The Century: America's Time - 1936-1941: Over The Edge

[MUSIC]

>> The Japanese have attacked
Pearl Harbor by air.

>> Ask not what your country can do for
you.

>> President Kennedy has been shot.

>> One small step for man.

>> Hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal.

>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

[MUSIC]

[SOUND]

[MUSIC]

>> In the summer of 1936,

the city of Berlin had put on its best
face as host of the Olympic Games.

[MUSIC]

>> Berlin was a lovely city.

It was a joyous,
it was a happy city at that time.

It was more attractive as a city,
for me, than were London or Paris.

>> In a world still
plagued by the Depression,

the capital of Nazi Germany was thriving.

>> The Nazis used
the Olympic Games of 1936

to try to project a positive
image of the new Germany,

to translate the athletes' success into
the success of National Socialism.

>> During the Olympics,

the uglier side of Hitler's National
Socialism was kept under wraps.

>> There was no outward
sign of anti-semitism.

There were no signs that
were reported later on,

of course, Jews and dogs forbidden.

I never saw that sign during the games.

[MUSIC]

>> But the glittering surface of
the international Olympic spirit could not

completely obscure the darker reality.

[MUSIC]

>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Marty Glickman and

Sam Stoller were members
of the American relay team.

>> [APPLAUSE]
>> The morning of the day we were supposed

to run, we were told, Sam and I,
that we were not going to run.

No fit American track and
field athlete has ever not competed in

the Olympic Games, except Sam Stoller and
me, the only two Jews on the track team.

>> Marty Glickman is convinced it was
politics that kept him out of competition.

He believes the American Olympic committee
did not want to embarrass Hitler by having

Jews stand on the winner's podium.

[MUSIC]

Almost everything at the Olympics
seemed to be going Hitler's way.

In event after event,

German victories appear to support his
notion of Aryan racial superiority.

>> [APPLAUSE]
>> But then came the 100 meters.

The hopes of the American team rested

on the son of an Alabama sharecropper,
Jesse Owens.

[MUSIC]

[SOUND]
>> [APPLAUSE]

>> [FOREIGN]

[MUSIC]

>> I was standing ten yards behind Hitler.

Hiter, hearing the name Jesse Owens,
angrily pushed back his chair,

and with a deep growl on his face,
walked right past me and walked out.

[MUSIC]

>> In that tense summer of 1936,
Owens went on to win four gold medals.

>> The competition was grand.

We're very glad to come out on top.

Thank you very kindly.

[MUSIC]

>> There were other American victories,
but

Germany won far more medals
than any other nation.

And with the 11th Olympiad, Hitler had
pulled off an international success.

For the rest of the decade,

it was not his athletes but
his soldiers who challenged the world.

As Hitler, with ever greater boldness,
threatened his neighbors,

the rest of Europe and
Britain stood by, incredulous.

America, safe on the other
side of the ocean,

was still worried about the Depression.

>> I see one-third of a nation ill-housed,

ill-clad, ill-nourished.

>> January 1937, the clouds of
the Great Depression still hovered over

Franklin Roosevelt at
his second inauguration.

>> I see millions whose daily lives,
in city and on farm,

continue under conditions labeled
indecent half a century ago.

>> The president thought that,
in order to lift the nation's spirits,

he had to make the country face
the economic crisis head on, together.

And he used the battery of newly
available mass media to do that.

The government hired photographers to
capture the faces of the Great Depression.

[MUSIC]

>> No other government has ever done this.

>> Carl Mydans, just 28 at the time,

was among those who set
out with their cameras.

>> The 35-millimeter camera became
the heart of the new age of photography.

That is, the new age of photojournalism.

What moved me greatly was their spirit.

They simply were proud of the fact that
they could live in the circumstances and

still be solid citizens.

We photographers were pretty skillful.

One could not look at
those pictures about what

was happening in the country and
not be affected by them.

