- This is a film about that scale and grandeur.
This is a film about that military achievement.
This is a film about a people who, for all time,
shattered the legend of Nazi invisibility.
This is a film about victory and defeat.
German victory, and German defeat.
This is the battle for Russia,
a battle that has been going on for centuries,
a battle that fills the pages of Russian history.
1242.
The Germany order of Teutonic Knights
had invaded northeastern Russia,
and occupied the old city of Pskov.
Under the leadership of their grandmaster, von Bock,
they threatened to enslave the whole population
of that area, including the capital, Novgorod.
In their hour of peril, the Russian people
turned for leadership to their prince, Alexander Nevsky.
And on April 5th, 1242, on Lake Peipus,
the Russians met the might of the German forces.
They weren't as well equipped or as well organized.
- But in their hearts was a flaming courage,
a flame so fierce that it pierced the German army.
The victory they won fills a bright page of Russian history.
1704, and another conquering army
marched across Russian land.
This time, under Charles XII of Sweden, and again,
the Russians fought for their country.
Led by their emperor, Peter the Great,
after five long years of war,
they defeated the Swedes, in the historic battle of Poltava.
- The invading Swedish armies were crushed,
and forever driven out of Russia.
1812.
Napoleon and his armies have blazed their triumphant way
across Europe, and were marching on Moscow.
Conquering armies entered the city,
but they entered a city in flames.
Even in that day, Russian earth was scorched earth
to an invader, and once again,
the invader was forced to start the long march
on the road back out of Russia.
1914, and another German army, this time,
under Kaiser Wilhelm, set out to conquer Russia.
This time, the Russian people, under the regime of the czar,
were not only fighting German guns
but oppression and corruption in their own country,
and only the ultimate collapse of imperial Germany
saved Russia from losing the Ukraine and the Crimea,
which the Germans had occupied in 1918.
Yes, for 700 years, the Russian people have had to fight
and defend their land against would-be conquerors.
Why?
Why have all these attempts been made to conquer Russia?
Perhaps Russia itself can provide the answer.
Here it is.
One sixth of the Earth's surface,
reaching from east to west,
nearly halfway around the world,
and southward from the North Pole to the borders of India.
One country of nine million square miles.
That's our own country three times over,
or all of North America, and a million square miles to boot.
The sun never sets on Russia.
When it is dusk on its western borders, facing Europe,
it is already dawn on its eastern borders
facing the Pacific.
That's Russia, or to be correct,
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Deep in its mountains lie thick,
rich veins of gold and silver.
Below ground lie enormous deposits of copper, tin,
manganese and nickel,
chromium and radium,
sulfur and magnesium.
Russia is rich in raw materials.
Her forests cover millions upon millions of acres.
One fourth of all the lumber reserve in the world
belongs to Russia, and as for fuel,
there's coal, ton upon ton,
and more important, there's also oil,
213 million barrels a year of it,
black gold flowing from the earth,
that contains 55 percent of the world's oil.
What else?
Iron?
Russia has better than 10 billion tons.
That can make a lot of steel before it's done.
Yes, Russia is rich.
Her farms cover millions upon millions of acres,
the rich black earth that besides giving forth
oil and coil, will also grow everything
from sunflowers to lotus.
The tea your people drink in such huge quantities,
and the tobacco that they smoke.
Cotton grows here, too.
Three million, 800 thousand bales a year,
and sugar, and on the pasture land,
the animals grow fat for food and wool for clothing,
while on the warm plains, the fields of grain
stretch as far as the eye can reach.
Corn, oats, hops, rye, and don't forget wheat.
One third of the world's best.
Yes, Russia is very rich,
for it has not only raw materials
and the products of its soil,
Russia is also people.
193 million people.
People of every race, color and creed,
people coming from the many different republics
that comprise The Soviet Union,
people speaking more than a hundred different languages,
but all citizens of one country.
Whether they are the great Russians,
the descendants of the first settlers of this vast area,
and for a thousand years, its main population,
or Cossacks, or famous horsemen from the open plains
of the Don River Valley.
Whether they come from the southwest, the Ukraine.
Here in the bread basket of the Soviet Union
live the little Russians that are known as Ukrainians,
and beside them, the Moldavians and Bessarabians,
but if they come from the far south,
between the Caspian and Black Seas.
Where we find the Armenians and the Georgians,
the Ingush, the Chechens,
and rugged as the high peaks
of their native Caucasus Mountains.
Whether they are Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kyrgys,
from the Persian and Indian frontiers.
Or Mongols.
The Bashkirs, the Turko- Tartars, the Buryats,
the Yakuts, from beyond the Ural Mountains,
or the people of the ice country,
hunters like the Saamis.
