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From sailors diving into a sea of burning oil, to a president's son storming the beach with his cane,

to a general walking into the largest invasion in human history with an apology note hidden in his wallet,

this is World War II Explained.

And by the end of this video, you'll understand exactly how the whole world caught fire and what it cost America to put it out.

But our story begins where the last war ended.

November 1918.

A military hospital in Pazewalk, Germany.

A 29 -year -old corporal lies in a bed, temporarily blinded by a British mustard gas attack.

He's a decorated soldier, a loner, a failed artist from Austria.

And when a chaplain walks in and announces that Germany has surrendered, the corporal turns his face to the wall and weeps.

His name was Adolf Hitler.

Now, Hitler refused to believe Germany had lost the war.

Instead, he embraced a poisonous belief that Germany had been stabbed in the back by traitors and Jews at home.

And that same feeling grew stronger across Germany.

Cause the Treaty of Versailles humiliated

Germans by forcing them to accept all the blame for World War I, give up their territory, gut their military,

and pay reparations so massive that it crushed the economy.

By 1923, German money was so worthless, people burned cash for heat, because it was literally cheaper than firewood.

So into that desperation stepped Hitler.

And here's the thing you need to understand about him.

He was a struggling painter, rejected from art school, twice,

but also a hypnotic public speaker who could hold a crowd of thousands in the palm of his hand.

And above all, a gambler.

Well, metaphorically, he was a man who would bet everything again and again on one single conviction,

that the rest of the world was too scared to stop him.

But his first bet failed.

In 1923, he tried to overthrow the government in the beer hall pooch and got thrown in prison.

But even that worked out for him.

Because behind bars, he wrote his manifesto, became famous, and learned his most dangerous lesson.

Don't seize power.

Get elected to it.

So when the Great Depression hit and six million

Germans lost their jobs, he saw his opening.

And on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was legally appointed

Chancellor of Germany.

And within weeks, he got lucky again.

The German parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames.

Hitler blamed his political enemies, declared a national emergency, and convinced lawmakers to hand him the power of a dictator,

using the rules of democracy to kill democracy.

Within months, opposition parties were banned, books were burning in the streets, and Germany's Jews were being stripped of their rights one law at a time,

the first steps down a road darker than anyone could imagine.

On the other hand, Hitler began building his war machine alongside two new friends,

fascist Italy under Mussolini and the Empire of Japan, which was already carving its way through China.

Together, they'd become known as the Axis Powers.

And America, what had nothing to do with any of it?

We'd just lost over 116 ,000 men in World War I, and Congress passed law after law to keep us out of the next one.

Sorry, fellas, this ain't our problem.

But while the United States looked away, Hitler started taking risks.

Bet number one, 1936.

He marched troops into the Rhineland, directly violating the Treaty of Versailles.

His own generals were terrified.

If France pushed back, Germany's tiny army would have to retreat in humiliation.

But France did nothing.

Bet number two, 1938.

He annexed his home country of Austria.

The world did nothing again.

And bet number three.

He demanded a chunk of Czechoslovakia.

And this time, the leaders of Britain and France flew to Munich and just gave it to him.

Britain's Prime Minister flew home waiving the agreement, promising peace for our time.

And it was met with huge relief and cheering crowds.

People desperately wanted to avoid another world war.

But just six months later, Hitler took.. the rest of Czechoslovakia.

You see the pattern?

Every time, Hitler bet the world would blink.

And every time, he was right.

So on September 1st, 1939, he made his biggest bet yet.

Germany invaded Poland.

And this time, Hitler had insurance.

Because a week earlier, he'd signed a secret deal with his sworn ideological enemy,

Stalin's Soviet Union agreeing not to attack each other and to split Poland between them.

Nazis and communists shaking hands.

Yeah, I don't trust either of you.

Oh, and this wasn't trench warfare.

This was blitzkrieg.

Tanks, dive bombers, and radio -coordinated troops punching through enemy lines before anyone could react.

Basically, everyone else showed up expecting a rematch of the last war.

Trenches, barbed wire, sitting still.

But Germany invented a war that never stopped moving.

And as a result, Poland fell in about five weeks.