>> These photographs were all over
the new magazines, Life chief among them.

>> I can remember, as a kid, running home
from school on the day that Life came,

to get that copy before
my brothers got home and

take it to my room so
I could look at it first.

[MUSIC]

It was as if the whole world was
opening up in those pictures.

And that magazine changed
the way we saw the world.

[MUSIC]

>> The United States Supreme Court
today handed down its long-awaited-

>> At a time when people were desperate

for news, radio, more immediate and
more trusted than newspapers,

became America's favorite
way to keep up with events.

>> Maritime labor leaders
declared today that-

>> The man who really

discovered radio to use it on a massive
scale which made history was FDR.

>> The money-
>> He found,

in order to be able to reach
the citizenry, he could use radio.

And that was the beginning
of the Fireside Chats.

>> Our capacity is limited only
by our ability to work together.

>> He made the difference.

People would be glued to their radios,
all over the country,

to find out from this
man What's happening?

What's going on?

When can we get word?

When will things change?

>> And just as he understood
the power of the still photograph and

radio, Roosevelt also saw the newsreel
as a way to pull the nation together.

Boulder Dam put into operation,
giant spurts of water runways.

>> There was something in
there a dam was being built or

the a river was being built.

>> The Colossal Triborough bridge has is
formally opened by president Roosevelt.

>> Where a was being real-
>> More than $50 million.

>> Or some invention was being announced,
there was something good going on.

Roosevelt made
the White House an amplifier

of all that the government
was trying to do.

>> And gentlemen,
the President of the United States.

>> Five years of information through
the radio and the moving picture,

have taken the whole nation to
school in the nation's business.

We have learned to think as a nation, we
have learned to feel ourselves, a nation.

>> [APPLAUSE]

>> [FOREIGN]

>> In Germany too,

the new mass media were part of
the national myth making machine.

Joseph Goebbels as Hitler's Minister
of Enlightenment and Propaganda,

control the printed press and
exploited the power of pictures and sound.

[MUSIC]

>> [FOREIGN]
>> At Goebles' direction,

the government put loud
speakers in the streets and

made cheap radios available to every shop,
school and home.

Every German was now within
the sound of Hitler's voice.

>> [FOREIGN]
>> To

have a real radio now that was fantastic.

Every day there were political programs or
sound, I learned lot from the radio.

I thought it was great but father,
father thought it was one of the main

weapons now to brainwash.

[MUSIC]

>> Propaganda films promoted
a glorious Germanic world of tomorrow.

[MUSIC]

We were told that we were
the top nation on Earth.

We were the chosen the people, he was the
head and we called it, the Master Race and

that we will more intelligent and
better looking and stronger.

Than all the others and
that it was our God given

duty to force our life
onto all the others.

>> To glorify the Master Race on film,

Hitler's choice was Germany's
preeminent filmmaker Fritz Lang.

Lang sensing the time, when one could say
no to the Fuhrer had passed left for Paris.

The powerful film propaganda
post would go to Hitler's

second choice, director Leni Riefenstahl.

Her film Triumph of the Will
used the 1934 Nazi Party Congress

as a vast backdrop designed to
make Hitler look like a god.

[MUSIC]

>> Military music was played and
he marched down the center aisle,

flanked by heaven knows how many
gorgeously uniformed creatures.

>> [APPLAUSE]

>> And he would be behind the lectern

standing there, silent,

waiting, until the tension rose.

>> [APPLAUSE]

And then he would start.

>> [FOREIGN].

>> Slowly revving up.

>> [FOREIGN]
>> Until

he finally reached a tremendous pitch.

>> [FOREIGN]

>> [APPLAUSE]

>> [FOREIGN]

>> If you sat in an audience like that

you'd be swept along.

>> [FOREIGN]

>> [APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC]

>> Never before had mass
communication been more effective.

>> Never before had it been used
with more sinister intentions.