Or settlers like the Laplanders.
Whether they come from the pioneering wilderness
of the far north,
or from a great city, like their capital, Moscow,
where the ancient buildings of an ancient civilization
stand beside the modern structures of a modern civilization,
where the old Russian droshky still competes
with the modern limousine.
Whether they work in factories or as soldiers,
whether they are brick layers or traffic cops,
sailors or riveters, school children or farmers,
nurses or engineers,
window washers or sales girls,
housewives or postal clerks,
radio announcers or stewardesses,
scientists or typists,
musicians or ballerinas.
Regardless of what they do or where they live,
they all have one thing in common: love of their soil.
That is Russia.
Size?
The largest country in the world.
Raw materials?
Unlimited.
Man power?
193 million.
These are three reasons why ever conqueror in history
has wanted Russia, and these are the reasons
why the modern would be conqueror wrote.
- "When we speak of new territory,
"we must think of Russia.
"Destiny itself points the way there."
- Yes, as we have seen,
Germany's spirit of aggression was handed down
from generation to generation,
and now, in Hitler's Germany,
the dream was world conquest.
For such a dream, there could be only one answer:
collective security.
So with this objective,
in 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations.
Again and again before the League,
its representatives urged binding agreements
to support by collective action
any nation submitted to attack.
- The State I represent entered the League
with the sole purpose of the maintenance
of invisible peace.
The League of Nations is still strong enough
by its collective actions
to avert or arrest aggression.
There is no room for bargaining or compromise.
- But while some members of the League
were pleading vainly for the use of collective force
to stop aggression, the world saw other members,
Germany, Italy, Japan, withdraw from the League
to follow the path of aggression.
Manchuria, Ethiopia,
then Hitler invaded Austria,
Czechoslovakia, and in 1939, Poland.
First step on the road to Russia.
But his eastward march was interrupted
by France and Britain declaring war.
So the Germans were forced to turn west,
and in 1940, as we have seen,
wiped the last opposition from western Europe,
and while the Nazis were unsuccessfully trying
to bring Britain to her knees,
the German generals were already planning to resume
the interrupted eastern blitz.
The road to Russia was now open,
but before that attack, preliminary steps were necessary.
South and east of Germany are Hungary, Romania,
Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece,
and Hungary had grain, rich fields of it,
grain too good for Hungarians, when German soldiers
have such good appetites.
Hungary had bauxite.
Bauxite makes aluminum, and aluminum makes planes,
and Hungary had an army,
not the battle trained German army,
but good enough to throw against Russian guns.
Romania had not only grain, but oil,
and Hitler needed every last drop of it
to power his war machine.
Romania also had men, more slave labor,
and more cannon fodder for the attack on Russia.
And most important, Romania and Hungary both
had Russian frontiers, and Hitler wanted those frontiers
in the hands of German generals.
Bulgaria didn't have a Russian frontier,
but it did have bases,
bases on the Black Sea,
bases for German submarines to prey on Russian shipping.
By the spring of 1941,
the reactionary governments of Hungary,
under the dictatorship of Admiral Horthy of Romania,
governed by young King Michael,
who was only a tool in the hands of Hitler's puppet,
General Antonescu, and of Bulgaria, ruled by King Boris,
always a disciple of German imperialism.
All had sold their countries out to Hitler.
Now, threatened by a revolt of their peoples,
they were only too glad to be protected by Hitler's armies.
So by March of 1941, German armies were in occupation
of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria.
That still left Yugoslavia and Greece.
So long as they remained unoccupied territory,
they remained the root
for a possible Allied counter invasion.
At one of their regular meetings,
Hitler had assigned the job of conquering Greece
to his stooge, Mussolini.
The stooge was delighted.
Here was his chance to prove to his people
that he, too, was a conqueror.
But he was wrong.
Perhaps the uniforms fooled him.
Something did.
For after the fascist legions had blitzed on one cylinder
this far into Greece, the Greeks,
in a brilliantly conducted mountain campaign,
drove the Italians back, and invaded Albania.
Hitler was enraged.
The failure of his stooge to protect his southern flank
was delaying the attack on Russia.
He sent a final ultimatum.
For the Yugoslavs and Greeks, it was surrender or else.
But the Yugoslavs and Greeks come from a long line
of fighting men.
Nazi slavery didn't appeal to them.
At dawn on April 6th, German bombs told the Yugoslavians
they were at war with Germany.
The Nazis and Italians launched a powerful
and coordinated attack from all their bases,
supported by virtually unopposed aerial bombarding.
The conclusion was inevitable.