But this time, Europe had enough.

Because Britain and France declared war.

And World War II had officially begun.

In the spring of 1940,

Hitler unleashed the Blitzkrieg on Western Europe, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and then France.

Now remember, in World War I, Germany threw itself at France for four years and never took Paris.

Well, this time, France surrendered in six weeks.

Hitler even took a tour of Paris and posed for this photo.

Crazy!

The British army barely escaped the continent at Dunkirk,

where over 338 ,000 soldiers were trapped on a beach with the German army closing in.

And what saved them was one of the most incredible rescues in history.

Hundreds of vessels, from Navy destroyers down to ordinary citizens in fishing boats,

shuttling men across the channel under bomber attack for nine straight days.

Civilians!

In fishing boats!

Sailing into a war zone!

Absolute legends!

And just like that, But Britain stood alone in Europe, the last major power still in the fight.

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Hitler expected them to make peace.

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But instead, they got Winston Churchill, who growled that

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Britain would never surrender.

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So Hitler tried to bomb

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Britain into submission.

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All through the summer and fall of 1940, German bombers pounded British cities night after night.

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While a few thousand young RAF fighter pilots, many barely out of school, rose to meet them again and again.

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Britain bent.

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It burned.

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But it never broke.

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Churchill said of those pilots, never was so much owed by so many to so few.

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It was the first time Hitler ever lost.

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Meanwhile, back in America, President Franklin D.

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Roosevelt watched all of this with growing dread.

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He couldn't drag an unwilling country into war.

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But he could send

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Britain ships, planes, and weapons through a program called Lend -Lease, turning America into what he called the Arsenal of Democracy.

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Cool name, sir!

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Cuz FDR believed something most

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Americans didn't want to hear.

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Two oceans had always protected us, but they weren't going to protect us much longer.

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Because on the other side of the world, Japan had a problem.

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Its empire was running out of oil, and America had cut off the supply to punish

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Japan's brutal invasion of China.

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So Japan's military leaders made a decision.

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Take the oil -rich territories of Southeast Asia by force.

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But to do that, they'd first have to knock out the one thing standing in their way.

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The American Pacific Fleet, sitting at anchor in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

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And the man ordered to plan that attack was the one Japanese officer who knew exactly how badly this would end.

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Isoroku Yamamoto had studied at Harvard.

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He'd served in Washington.

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He'd seen American factories, oil fields, and industry up close.

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And he opposed going to war with the United States.

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He warned his own government with a chilling prediction.

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I can run wild for six months.

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After that, I have no expectation of success.

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But when his country ordered him to fight anyway, he did his duty.

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And he planned one of the most devastating surprise attacks in history.

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Oh, and remember his prediction.

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Six months.

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That's gonna come back to haunt them.

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At 7 .55 a .m on Sunday,

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December 7, 1941, the first wave of 183 Japanese aircraft screamed out of the clouds over Pearl Harbor.

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Sailors were eating breakfast.

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Some were still asleep.

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Church bells were ringing.

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And then, the bombs fell.

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Battleship Row erupted in fire.

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The USS Arizona took a bomb to her ammunition magazine and exploded,

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killing 1 ,177 men in nine seconds.

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Many are still entombed in her hull today.

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Sailors dove into water coated in burning oil.

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Anti -aircraft gunners fired back in their pajamas.

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The battleship Nevada, wounded and burning actually got underway and made a desperate run for the open sea,

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her crew refusing to quit even as the second wave of 170 more aircraft came screaming down on her.

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In under two hours, 2 ,403 Americans were dead.

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19 ships were sunk or damaged.

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The Pacific fleet was crippled.

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Man, it doesn't really get much worse than that.

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So the next day, FDR stood before

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Congress and called it a date which will live in infamy.

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America declared war on Japan within the hour.

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And the bad news kept coming, because in the months after

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Pearl Harbor, Japan ran the table across the Pacific.

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Guam, Wake Island, Hong Kong, Singapore.

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In the Philippines, tens of thousands of American and Filipino troops were forced to surrender, then driven on a brutal forced march,

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the Bataan Death March, where thousands died from beatings, starvation, and execution.