>> [FOREIGN]

[MUSIC]

>> [FOREIGN]

>> Only four months after Hitler came to

power, bonfires burned in
the streets of German cities.

>> [FOREIGN]
>> The flames were fed with books by

Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein,
Hellen Keller, Sigmund Freud and

other authors who were deemed
subversive to the German people.

[MUSIC]

>> [FOREIGN]
>> Democracy in Germany was dead.

>> [FOREIGN]
>> Hitlers own book"Mein Kampf",

"My Struggle" was now the blue print for
Germany's future.

[MUSIC]

In the new Germany, Nazi Party thugs,
the paramilitary Brown Shirts would

patrol the streets to root out and
arrest anyone who stood in Hitler's way.

Thousands of political opponents were
sent to hundreds of concentration camps.

The first was near the German
village of Dachau.

>> Everyone knew that you could be sent to
such a camp without due process of law.

We had a verse that was

widely recited [FOREIGN]
>> Dear God,

strike me dumb, so
that I won't be sent to Dachau.

>> In the new Germany everyone
was classified by race,

in the new Germany,
only those who Hitler considered perfect.

The purest members of
the Aryan race were welcomed.

>> [FOREIGN]
[SOUND] The name undesirable

was the Jewish people, the Jews.

We were being told that the Jews, they are
behind everything which is bad in Germany.

[MUSIC]

>> There was a lot of
propaganda against the Jews.

There were no longer
any normal newspapers.

Most of them were Nazi.

You saw headlines, the Jews are criminals,
the Jews are vermin.

They must be killed.

There must be arrested.

>> Hitler had declared in "Mein Kampf"
that Jews weaken the German Master Race.

>> Well of course we talked
about race in school, and

the superior races, the non-superior,
the degenerate races.

And the teacher had some calipers to
measure the width of your eyes and

your nose and so on, the head.

[MUSIC]

>> In our classroom, we had a poster,
the head shapes from the sides,

the Aryans of course,
they looked good from the sides,

they looked good from the front,
they were blond and they were blue-eyed.

And when I was about 14 years old,
my hair began to darken and

I sometimes was worried that I didn't
look like a proper Aryan anymore

because my hair was not
really blonde anymore.

And also my nose is a little bit
hooked as you might probably see and

sometimes I looked in the mirror,
held another mirror here and

I was frightened that somebody should
think that I had some Jewish connections.

>> Two years after they came to power,
they came out with the Nuremberg racial

laws, which separated the Jews
from the German people.

We were not allowed to go
swimming with the other children.

We are not allowed to play
with the other children.

We were not allowed to go excursions
with the other children, and so on.

[MUSIC]
>> Jews were stripped of their

citizenship, their businesses boycotted.

They were forbidden to marry or
have sexual relations with Aryans.

[MUSIC]
Any trace of Jewish ancestry meant

immediate banishment from
all civil service jobs.

[MUSIC]

>> I was classified as a quarter Jew,
a mongrel of the second degree.

I was dismissed from the public service.

All I had achieved through examinations,
through study and

other efforts to establish myself in life,

all that was,
by a stroke of the pen, cut off.

>> Hitler had made his vision for
his people a reality.

And he planned to force that vision
far beyond Germany's borders.

[MUSIC]

>> And I remember when I was a guest
with my mother in Berchtesgaden,

you could see on a clear day,
you could see Salzburg.

And he pointed out to me, he said,
you see that there, boy, that's Salzburg.

That is in my homeland of Austria.

And one of these days I'm going to see
to it that that will join with Germany.

THE ANSCHLUSS

>> On March the 12th, 1938,
Hitler made good on his plan.

Americans heard it first
from NBC's Max Jordan.

>> Ladies and gentlemen,
at the Austrian frontier town

an endless stream of German
soldiers is pouring into Austria.

>> It was astonishing.

The takeover of a country
broadcast live on radio.

