The History of the Twentieth Century

The Big Three--Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill--met and conferred together for the first time in November 1943. It was the most important meeting of world leaders since the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

Transcribed - Published: 17 August 2025

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, created in 1924 by the merger of three film production companies, quickly rose to become the most successful studio of the era. The record box office for the 1939 film Gone with the Wind represents the studio at its height.

Transcribed - Published: 3 August 2025

The Japanese "Zero" fighter plane played an important role in Japan's amazing victories early in the Pacific war. But by 1943, the Zero (and its pilots) were falling behind their Allied counterparts.

Transcribed - Published: 27 July 2025

Continuing from the previous episode, we examine events in multiple theaters in August-September 1943

Transcribed - Published: 20 July 2025

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

Transcribed - Published: 13 July 2025

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

Transcribed - Published: 29 June 2025

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

Transcribed - Published: 22 June 2025

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

Transcribed - Published: 15 June 2025

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

Transcribed - Published: 8 June 2025

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

Transcribed - Published: 25 May 2025

Resistance against the Nazis could take many forms.

Transcribed - Published: 18 May 2025

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

Transcribed - Published: 11 May 2025

In the occupied countries of Europe and Asia, resistance movements developed to oppose Axis occupations. In most cases, the resistance movements were divided between Communist and non-Communist.

Transcribed - Published: 4 May 2025

The U-boat war was going quite well for the Germans at the beginning of 1943, but by mid-year, the German Navy was on the verge of abandoning the effort.

Transcribed - Published: 20 April 2025

The Hamburg bombing forced the German government to rethink its defense policies. In Québec, Churchill and Roosevelt cut a deal on atom bomb research.

Transcribed - Published: 6 April 2025

After two years of trying, RAF Bomber Command at last perfected the techniques to inflict mass casualties and devastation on an enemy city. Meanwhile, the US Eighth Air Force struggled to develop their own strategies.

Transcribed - Published: 30 March 2025

As the war turned against them, the Japanese attempted to create allies among the nations it occupied, declaring the independence of Burma and the Philippines, while the US embraced China as a peer of the main Allied powers, alongside the US, UK, and USSR.

Transcribed - Published: 16 March 2025

The Japanese come to the reluctant conclusion that they have to abandon Guadalcanal and northeastern New Guinea. US submarine warfare begins to take a toll, and Admiral Yamamoto is killed.

Transcribed - Published: 2 March 2025

The German offenive failed. Then it was the Soviets' turn.

Transcribed - Published: 16 February 2025

Adolf Hitler begins his long-delayed 1943 offensive against the USSR, which fizzles in a matter of days.

Transcribed - Published: 2 February 2025

Warner Brothers was one of the minor studios until they introduced the first talking picture, which made the studio into one of the majors. In the Thirties, Warner Brothers, led by the irascible Jack L. Warner, was known for its glitzy musicals and crime dramas. In the early Forties, the studio released two films that are now regarded as among the best American films ever made: The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.

Transcribed - Published: 19 January 2025

The Japanese claimed to be liberating their fellow Asians from Western oppression, but Japanese rule proved to be brutal and murderous.

Transcribed - Published: 5 January 2025

In early 1943, the remaining residents of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the SS. Farther east, the German Army uncovers the mass grave where the Soviet NKVD buried thousands of murdered Polish Army officers.

Transcribed - Published: 29 December 2024

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the American atom bomb project kicked into high gear. Fearful that the Germans were already working on a bomb and had a head start, the US government built a huge program meant to approach the problem of building an atom bomb from several different angles all at once.

Transcribed - Published: 25 December 2024

The Allies invade Sicily, which leads to the fall of Benito Mussolini.

Transcribed - Published: 22 December 2024

Hitler himself said that he had "never been a man of the defensive," but in the aftermath of Stalingrad, he had no choice.

Transcribed - Published: 15 December 2024

RKO Radio Pictures had a reputation for producing second-rate films. Even so, this was the studio that signed Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn; it was the studio that released King Kong and Citizen Kane.