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America wasn't just losing, it was getting humiliated.

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But then, Hitler did something so reckless, historians still argue about it.

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On December 11, 1941, Germany declared war on the United States.

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Nobody forced him to the man just couldn't help himself he bet

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that america was soft divided and too far away to matter big mistake buddy

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because america transformed almost overnight factories

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that built cars started building tanks 16 million americans put on

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a uniform millions of women marched into the workforce building the

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bombers their brothers would fly by the end of the war

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American factories were cranking out a new warplane roughly every 5 minutes.

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But America's first punch back was small but mighty.

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In April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle led 16 bombers off an aircraft carrier,

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something never done before, and bombed Tokyo itself.

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The damage was minor.

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The message was not.

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Mr. Doolittle can do a lot.

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And that message rattled

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Japan into a fatal mistake because Yamamoto decided to finish off the American carriers once

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and for all by luring them into a trap at a tiny island called Midway.

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One problem.

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American codebreakers were reading Japan's mail.

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They knew the target.

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They knew the date.

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And they even confirmed it with a trick, broadcasting a fake message that

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Midway was low on fresh water, then watching Japanese radio traffic repeat it.

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So, when the Japanese fleet arrived on June 4, 1942, the trap was reversed.

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American dive bombers caught the Japanese carriers at the worst possible moment.

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Decks crowded with fuel lines and bombs.

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In about five minutes, three Japanese aircraft carriers were burning wrecks a fourth followed by the end of the day.

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Four carriers, the heart of the fleet that hit Pearl Harbor.

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gone in a single day.

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And get this, Midway came almost exactly six months after Pearl Harbor.

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Yamamoto's prediction came true nearly to the day.

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He had run wild.

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And now, the tide had turned.

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But Yamamoto's story has one final chapter.

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Cause in April 1943, American Code Breakers intercepted his inspection tour schedule.

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Exact times, exact route.

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So 16 P -38 fighters flew hundreds of miles at wavetop height and ambushed his plane over the jungle in Operation Vengeance,

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sending the architect of Pearl Harbor down in flames.

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The date?

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April 18th, one year to the day after the Doolittle Raid.

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Meanwhile, on the far side of the world,

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Hitler had overstepped in his own way invading the soviet union his former partner he bet on another lightning victory

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but instead he got the russian winter endless soviet manpower

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and a meat grinder of a war his army was never built for

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and at a city called stalingrad the soviets bled his forces

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white in the most brutal battle of the entire war over

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a million casualties on each side ending in an entire German army, surrounded, frozen, and destroyed.

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The Axis was no longer unstoppable.

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Now, America just had to do the hardest thing in military history, invade fortress Europe.

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But first, the United States needed to learn how to fight, and it did the hard way,

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through North Africa and up the boot of Italy in 1943, knocking Mussolini out of power along the way.

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One Axis dictator down, two to go.

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That's also where the world met a general with pearl -handled pistols and zero filter.

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George Patton.

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See, Patton believed in speed, aggression, and never digging in.

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His men called him old blood and guts, and the Germans considered him the most dangerous commander the Allies had.

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But he was also deeply flawed.

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He nearly got fired for slapping a shell -shocked soldier in a hospital.

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But when America needed someone to attack, there was nobody on Earth better.

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And the man who had to manage Patton and the entire

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Allied war effort was his old friend, General Dwight D.

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Eisenhower.

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But here's the wild thing about Eisenhower.

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He had never personally led troops in combat.

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Not once.

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But Ike had a rarer gift.

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He could take prideful generals from a dozen countries and forge them into one team.

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And by 1944, that team had built the largest invasion force in human history, aimed at the beaches of Normandy, France.

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Nearly 156 ,000 men, thousands of ships and aircraft, one shot to crack open Hitler's Europe.

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And the entire thing came down to this one man's decision, because the weather over the English Channel was terrible.

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Eisenhower's forecaster spotted one narrow window on June 6th.

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If he was wrong, thousands of men would die for nothing, and the war could drag on for years.

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But Ike gave the order.

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Okay, let's go.

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Then, alone, he scribbled a note and slipped it into his wallet to be released in case the invasion failed.

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It read, The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do.

