Nazi Germany and Japan." So see if you can remember here, how many Americans were killed in the Pearl Harbour attacks? Was it 24, 240, 2,400, 24,000 or 240,000? How many Americans were killed in that attack? Did you go for 2,400? If you did, you were right.

Over 2,300, just shy of 2,400 Americans killed.

That was the impetus to get America involved in the war.

So while that was happening in the Pacific and the United States, on the other side of the ocean, or the other side of the Atlantic in Europe, in Eastern Europe, something else happened.

Hitler had taken France and he was allied at this point with Russia.

But he used this opportunity, now that he had no worries of France and no worries of Britain attacking, he used this opportunity to turn eastward as he always wanted to do, he said so in his foreign aims. He wanted Lebensraum to the east, to turn eastwards towards the USSR.

And so the Battle of Stalingrad began.

It's called Stalingrad because the leader of the USSR at that point was somebody called Stalin.

He was the leader of the Communist Party in charge of Russia, and so the area was called Stalingrad.

This is what the area looks like.

Have a look at this little map here.

So it's a map inside of Russia.

And you can see Stalingrad is this area here.

So here's Ukraine, Germany sort of over here.

And they were turning east.

They were fighting towards Stalingrad.

Now, the area that the Germans really wanted wasn't actually Stalingrad.

The area that they really wanted was this area to the south by the Caucasus Mountains because this area has got lots and lots of oil, and natural resources, and factories.

And so if they could take those, then they would have lots of oil and resources that they needed for the war.

Because Germany, of course, is a landlocked country.

Germany isn't able to have, because it's not an island like the United States or like Great Britain, it's not able to send ships to go and get supplies.

And so it needed to get supplies from land.

And so they needed to take, they needed to take this area near the Caucasus Islands here.

The Battle of Stalingrad was huge.

It was absolutely huge.

And Germany ended up losing it.

He lost it for a few different reasons.

First of all, instead of going to the Caucasus Mountains like they were planning to, he turned all of his troops towards Stalingrad, the actual capital, because he wanted this as a symbolic city.

This was Stalin's hometown, and so he wanted this city.

And so instead of taking, instead of moving his troops once he'd sort of started to win here, instead of moving down to get those areas that he wanted with the oil fields, he moved his troops to Stalingrad instead.

And that hugely lengthened the amount of time that Germany was in Stalingrad and in Russia.

It also meant he had to divide his forces.

And by dividing his forces, they were easier to defeat.

The USSR had huge numbers of men, huge numbers of soldiers, much larger than Germany.

And so if they just kept fighting each other, Germany would run out of men before Russia.

The conditions in Russia were extremely cold and extremely harsh.

And because it was taking Germany longer than they planned, it meant that they weren't well-enough equipped for the conditions.

Whereas the Russians were used to it.

and the country's so large that the supply lines that Germany had to have were really, really long.

They had to go all the way back into Germany.

And that delayed things.

It meant it was difficult to get supplies to the frontline for Germany.

And so Germany ended up losing the Battle of Stalingrad, huge, huge battle in the Second World War that Germany ended up losing.

Why was this important? Well, for lots of reasons.

I'm going to give you four and I would like you to put them in order.

First, it showed that the Axis Powers were not invincible.

They could be beaten, the Nazis weren't invincible.

They'd taken fronts really easily.

They'd taken the rest of Europe really easily, but they weren't invincible.

They could be beaten, an army could beat them.

Second, they lost many soldiers.

Germany lost about 800,000 soldiers.

About 800,000 soldiers were killed during this battle.

Russia lost more, Russia lost over a million soldiers, but Russia were prepared to send more troops in to defend their homeland.

And they had more troops.

So if it's just a numbers game, Russia was always going to win because they've got more to start with.

Germany, after losing Stalingrad, it meant that they were now fighting a defensive war on the east.

That means that if anybody attacks from the west, they're fighting a war on two fronts.

They're fighting it both.

They're fighting on both sides of their country, which isn't a situation that any country wants to be in.

And lastly, the USSR held onto those important oil fields and factories.

So first of all, the USSR still had them, and Germany didn't get them.

So they weren't able to access those resources.

So, which of those, have a read through of those, and write down, you can write down in the boxes, so next to these, write down the number from one to four, one being the most important and four the least important, why do you think that losing the eastern front, losing Stalingrad was so important? Pause the video and write that down now.

Super, so we're moving now, forward further into the war and towards the end of the war often starting with what was called D-Day.

So the USSR was now fighting Germany on that eastern front and America had joined the war.

And America had sent lots and lots of troops to Britain.

You can see this map here now of Britain and you can see fronts just over the Channel.

And the United Kingdom, and the USA, and Canada, and other allied countries and Commonwealth countries were preparing an invasion, an invasion of France, so that they could start to move through and attack Germany from this western side.

And this attack was called Operation Overlord or D-Day.

D-Day, D stands for day.

So they kept on talking about the day, the day that they were going to invade Normandy, Northern France.

And so eventually they called it the D-Day.

And D-Day came in 1944, the 6th of June, 1944.

And the attack looked like this.

So there were five beaches that were going to be attacked.

The Americans took one beach here called Utah, and another here called Omaha.

These were the code names that the army used.

The British took a beach called Gold.

The Canadian forces took a beach that is called Juno.

And the British took a beach called Sword.