Transcribed - Published: 1 December 2024

The first in a series looking at the American film industry in the 1930s and 1940s, the heyday of the "studio system."

Transcribed - Published: 24 November 2024

The fall of Burma to the Japanese put India on the front lines of the war, posing hard questions for the Indian nationalist movement.

Transcribed - Published: 17 November 2024

The BBC struggles to determine its role in wartime Britain.

Transcribed - Published: 10 November 2024

Stalingrad falls and Joseph Goebbels tries to spark a program to ramp up the German war effort.

Transcribed - Published: 27 October 2024

Roosevelt and Churchill met again in early 1943 to discuss the next stage of the war against the Axis, and they chose a provocative venue: Casablanca, a city their armies had only recently taken.

Transcribed - Published: 20 October 2024

In October and November 1942, the Japanese began their final push to drive the Americans off Guadalcanal.

Transcribed - Published: 6 October 2024

The Germans began an operation to relieve the siege of Stalingrad, but the Red Army was already prepared with a counter attack.

Transcribed - Published: 29 September 2024

The battle for Stalingrad raged on for two months, then the situation was suddenly upended by a surprise Soviet offensive that surrounded the city.

Transcribed - Published: 15 September 2024

The Anglo-American amphibious landings in French North Africa were not only a complex military operation. There was also complex negotiation going on behind the scenes. The Allies did not want to defeat French forces in North Africa; they wanted the French to join them.

Transcribed - Published: 8 September 2024

In October 1942, Bernard Montgomery began his long-awaited offensive against the Italians and Germans in Egypt. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the Mediterranean, the Allies were preparing to open a new front in Africa.

Transcribed - Published: 1 September 2024

The Battle of Stalingrad was a throwback to the kinds of battles fought in the last war. Like Verdun, the Germans were paying a heavy price. Would the gain be worth it?

Transcribed - Published: 25 August 2024

As Bernard Montgomery plotted an offensive against Axis forces in North Africa from the east, Dwight Eisenhower was plotting one from the west.

Transcribed - Published: 11 August 2024

When German soldiers began their assault on the city of Stalingrad, they expected a quick victory, but the Soviet defense was far tougher than they had imagined.

Transcribed - Published: 4 August 2024

German forces advance on Stalingrad in August 1942, while Adolf Hitler becomes increasingly hostile and mistrustful of his military commanders.

Transcribed - Published: 21 July 2024

The Nazis applied the experience they had gained from murdering disabled people and Soviet POWs to their project to exterminate Jewish people in Europe.

Transcribed - Published: 14 July 2024

It started with the concentration camps.

Transcribed - Published: 30 June 2024

In the first American offensive action of the war, US marines land on Guadalcanal.

Transcribed - Published: 23 June 2024

The German 1942 offensive in the USSR began well, so well that Hitler split the offensive into two parts. The German Army was advancing on Stalingrad and threatening to cut Russia off from its oil fields in the Caucasus.

Transcribed - Published: 16 June 2024

The US military went into the war just itching to invade France and take on the Germans ASAP. It was up to the British to talk them down, though the Allies did attempt a raid on the French coast at the port of Dieppe. Meanwhile, German intelligence infiltrated saboteurs into the United States.

Transcribed - Published: 9 June 2024

The war against Japan brought the Nationalists and the Communists back into a new alliance, but it didn't last. Mao Zedong polished up his political writings and asserted his authority over the Party.

Transcribed - Published: 26 May 2024

Adolf Hitler redeployed Luftwaffe units from the Eastern front to the Mediterranean. With Axis air superiority in the region established, shipments of equipment and supplies to Panzer Army Africa substantially increased. Soon Rommel was on the move again, this time driving the British deep into Egypt.

Transcribed - Published: 19 May 2024

Rommel was surprised by a British offensive (Operation Crusader) and his forces were driven all the way back to where he had started from a year earlier. But in a few months, he and his army pushed the British back to where they had started.

Transcribed - Published: 12 May 2024

When the United States entered the war, the German U-boats suddenly had many more targets.

Transcribed - Published: 5 May 2024