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If any blame or fault attaches to this attempt, it is mine alone.

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He was so exhausted, he dated it July 5th instead of June 5th.

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That's what command looks like, folks.

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One man carrying all of it.

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So that night, over 13 ,000 American paratroopers dropped into the darkness behind enemy lines,

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scattered for miles by wind and anti -aircraft fire, fighting in tiny lost groups before the sun even came up, which weirdly helped.

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Cause German commanders reading the reports couldn't figure out where the real attack was.

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Oh, and Germany's best general, Erwin Rommel, the man in charge of defending the coast,

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he looked at the awful weather forecast and gone home for his wife's birthday.

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Ha!

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Tell your wife we said happy birthday!

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At dawn on June 6, 1944, D -Day, the ramps dropped, and wading through the surf at Utah Beach,

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leaning on a cane, is a 56 -year -old brigadier general, the oldest man in the entire world entire invasion.

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His name is Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Yes, that Roosevelt, the eldest son of President Teddy Roosevelt.

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He'd already been shot in the leg and gassed half -blind in World War I.

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Now he's got crippling arthritis and a heart condition he's hiding from Army doctors.

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He begged to land with the first wave after his commander said no. Twice.

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So he put it in writing, It will steady the men to know that I am with them.

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His general finally approved it, privately expecting never to see him alive again.

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But he's one of the first men onto the sand, and he immediately realizes something is wrong.

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The currents have pushed the entire landing force a full mile off target.

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The maps are useless.

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The plan is dead.

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Thousands of men and vehicles are about to pile onto the wrong beach.

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So the old man walks the open sand, under fire, with a cane and a pistol, sees the ground for himself, and makes the call.

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We'll start the war from right here.

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And it works.

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He redirects wave after wave, cracking jokes, telling stories about his father, and calming terrified teenagers while shells fall around him.

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Oh, and somewhere down that same coastline, on bloody Omaha Beach, his own son Quentin is landing too.

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Father and son.

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Same morning, same invasion.

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But five weeks later, Ted Roosevelt's hidden heart finally gave out.

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And here's the part that gets me.

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That same day, Eisenhower had just approved his promotion to general of his own division.

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The star never reached his uniform.

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Years later, someone asked

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General Omar Bradley to name the single most heroic act he'd ever seen in combat

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he answered instantly ted roosevelt on utah beach today

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he rest in the normandy american cemetery buried right beside his

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little brother quentin who never came home from world war one man the roosevelts are as tough as they come

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rest easy sir but let's rewind to that june morning cause not every beach was utah on Omaha Beach,

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American troops walked into a slaughterhouse.

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German machine guns on the bluffs raked the landing craft before the ramps ever opened.

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Men drowned under their own gear.

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The first waves were torn apart, pinned behind obstacles on a beach with nowhere to hide.

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For a few terrible hours, Omaha hung in the balance.

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But then, small groups of soldiers, sergeants and junior officers did what Americans do.

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They stopped waiting for orders.

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They blew gaps in the wire, clawed up the bluffs, and took out the German guns one position at a time.

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And where was Hitler while his Atlantic wall was cracking?

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Asleep.

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His panzer reserves, the tanks that might have thrown the invasion back into the sea, sat waiting for his personal release order,

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and by the time he acted, it was too late.

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The Fuhrer had finally been outplayed.

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By nightfall, the Allies had their foothold.

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It cost over 4 ,400 Allied lives in a single day, including more than 2 ,500 Americans.

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To every one of those boys, thank you.

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We remember.

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From that foothold, the Allies broke out and raced across France.

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On August 25, 1944, Paris was liberated.

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By December, Allied armies stood at Germany's border, and some folks were saying the war could be over by Christmas.

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They were wrong, because Hitler had one last trick up his sleeve,

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and it would trigger the biggest and deadliest battle in the history of the United States Army.

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December 16, 1944.

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The Ardennes Forest in Belgium, the quietest sector of the entire front.

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So quiet, it's where exhausted American units were sent to rest, which is exactly why Hitler chose it.

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Out of the freezing fog came over 200 ,000 German troops and hundreds of tanks.