Although resistance was determined,
the Yugoslav army was cut up
into many small segments, and captured.
The war in Greece also began on April 6th.
There, in spite of fierce and valiant resistance
by the Greeks, and the British,
who had come to their aid,
the Germans, overwhelmingly superior
in both numbers and equipment,
forced their way past the Vistritza River,
Mount Olympus, the famous passage of Thermopylae,
and by the end of April,
a swastika flew over the ancient city of Athens.
The conquest of the Balkans was now complete.
The whole force of Nazi might could now
be turned loose on Russia.
There was no time to waste,
for time was Russia's weapon.
Their industries, so recently built and which,
like our own, were designed for the ways of peace,
were converted for war.
Instead of steel for plows and tools,
steel for shells and guns.
They knew their industry could never produce enough
too adequately for the titanic struggle,
but what they could produce, they would.
At the same, the army began to grow.
More and more men were called up to be trained,
hardened, drilled, prepared to defend their land.
With the conquest of the Balkans,
the Nazis had a solid front from the Black Sea to the Baltic
but the Russians had built themselves a buffer,
to take some of the steam out of the Nazi punch
no matter where it landed,
but where would it land?
When the blow came, it was from five different directions,
and from the north, one extra, just for luck.
That was the big day.
As dawn broke, more than 200 Axis divisions,
more than 2 million men plunged into a front
2000 miles long, reaching from the White Sea to the Black.
Their aim?
The annihilation of the Red Army,
in the decisive battle on the frontier.
The offensive started along the whole length of the front,
but was concentrated on three main objectives:
Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine.
In the first 30 days, von Leeb's forces
drove to within 125 miles of Leningrad,
while the Finns under Mannerheim, supported by the Germans,
began to drive from the north to encircle the city.
In the center, von Bock's army plunged 480 miles
into Soviet territory.
One Russian city after the other was overrun
by the invaders.
And on July 17th, they captured the first main objective:
Smolensk, regarded as the key to Moscow.
Simultaneously in the south, von Rundstedt's forces
cut deep into the Ukraine.
This was Blitzkrieg at its best.
The world gave Russia another six weeks,
and the Germans issued a communique.
- The issue in the east has already been settled.
Smolensk is the last halt on the road to Moscow.
- But then, a strange thing happened.
For the first time since the mighty German army
started its career of blitz, smashing into submission
one European country after the other,
that same German army came up against a country
that did not submit.
Despite the fact that Hitler's army
swept deeper and deeper into the Soviet Union,
and by October the 15th stood practically
within the shadows of the Kremlin,
despite the fact that the Soviet government
and all foreign missions were forced to move to Kuibyshev,
700 miles to the east,
despite Hitler's triumphant pronouncement,
I can say that this enemy is already broken
and will never rise again.
Despite the fact that by December,
500,000 square miles of Russian territory,
an area equal to the entire middle western United States
had fallen to the invaders, yes,
despite Russia's loss of her best agricultural areas,
her most thoroughly developed industrial plants,
millions of her people,
thousands of her tanks and her planes,
despite everything, those six weeks had lengthened
into nearly six months, and the dread Nazi blitz
had spluttered, stumbled, and finally died.
What had happened here?
Let's try to analyze it.
First, in this titanic struggle, not only two armies,
but two fighting methods and two strategies
came face to face.
The German strategy was based on the well tried
'Keil and Kessel'
or wedge and trap maneuver.
One wedge would be driven deep into the enemy territory,
to hook up with another spearhead,
driven through to meet it.
In the trap thus formed, the victim would be pocketed
for annihilation.
The German plan in every campaign was to seek
a decisive battle at the moment of invasion.
- A single blow must destroy the enemy,
without regard for losses,
a gigantic, all destroying blow.
- Remember the campaigns you have already seen
in these films.
Poland, the Poles concentrated on their borders.
The blitz broke through.
18 days finished Poland.
France, the Allied strength on the borders,
the breakthrough at Sedan,
and the issue of France was settled.
The Balkans, the Yugoslavians rushed to the border,
the breakthrough came and in 12 days, Yugoslavia was gone.
The Germans planned the same blitz against the Russians,
but the Russians had developed their own strategy,
one to take full advantage of the vast area of their land.
The Russian strategy was a defensive depth,
line after line, far back into the interior,
and when the Nazi wedge struck,
the first line would bend with it,
until it became part of the second.
Again, the wedge would strike,
again, a segment would be lost, but again,
the line would bend, until it became part of the third.
So the deeper the Germans plowed into Russian soil,
the stronger their opposition,
until finally, they faced an unshatterable wall,
and were robbed of their chance to hit
that all destroying blow they had counted on.