>> The cheers are for Chancellor Adolf
Hitler, returning to his homeland for

the first time in almost 25 years.

>> Karla Stept lived in
the Austrian capital, Vienna.

She was 20 years old, and a Jew.

>> It was my home, so when suddenly
the Germans marched Into Austria,

where they were welcomed with open arms.

[MUSIC]

The world ended for me.

[MUSIC]

>> It was a Friday evening, crowds
began to march down, shouting slogans.

I remember one specifically
which was [FOREIGN],

which translated means Jews
perish in your own filth.

And it was clear that something was
imminent, something was happening.

[MUSIC]

>> Saturday morning, the Brown Shirts, and

Blackshirts already started to go
against the Jewish population.

They got Jewish men and women out to
scrub the sidewalks on their knees,

being kicked by the population
standing around them.

Hitler wasn't even in Vienna yet.

But what took Germany five
years took Austria 24 hours.

[MUSIC]

>> In the spring of 1938, few Americans
could avoid the news of Hitler in Germany.

>> Parade in Berlin's Tiergarten shows
that once again, Germany has a real army.

>> That would mean war,
when will Nazi aggression end?

The democratic nations
draw together against-.

>> The rest of Europe Hitler orders
all Germany to mobilize at it's full

war strength.

A million and a half-.

>> Growing anxieties over the increasing
power of the Third Reich,

turned a heavyweight boxing match in June
1938 into an international showdown.

In one corner of the ring would be
Hitler's pride and joy, Max Schmeling.

In the other,
the American champion, Joe Louis.

>> Joe symbolized not only the fight
against discrimination but

the struggle against fascism.

At a time when the entire world
was talking about Hitler and

Mussolini, anti-Semitism.

>> Under the wing Max swings around Joe
Lewis with two swift lefts to the chin.

>> There was tremendous tension.

>> A left to the jaw, a right to the head,
and Donovan is watching carefully.

>> I was glued to the radio.

>> Lewis measures him, a right to
the body, a left up to the jaw, and

Schmeling is down.

>> We just shouted exploded,
shouting, wow.

>> The count is five, six,
the men are in the ring.

The fight is over,
Max Schmeling is beaten in one round.

>> People shouted out of their windows,
Joe won, Joe won.

All up and down.

>> [INAUDIBLE] and
still champion Joe Louis..

>> We won, it was a victory.

And we needed victories
very badly at the time.

>> When 21 year old Milt Wolff
heard the news about Joe Louis,

Wolf was already fighting against
Hitler in the Spanish Civil War.

In that war, Nazi Germany was supporting
Francisco Franco's fascist rebels who

were about to overthrow Spain's
freely elected government.

>> I was a kid in Brooklyn, okay,

and I was caught up in this
whole bit of the war in Spain.

For myself, it was a commitment
to a struggle against fascism.

>> Milt Wolff joined 2800 American
volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

in defiance of American neutrality.

They went to defend democracy in what
was widely seen as a dress rehearsal for

the greater battle with Hitler.

>> So these were guys who were
essentially coming off the street.

Most of them had no military training
at all, and up to the front they went.

[MUSIC]

They were hitting us with artillery, and

they were strafing us
with the German planes.

And guys were getting killed and wounded.

For myself, the war in Spain gave
meaning to the word anti-fascism.

>> By 1938, democracy was doomed in Spain,

as it had been in Italy,
and Austria, and Germany.

Hitler's ideology and Hitler's armies
were a danger to freedom everywhere.

>> It has now reached the stage

where the very foundations of
civilization are seriously threatened.

Let no one imagine that
America will escape,

that America may expect mercy,

that this Western hemisphere
will not be attacked.

>> September the 12th, 1938.

The entire civilized world,
as a CBS broadcast put it,

was anxiously waiting to
hear Hitler's next threat.

It came in an unprecedented live broadcast
from the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.

>> [FOREIGN]
>> Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland,

a region of Czechoslovakia inhabited
mostly by German speaking people,

become a part of Germany.