And together, by attacking those beaches, their plan was to take control of this area of Normandy, these beaches, so they could start to move into France and take it back from the Germans.

Once they had France, then they could start to move into Germany and attack Germany.

Let's watch a quick video which shows you the enormity of this invasion.

You'll see that 156,000 troops landed in one day.

So France went from having just German troops in it controlling that country, to 156,000 allied troops landing on the beaches.

So you can see there the enormity of that operation and D-Day was a huge success as the Allies started to manage to hold those positions, and move their way through France, and take back France from the Germans, moving ever closer towards Berlin.

Germany now fighting the Russians on one side and the allied forces of Great Britain, and America, and Canada, and Commonwealth countries together on the other side.

And so this is where Germany started to lose the war.

And within a year, they would have lost the war as the Allies slowly move in towards Berlin, the capital of Germany.

So I have a little question for you here to see if you can remember one feature of D-Day that I mentioned.

Can you remember what the code names of the beaches that they Allies landed on, they landed on five beaches, can you remember the names of them? I'll give you a little clue by giving you the starting letters.

If you think you can do them without them, then pause the video and do it now.

If you need those starting letters, here they are.

Pause the video and see if you can remember the names of the beaches that the Allies landed on during D-Day on the 6th of June, 1944.

Great, let's see if you got them right.

It was Utah and Omaha.

Those were where the Americans landed.

Britain landed on Gold, Canada at Juno, and Britain on Sword, well done if you've got those right.

If you've got them, if you didn't get them, or if you got them wrong, you can correct them now.

If you got them right, give yourself a tick, well done.

So the last part of our lesson, the Allies managed to move in towards Berlin, and take Berlin, they managed to take over Germany.

Hitler is hiding in a bunker.

When he eventually realises that he's lost the war, he kills himself.

And the Germans eventually surrender after the Russians, especially, managed to get into Germany and Berlin.

And then the Allies move in and all of the Allies take over Europe from the Nazis.

They eventually surrender.

And that celebrated VE Day, Victory in Europe Day.

But we know that there was more fighting than just in Europe.

We know that Japan was still fighting in the Pacific, especially with the United States.

There were still lots and lots of people dying in that theatre of war.

And so what happened after VE Day was sometimes called the Manhattan Project was a horrifying event.

I'm going to show you a video so that you can see what it was.

This was the product of Project Manhattan, the Manhattan project which the United States had been leading with a number of scientists, where they'd been trying to work out how to create this nuclear bomb.

They realised how to split the atom and release that energy, create a chain reaction, and that, towards the end of the war, they were successful.

You can see those tests, they were successful.

And so they had a nuclear bomb and no other countries did.

The leader of the Manhattan Project which created the bomb was called JF Oppenheimer.

And this is what he said after he saw the first explosion.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." That's how Oppenheimer felt after developing that nuclear bomb.

So the Americans, the Allies, then had a decision to make.

Japan was still fighting, and they didn't seem to show any signs of surrendering.

In fact, culturally, it seemed like that was against what the Japanese believe, never surrender.

Now, the Allies sent an ultimatum, that final demand to Japan.

It said, "You need to surrender anything," and the ultimatum said, "or you'll face the inevitable "and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces.

"And just as inevitably the utter devastation "of the Japanese homeland." Japan ignored or rejected the ultimatum.

They didn't look like they were surrendering.

And America had a new president at this point, FDR, Franklin D.

Roosevelt had died.

He was, he was sick and he died.

And Harry Truman asked his generals, he said, "Look, we've got this bomb.

"We've got this war in Japan, with Japan.

"Shall we use the nuclear bomb against Japan?" And the generals said to him if they carried on with this war, it could go on for years and years.

Up to a million more US soldiers could die.

So they said to bring about a speedy end to the war and save all of those lives, they should drop the nuclear bombs on Japan.

And that's exactly what they did.

So in two cities in Japan, one called Hiroshima and one called Nagasaki, in August in 1945, two nuclear bombs were dropped, the first one Hiroshima on the 6th of August.

And the second on the 9th of August on Nagasaki.

The first bomb in Hiroshima killed 80,000 people instantly.

If you were within a mile of that explosion, you would have been vaporised.

The heat was so hot that it would have literally just disintegrated you.

The second, if you were outside of that blast zone of a sort of mile, then the burns would have been horrible.

And many, many more died from the radiation poisoning and injuries afterwards, perhaps up to 200,000.

In Nagasaki, 39,000 instantly killed and many more afterwards.

So I want to end on this question.

And it's one that you're going to have to mull over it, debate and think about.

Japan didn't look like they were going to give up.

They were fighting across the Pacific, across lots of different islands.

The war had already cost about 85 million people being killed in the Second World War already.

It looked like at least another million Americans and Japanese, many more Japanese as well, would have been killed if the fighting continued.

And so the argument was, "We'll drop this bomb, "and it ends the war and no more people die.

"Yes, a load of people will die.

"a load of civilians will die and that's very sad, "but it will be worth it 'cause it will save "more lives in the long run." So what I'd like you to do is assess that argument.

I'd like you to debate that.

See if you can jot down the arguments for using the nuclear bomb, and the arguments against using a nuclear bomb.

And then answer this question here.

Should the Allies have used a nuclear bomb, on balance, what do you think? So pause the video, jot down the arguments for.

Jot down the arguments against.

And then write your paragraph, should the Allies have used a nuclear bomb against Japan?.