As you might remember from episode 124, which was about the Allied victory in Europe, Germany was basically cut in half by the invading Soviets in the East, and the Allies in the West. The Soviets had captured Berlin, and they had also occupied the eastern part of Germany. But they also had occupied all of eastern Europe, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. And they had no intention of giving those countries up.

Ok, WWII is over, and so I’m done talking about famous battles and cool fighter planes for a while. But I do feel that I need to go back and talk about a really important and horrific story of WWII, and how that affects our modern world. And that is the story of the Holocaust. It’s not a pleasant thing to talk about, but it’s really important, and has a big impact on the world after WWII, and on our modern world as well.

And just a bit of a warning here, this episode is a bit longer than most, because I feel like I needed to re-cover some history that we’ve already talked about in older episodes.

Well, here we are, finally. The Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan have been defeated. Hitler has committed suicide, at least that’s the official story, Mussolini was captured and hanged, and the Japanese emperor had to go on a nationwide broadcast and admit that he was not a deity.

The Allies were firmly in control of all the Axis lands, and the countries that they had conquered. If you look at a map of the high-tide mark of the Axis control, which was probably mid-1942, they controlled all of Europe, except the UK and the remnant of the European part of the USSR. They controlled much of North Africa. The Axis controlled all of the western Pacific Ocean, and in mid-1942, they had inflicted huge damage on the existing militaries of the Allies.

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Well, here we are. Humans are about to devise the technology that could realistically end the world. For the first time, humans have the ability to basically eradicate all of life on earth, and it’s only restrained by, well humans. Yikes.

The war in Europe ended in May of 1945, but the war in the Pacific was still going on. We talked about the turning point in the Pacific, the Battle of Midway, a couple of episodes ago, but since then we’ve only talked about the war in Europe. So we need to go back a couple of years and catch up with what was going on in the Pacific.

Well, VE Day is the sort of nickname that the world press gave to the day when victory in Europe was achieved. So VE stands for victory in Europe, which obviously is where we are going with this episode, but we’ve got a ways to go yet. And the eventually victory over Japan is going to be called VJ Day, but that one doesn’t get all that much traction, for some reasons that we’ll go into next episode. But lots of newspapers and countries around the western world were very excited about VE Day, and the name kind of stuck.

At the end of the last episode, we left about 150,000 Allied troops holding a small but solid beachhead in Normandy. The D-Day invasion was a huge Allied victory, but it was only the start of a long and difficult road to the defeat of Nazi Germany. But it was, indeed, the beginning of the end.

Well, here we are. This episode is about one of the most massive, high-risk and pivotal events of the last 100 years. Seriously, if you had to pick one day that was the most important or consequential days of the last 100 years, I think you might have to pick June 6th, 1944. It wasn’t quite the same ‘turning of the tide’ event that Midway and Stalingrad were, but in some ways, June 6th 1944 was an even bigger deal than either of them.

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As the Soviets were fighting the Germans all along a 1000 mile long front, they were demanding that the Allies in the west do something to open a second front against the Germans. We’ll get to the Allies eventual response to this in a couple of episodes, but the western allies had the same problem invading Europe that the Germans had had when they were thinking about invading Britain. That problem was the English Channel.

In order to send an invasion fleet across the channel to land in France, the Allies had to have complete control of the air above the channel, to protect the invasion fleet from German planes. So before the sea-borne invasion could take place, the Allies needed to defeat the Luftwaffe, or at least drive them back from their bases in France where they could attack an invasion fleet.

So the Allies started building up their air forces in Great Britain. The Royal Air Force, which had done such a heroic job of defeating the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, had continued to build up its fighter and bomber forces. But early 1942, they were joined by the newly formed American group, the Eighth Air Force. The Americans began to ship men, planes, bombs and ammo, and fuel to Great Britain. By the end of the war, the Americans are going to have over 200 airbases in Great Britain, with over half a million men on those bases, and over 50,000 planes.

Every once in a while, there is a great moment or battle that really changes the course of history. Yes, yes, I know I said that exact thing at the beginning of the last episode too, but I need to say it again, because this episode is, once again, a pivotal moment in human history. And instead of it being decided by a few crucial minutes, this battle will take about half of the year of 1942. And unlike the Battle of Midway, where the casualties were measured in the thousands, the casualties in the battle of Stalingrad will be measured in the millions.

Welcome to the deadliest battle in all of human history, the battle of Stalingrad.