>> [FOREIGN]

[MUSIC]

>> The Columbia Broadcasting System has
brought its listeners to be addressed by

Adolf Hitler.

At this time, we present HV Kaltenborn.

>> Good afternoon, everybody.

Adolf Hitler has spoken,
and the world has listened.

The world has listened, because it
fears that this speech might mean war.

>> The British Prime Minister,
Neville Chamberlain,

who'd never been on an airplane before,

flew to Germany twice within ten
days to seek a peaceful settlement.

[MUSIC]

>> Just to see on the newsreels
screen Chamberlain coming there

with his umbrella is
unthinkable to a German mind.

Hitler with an umbrella,
you laugh when you think about that about.

We thought they were weak.

[MUSIC]

>> Chamberlain failed.

Hitler refused to withdraw his demands.

The Sudetenland would be his,
one way or the other.

War now seemed inevitable.

In Britain, nervous citizens
began to build bomb shelters.

[MUSIC]

In France, army reserves were called up.

[MUSIC]

And then only 24 hours before Hitler's
promised invasion of Czechoslovakia,

Prime Minister Chamberlain
once again flew to Germany.

At a meeting in Munich with Hitler and
Italy's Benito Mussolini,

Chamberlain abandoned the Sudetenland
to Germany, in return for

what he called "Peace In Our Time."

Hitler gave his word that there
would be no more territorial claims.

THE MUNICH PACT

Chamberlain flew home to a hero's welcome
from a Britain anxious to avoid another

conflict, after the devistating slaughter
of World War I, only 20 years earlier.

>> And here is the paper which bears
his name upon it, as well as mine.

>> [NOISE]
>> As symbolic of the desire

of our two peoples never to go
to war with one another again.

>> Chamberlain got what
he thought was peace.

Hitler got the Sudetenland.

>> To us Germans,
it was a great thing.

Their land is bordering on Germany.

And as a Sudeten, people were Germans,
so we thought, yeah,

sure, why should say
live in Czechoslovakia?

>> On October the 1st,
1938 Hitler welcomed 3.5 million

Czechoslovakians of German
blood into the Reich.

>> [NOISE]
>> Hitler's reception was a replay of

Austria.

[MUSIC]

>> [NOISE]
>> As Hitler was being cheered

in the Sudetenland, the Nazis campaign
against German Jews was intensified,

very much aided by an incident in Paris.

On November the 7th,
a young Jew, Herschel Grynszpan,

distraught over the deportation
of his parents,

walked into the German Embassy in Paris
and shot a minor official, Ernst vom Rath.

[MUSIC]

>> While he was fighting death,

the newspapers carried headlines,
headlines against the Jewish people.

"The Jews have taken off
their mask from their face.

They have shown now what
they want to do to us."

It was dreadful.

We said if only this man does not die.

But of course, he died.

[MUSIC]

>> Vom Rath's death became
Hitler's opportunity.

Only a junior diplomat,

Vom Rath was nonetheless accorded
the honors of a fallen hero.

[MUSIC]

The ceremony was intended
to inspire revenge.

For once, said Joseph Goebbels, the Jews
should get the feel of popular anger.

[MUSIC]

That anger exploded on the night of
November the 10th, 1938, Kristallnacht.

>> I saw the synagogue in flames.

People came from all over,
the fire department.

They did not make one
effort to put out a flames.

Kids were laughing.

Kids were having fun.

I heard "kill the Jews, kill the Jews".

>> For 24 hours, Nazi stormtroopers
rampaged through Germany and

Austria, destroying synagogues and shops.

The Night of Broken Glass in German,
Kristallnacht.

[MUSIC]

Scores of people were killed,
more than 20,000 arrested.

It was now clear there was no future for
Jews in Germany.

>> For the first time in America, it broke
through a certain part of the awareness

that something horrible was
happening in Hitler's Germany.

