We've all heard of the atomic bomb, but in the late 1950s, an idea was conceived of a bomb which would maximize damage to people, but minimize damage to buildings and vital infrastructure: perfect for an occupying army. This is the story of a man and his bomb: a melding of world events and scientific discovery inspire the neutron bomb, one of the most hated nuclear weapons ever invented.
The true story of German-Czech businessman Oskar Schindler (1908-74) as told by some of the Jews — more than a thousand people — whose lives he saved from extermination during World War II.
Evocation of the Oradour-sur-Glane Massacre on 10 June 1944, when 642 of its inhabitants were slaughtered by a Nazi Waffen SS company, based on a visit to Diors' Museum of the Three Wars" and archive photographs.
Germany in 1941. War in Europe for two years. The Nazis at the height of their power. Since the beginning of the war, there has been a frontline in the west where the traces of horrible fights disappear on the spot:The Battle of the Atlantic. England, traditionally the leading naval power worldwide was to be cut off from all supplies by a blockade while the balance of power is not in favor of the German Kriegsmarine. Their commander-in-chief complains that "the war was five years early." That a victory seems achievable at the beginning is the result of a weapon that was only known in Germany at the height of perfection and drill: submarines.
This documentary traces the history of the Short Sunderland Flying Boat, from its introduction to service in the RAF in 1938 it was to become one of the longest serving careers of any front-line aircraft. The Sunderland was one of the very few types to remain in operational service through the Second World War and the only RAF aircraft to perform front-line duties for the whole of the Korean War. When it finally retired in 1959, it had served for a total of twenty one years and had built up a reputation as a tough and reliable workhorse.
During the latter days of WWII an American Lieutenant accidentally falls out of an airplane into German territory. He is taken in by a Baroness who becomes smitten with him and doesn't want him to leave, so she doesn't tell him that the war has ended...for five years!
The De Havilland Comet was the world's first passenger jet airliner. But less than two years into service, two aircraft blew up in mid-air, killing all aboard. PM Winston Churchill ordered an assemblage of experts to discover what went wrong - in the process, inventing many of the air crash investigation techniques still used today.
This 2004 documentary by Werner Herzog diaries the struggle of a passionate English inventor to design and test a unique airship during its maiden flight above the jungle canopy.
In the North African desert in World War II, a crippled American fighter plane that is unable to take off tries to evade and destroy a pursuing Nazi tank.
Hitler's invasion of Russia was one of the landmark events of World War II. This documentary reveals the lead-up to the offensive, its impact on the war and the brinksmanship that resulted from the battle for Moscow. Rare footage from both German and Russian archives and detailed maps illustrate the conflict, while award-winning historian and author John Erickson provides insight into the pivotal maneuvers on the eastern front.
In 1973 Alister Barry joined the crew of a protest boat (The Fri) to Mururoa Atoll, where the French Government were testing nuclear weapons. Barry records the assembly of the crew, the long journey from Northland, and their reception in the test zone; when The Fri was boarded and impounded by French military he had to hide his camera in a barrel of oranges.
J. Robert Oppenheimer and other key figures involved in the decision to drop the first atomic bomb discuss their motivations in this NBC News documentary. Originally produced and televised in 1965, two decades after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was re-released in 2023 with an epilogue by Michael Beschloss, NBC News Presidential Historian.
They raised children, baked cakes... and built world-class fighter planes. Sixty years ago, thousands of women from Thunder Bay and the Prairies donned trousers, packed lunch pails and took up rivet guns to participate in the greatest industrial war effort in Canadian history. Like many other factories across the country from 1939 to 1945, the shop floor at Fort William's Canadian Car and Foundry was transformed from an all-male workforce to one with forty percent female workers.
De Gaulle, l'homme à abattre
A film that relates the trial in Bordeaux in January 1953 of some of the participants in the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre of June 10, 1944.
The true story of WWII's notorious Sobibor Nazi death camp, where a courageous inmate orchestrates and leads the escape of over 300 prisoners.
On August 6 1945, one plane dropped one bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the city was destroyed and 80,000 people were dead. But the dropping of the Atomic bomb also launched the Nuclear age, shaping all of our lives and changing the world for ever. For this film we have tracked down people who made the bomb, people who dropped the bomb, and people who were in Hiroshima – some less than half a mile from ground zero -when the bomb fell on their city. Many of the witnesses are in their 90s and this will be the last time they will be able to tell their extraordinary stories. The Day They Dropped The Bomb is told through witness recollections, rare archive film and photographs shot at the time. The documentary will be broadcast for the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima next year by ITV and in America by the Smithsonian Channel.
The riveting story of the first all-Black tank battalion to fight in US military history. Under General George Patten's command, the 761st fought heroically throughout WWII and were the furthest east of all US troops in the European theater of war.
Belgique nazie
During World War II, the photographer Francisco Boix and other Spanish Republican prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where 120,000 people died, managed not only to survive their indescribable experience, but also, after the war, to reveal to the world what really happened in that hell, saving from destruction thousands of official photographs taken by the SS.