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Hitler's secret reserve gambled on one final lunge to split the Allied armies in two.

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Thinly stretched American lines were overrun.

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The front bulged backward, giving the battle its name, the Battle of the Bulge.

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But scattered American units did something the German timetable never accounted for.

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They refused to break.

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Outnumbered engineers, cooks and clerks blew bridges and held crossroads, selling every single mile at a price the Germans couldn't afford.

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And at a crossroads town called Bastogne, the 101st Airborne was completely surrounded,

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low on ammo, low on food, and freezing.

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So the Germans sent a formal demand for surrender.

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But the American commander, General Anthony McAuliffe, sent back a one -word reply.

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Nuts!

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God, I love this country!

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But Bastogne couldn't hold forever, so Eisenhower turned to Patton, who did something most generals would call impossible.

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He pulled his third army out of one battle, pivoted it 90 degrees, and threw it north through ice and snow in a matter of days.

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On December 26th, Patton's tanks punched through to Bastogne.

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The skies cleared, Allied airpower returned, and Hitler's last gamble collapsed.

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But the cost was staggering.

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The Battle of the Bulge involved over 600 ,000 American troops, the largest battle the U .S.

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Army has ever fought.

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And when it was over, more than 19 ,000 Americans were dead.

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More than Pearl Harbor, D -Day, and Iwo Jima combined.

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And as American forces pushed into Germany itself in the spring of 1945,

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they began discovering something that turned battle -hardened soldiers' stomachs.

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The camps.

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Ordruf, Buchenwald, Dachau.

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Germany's concentration camps were a living nightmare.

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Eisenhower even forced himself to witness it personally.

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Then he ordered camera crews, journalists, and even nearby German civilians brought in to see it, so that there would be proof,

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so no one could ever claim it didn't happen.

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This is why this war had to be won.

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But the man who had led America through all of it never saw the finish line.

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On April 12, 1945, Franklin D.

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Roosevelt died suddenly, less than a month before victory in Europe.

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The nation wept, and a plain -spoken man from Missouri named Harry Truman suddenly held the most powerful office on Earth.

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18 days later, the story that began in a Pazewalk hospital bed reached its ending.

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With Soviet shells falling on Berlin above him, Adolf Hitler took his own life in an underground bunker.

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And on May 8, 1945, VE Day, Germany surrendered unconditionally.

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Half the war was over, but the Pacific still burned.

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At Iwo Jima, Marines fought for five weeks over eight square miles of volcanic rock honeycombed with tunnels.

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Nearly 7 ,000 Americans died taking it, and the flag they raised on Mount Tsuribachi became the most famous photograph in American military history.

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At Okinawa, it got even worse.

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Kamikaze pilots deliberately crashing their planes into American ships, and defenders fighting nearly to the last man.

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And that was the terrifying math of it all.

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If Japan would spend tens of thousands of lives defending tiny islands, what would invading

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Japan itself cost?

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Planners projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties, and millions of Japanese.

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So Truman faced an impossible choice.

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Invade and feed a generation of young

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Americans into the bloodiest battle ever fought, or use a terrifying new weapon and end the war at a price the world had never seen.

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So on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima.

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Three days later, a second destroyed Nagasaki.

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Tens of thousands died instantly, many more in the months that followed, leading to Japan announcing its surrender.

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And on September 2, 1945, the war officially ended, slowly,

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quietly, on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

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The Japanese delegation arrived in formal black coats and top hats, standing stiff and silent before representatives of every allied nation.

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General Douglas MacArthur, who could have just gloated, instead spoke of hope that a better world shall emerge.

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The signatures took just minutes.

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Then MacArthur leaned into the microphone.

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These proceedings are closed.

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And overhead, hundreds of American warplanes thundered past in formation, as the deadliest war in human history finally went silent.

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World War II didn't just change the map, it changed what the world was.

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But the cost?

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Well, when the smoke cleared across six continents, it revealed an estimated 70 to 85 million dead,

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roughly 3 % of every human being alive on Earth.

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Among them, over 400 ,000 Americans who never came home.

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Every small town in America lost somebody.

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Every one.

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And yet, look what rose from those ashes.