>> [FOREIGN]
>> [FOREIGN]

>> Roosevelt himself said it just was

incomprehensible to imagine that such
a thing could happen in the 20th century.

And still,

people felt we've seen what happened
when we get involved in Europe's wars.

This is Europe's problem.

>> [FOREIGN]

>> [FOREIGN]

[MUSIC]

>> On Easter Sunday, 1939, an enormous
crowd came together around the reflecting

pool in the nation's capital to hear
one of the great voices of modern time.

Marian Anderson

[MUSIC]

>> Because she was a Negro, Anderson
had been barred from performing at

Constitution Hall by the Daughters
of the American Revolution.

When president Roosevelt heard this,

he enabled her to sing
at the Lincoln Memorial.

[MUSIC]

>> And I was among the 75,000 people

gathered to hear her sing that day.

This was a moment maybe even more
important to us than what Joe Lewis

had done when he demolished Max Schmeling.

[MUSIC]

And we stood there and we listened,
and tears ran down our faces.

[MUSIC]

It was a part of America's statement in
Hitler's face,

about what we truly
thought about Black people.

[MUSIC]

>> Marian affirmed for all of us,
what the true meaning of America was.

[MUSIC]

>> That powerful symbol of racial
justice gave hope to European Jews.

Hope that despite strict quotas,
limiting immigration,

America would provide a haven
from the terror of Adolf Hitler.

>> My mother desperately
tried to get out of Austria.

And because of the quota system,
there were obvious difficulties, and

could not gain entrance to United States.

And one possibility was
to get entrance to Cuba.

>> Fred Reif's family joined
more than 900 Jewish refugees

on board the steam ship, St.
Louis, bound for Cuba.

But at Havana,
Cuban officials refused to let them land.

[MUSIC]

>> Some suicide start to happen.

I remember one person slit his wrists and
jumped overboard in harbour.

[MUSIC]

>> The fear is, of course,
if you can't land in Cuba,

then you have to go back to
Germany to a concentration camp.

We all lived there.

[MUSIC]

>> And so, the St. Louis turn
north towards the United States.

For five days,

the ship sat off the Florida coast
while the captain appealed for refuge.

[MUSIC]

>> Everybody's hopes were up.

Franklin Roosevelt was everybody's idol.

And nothing will happen to us.

America wouldn't let us down.

[MUSIC]

>> But the United States government
did not permit them to land.

[MUSIC]

The passenger sent one last urgent
plea directly to President Roosevelt.

There was no reply.

[MUSIC]

The St. Louis had no choice but
to sail back across the Atlantic.

At the last minute, England,
France, Holland, and

Belgium agreed to take
the stranded refugees.

But because the war was spreading
over the next six years,

660 of the more than 900 passengers
would perish at the hand of the Nazis.

[MUSIC]

>> President Roosevelt was sympathetic
to the plight of the refugees.

But with the United States Congress
in an isolationist frame of mind,

he felt he could not spend "political
capital" saving a small number of Jews,

when all of Europe needed
help against Hitler.

Roosevelt believed that the only
way to stop Nazi aggression and

keep America insulated from Europe's
troubles, was to arm Britain and France.

It was not a popular idea in a country
that was officially neutral.

In March 1939,
six months after the Munich Agreement,

which Neville Chamberlain thought
Hitler would honor, Hitler broke his

promise not to make any territorial
claims, and took all of Czechoslovakia.

And still,

most Americans wanted to leave the
Europeans to deal with their own crisis.

America was interested in
a very different future.

[MUSIC]

>> In the summer of 1939,
New York was home to the world's fair,

that it was called the World of Tomorrow.

[MUSIC]

Visitors got their first
look at television.

>> How it worked, we did not know.

I didn't ask [LAUGH] I was just
in awe of the whole thing.

>> General Motors confidently offered
visitors a future without traffic jams.

General Electric dreams of
easy living with a dishwasher.