The result?
The Germans conquered land and lost the campaign.
For the Russian tactics kept the main bulk
of their armies intact, and made a long war inevitable,
instead of that quick decision the Germans sought.
And the Russians had other tactics
that threw the Germans for a loss.
Germany had developed blitz warfare,
mechanized warfare, armies on wheels,
juggernauts to crush everything before them.
But the Russians found a way to drag them out
of their traveling fortresses.
They used their cities as strongholds,
and made the blitz come to them down alleys.
The more a city was bombed, the more impassable it became
to the German Panzers.
They made the names of these Russian cities
as familiar to us as the names of towns in the next county.
Rostov, Kharkov, Kiev, Kursk, Smolensk.
City after city, standing in the path of the Nazi blitz,
the Red Army has found a way to make their cities
of great strategic importance.
Odessa, the scene of a heroic siege of more than two months
held up the whole Nazi thrust into the Crimea.
Sevastopol, which resisted every attempt of the Germans
to break through.
Here, for eight and a half long months,
the Russians fought for the town.
Inch by inch, barring the Germans
from the great Black Sea naval base located there.
Finally, when the Germans entered the town,
each district was defended street by street.
Each street house by house
and each house room by room.
The Russians knew their cities would be demolished,
but their objective was not to save cities,
but to destroy Germans,
a high price to pay for a copy of Mein Kampf.
So the Germans were forced out of their armored shells,
to fight and to die in the hand to hand combat
they thought they had abolished.
There was another item the Germans had overlooked.
They overlooked people, and generals may win campaigns,
but people win wars,
and on that fatal June 22nd,
when the Russian people first learned
of the invasion of their country,
their grim faces told of their determination,
to fight and to die, but never to surrender.
They knew this wasn't a question of who occupied
what piece of land.
This was a question of life or death.
- This war is not an ordinary war.
It is the war of the entire Russian people,
not only to eliminate the danger hanging over our heads,
but to aid all people groaning under the yoke of fascism.
- So the alarm was spread to factory and farm,
and from every Russian town and village,
men poured forth to answer the call.
From now on, one thing mattered,
and one thing only: victory.
Total war meant total mobilization,
not war just for soldiers, war for everyone,
young or old, male or female, it made no difference.
Age had nothing to do with it.
If you were only 12 years old, there was work
for 12 year olds to do.
Sex had nothing to do with it.
If you could hold a rifle, you were a soldier.
If you could turn a lathe, you were a soldier.
If you could harvest the fields, you were a soldier.
If you could handle a locomotive,
or pilot a ship, or guide a tractor,
you were still a soldier.
For everything you did was part of that total war.
Nothing that the enemy could use was left behind,
not a yard of wire, or a pound of iron,
not an acre of wheat or a head of cattle,
and the old men stood watch over the fields,
ready to give the word to burn
at the first sight of the enemy.
Scorched earth.
What can't be withdrawn must be destroyed.
That meant the factories, the plants, the oil depots,
flames claimed them all.
The giant dam at Dneprostroi, into which had been poured
not only steel and concrete,
but five long years of Russian toil and Russian sweat,
to yield the miracle of electricity to the farms
and people of the Ukraine.
Now, rather than let the power it generated
fall to the enemy, they destroyed it.
Scorched earth.
The land they had lived on, worked on,
their forests, their fields, their farms,
they surrendered them to the flames,
but not to the invaders.
That was the scorched earth.
And for action behind the German lines,
a new army was formed,
an army without uniforms whose home was the forest,
and whose front was the enemy's rear,
the guerrilla army.
A minimum of glory, and a maximum of determination.
Their achievements were seldom recorded.
Look well at these faces.
You will never see them again in the ranks of war prisoners,
or read their names over heroes' graves.
Ahead of them lay nothing but the rope and the halter,
but they stayed behind and went on fighting.
Their only goal was merciless destruction,
destruction of communication lines, supplies,
the invaders themselves.
Their weapons were dynamite, and the terror of surprise.
They asked for no mercy, and they gave none.
This is the guerrilla army, this, the scorched earth,
this, the Red Army, these, its leaders.
These are the reasons why
although the Germans conquered land,
500,000 square miles of it,
it was just land, barren land, scorched land.
These are the reasons why, after five and a half months
of blitz warfare, after coming within sight of their goal,
the Germans were stopped at the very gates of Moscow.
These are the reasons why although Hitler had sworn
that before December, the swastika would fly
from the Kremlin towers, December had come,
but it wasn't the swastika that flew
over the Russian capital,
and it wasn't the Nazi conquerors who marched
through the streets of the ancient city.
But fresh reserves of the Red Army.