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The GI Bill sent a generation of veterans to college and helped build the American middle class.

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The United Nations was founded to keep this from ever happening again.

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And instead of crushing its defeated enemies like the world did in 1919, America helped rebuild them.

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Today, Germany and Japan are two of our closest allies on Earth.

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Just think about that.

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The cycle of revenge that put a weeping corporal in a hospital bed in 1918.

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America broke that cycle.

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That's not just winning a war.

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That's winning the peace.

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And no nation in history had ever done it like that before.

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Man, I'm the proudest eagle on the planet right now.

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I freaking love this country.

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But here's the thing.

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Hitler wasn't the only dictator who learned the hard way not to bet against America.

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Because these are times U .S presidents humbled dictators.

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From dragging a tyrant out of a ditch, to snatching a president out of his palace, to blasting rock music so loud,

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a dictator surrendered just to make it stop.

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So if you want to see America defeat the enemy with rock and roll, don't forget to subscribe, become a member,

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and click this video right here to keep watching.

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Thank you.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “World War 2 Explained in 31 Minutes”. This video has 408 sentences and 4248 words to shadow. The speech runs for 31:15. The speaker talks at a steady 136 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 79% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
ally noun	/ˈæl.aɪ/	A person who co-operates with or helps another; an associate; a friend.
pearl noun	/pɝl/	A shelly concretion, usually rounded, and having a brilliant luster, with varying tints, found in the mantle, or between the mantle and shell, of certain…
surrender verb	/səˈɹɛndə(ɹ)/	To give up into the power, control, or possession of another.
invasion noun	/ɪnˈveɪʒən/	A military action consisting of a large armed force of one geopolitical entity entering territory controlled by another such entity, generally with the…
carrier noun	/ˈkæɹi.ɚ/	A person or object that carries someone or something else.
bomber noun	/ˈbɑmɚ/	A military aircraft designed to carry and drop bombs.
fleet noun	/ˈfliːt/	A group of vessels or vehicles.
dictator noun	/ˈdɪkˌteɪtəɹ/	An authoritarian leader of a country, nation, or government.
invade verb	/ɪnˈveɪd/	To move into.
crack noun	/kɹæk/	A thin and usually jagged space opened in a previously solid material.
shell noun	/ʃɛl/	The calcareous or chitinous external covering of mollusks, crustaceans, and some other invertebrates.
trap noun	/tɹæp/	A machine or other device designed to catch (and sometimes kill) animals, either by holding them in a container, or by catching hold of part of the body.
freeze verb	/ˈfɹiːz/	Especially of a liquid, to become solid due to low temperature.
brutal adjective	/ˈbɹuːtəl/	Savagely violent, vicious, ruthless, or cruel, often in an unintelligent manner.
prediction noun	/pɹɪˈdɪkʃən/	A statement of what will happen in the future.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
break out verb		To escape, especially forcefully or defiantly.
come down to verb		To reach by moving down or reducing.
come over verb		To affect in a sudden, unprecedented or surprising manner; to overwhelm a person's ordinarily contrary impulse.
come up verb		To emerge or become known, especially unexpectedly.
cut off verb	/ˌkʌt ˈɔf/ [ˌkɐɾ ˈɔf]	To remove by cutting.
fall around verb		To fall over continually, especially through drunkenness, clumsiness, or incompetence.
figure out verb		To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
finish off verb		To finish completely.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

Sorry, fellas, this ain't our problem.
You see the pattern?
We'll start the war from right here.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	had been stabbed · was legally appointed · were banned
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	man who would · Japan, which was · date which will
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has surrendered · have pushed · has ever fought

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 30 contractions and reduced forms, such as couldn't, he'd, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: invasion /ɪnˈveɪʒən/, shell /ʃɛl/, prediction /pɹɪˈdɪkʃən/, casualty /ˈkæʒu.əlti/, shock /ʃɔk/
Long words — get the stress right: casualty /ˈkæʒu.əlti/, anxiety /æŋˈzaɪ.əti/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, execution /ˌɛk.sɪˈkjuː.ʃən/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like ally, pearl, surrender.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: World War 2 Explained in 31 Minutes - Learn English Speaking with Video

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