>> It was as if all of the dreams
of the future was suddenly going

to be materialized.

Machines were going to
make us better people.

>> And here he comes,
ladies and gentlemen.

Walking up to greet you,
under his own power.

>> It was like science fiction for
me, 12 years old,

waiting to see the World of Tomorrow.

[MUSIC]

>> The flags of 60 nations
flew over the fair.

Only one major power was absent.

[MUSIC]

Germany had been invited,
but Hitler had declined.

[MUSIC]

He had his own plan for
the World of Tomorrow.

[MUSIC]

On the last day of August,

visitors were enjoying another
festive evening at the fair.

[NOISE]
>> As we were approaching

the Polish pavilion, the lights went out.

And we didn't know whether it
was an electrical problem.

or what?

Because the rest of
the fair was still lit.

All of a sudden a loudspeaker went on.

And they had announced that Germany
had just marched into Poland.

[MUSIC]

>> Suddenly, the World of Tomorrow
had lost its bright promise.

>> And here is the United first flash
from Warsaw which says officially that

German planes have bombed railway
station in 3 Polish towns.

10 Downing Street =Prime Minister of UK

I am speaking to you in the Cabinet Room
at 10 Downing Street.

This country is at war with Germany.

[SOUND]
>> I remember

the broadcaster in London saying, and
I'll never forget that sentence he used.

Tonight, the lights are going
out all over Europe, and

no one knows when they'll
ever come back on.

[MUSIC]

[MUSIC]

The war in Europe made Americans
realize just how blessed they were.

In a display of patriotism,
flag sales soared.

And the song by famous Jewish immigrant

Irving Berlin went to
the top of the hit parade.

[MUSIC]

Most Americans still wanted
Europe to fight its own battle,

but President Roosevelt and a growing
number of people knew that they had to

prepare for the worst,
as events in Europe raged out of control.

[SOUND]

>> In the spring of 1940,

Hitler turned his Blitzkrieg,

his lightning war,
against the countries of western Europe.

[SOUND]

>> I think at that time, probably,

he was at the top point of his power.

Six weeks to beat Poland and
18 days to occupy Norway and Denmark.

To beat Holland in five days and
Belgium in 17 days.

I think those who doubted him,

they then thought that man is just superb,
he wins everything.

[MUSIC]

>> And then France fell in just six weeks.

On June the 14th,
German troops entered Paris.

[MUSIC]

Even as France collapsed, the German
planes started to attack Britain,

the last democratic stronghold in Europe.

Still, the United States held back.

President Roosevelt was able to help
America's battered English ally with

a program to "Lend and Lease" them arms.

>> We shall send you in
ever-increasing numbers,

ships, planes, tanks, guns.

That is our purpose and our pledge.

[SOUND]
>> But

as a beleaguered Britain became
freedom's last holdout in Europe,

full American involvement
became increasingly inevitable.

In December of 1940, the first peacetime
draft in American history began.

America's armed forces
were in woeful shape.

The US Army had under 200,000 men,
fewer than Holland or Portugal.

[MUSIC]

I remember even running around
with sticks for rifles and

we used old tomato cans
from the mess hall.

They got Campbell's soup cans and they'd
put gravel in them, and they'd rattle.

And then we'd throw them as far
as we could throw them, and

that's learning how to throw a grenade.

[SOUND]
>> I was in ROTC,

I was studying to be an officer
in the American Army.

And I would look at that German war
machine, and it put cold chills up and

down my back.

[MUSIC]

And I used to say to myself, you mean to
tell me we gotta go up against those guys?

[MUSIC]

It wasn't a very pretty picture.

[MUSIC]

>> By 1941,
history's deadliest conflict was underway.

And the very survival of freedom in
the world depended on the outcome.

That's on the next episode of
The Century: America's Time.

I'm Peter

Jennings,

thank

you for

joining

us.

[MUSIC]