The British fought the Second World War to defeat Hitler. This film asks why, then, did they spend so much of the conflict battling through North Africa and Italy? Historian David Reynolds reassesses Winston Churchill's conviction that the Mediterranean was the 'soft underbelly' of Hitler's Europe. Travelling to Egypt and Italian battlefields like Cassino, scene of some of the worst carnage in western Europe, he shows how, in reality, the 'soft underbelly' became a dark and dangerous obsession for Churchill. Reynolds reveals a prime minister very different from the jaw-jutting bulldog of Britain's 'finest hour' in 1940 - a leader who was politically vulnerable at home, desperate to shore up a crumbling British empire abroad, losing faith in his army and even ready to deceive his American allies if it might delay fighting head to head against the Germans in northern France. The film marks the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein in 1942.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, an acting troupe becomes embroiled in a Polish soldier's effor...
Oskar Matzerath is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his m...
The lifelong friendship between Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker is put to the ultimate test when the ...
Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefen...
Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefen...
At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to...
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
The classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their J...
A Russian and a German sniper play a game of cat-and-mouse during the Battle of Stalingrad in WWII.
As U.S. troops storm the beaches of Normandy, three brothers lie dead on the battlefield, with a fou...
In a moment captured in time, die-hard Italian fascists conduct reprisal executions of civilians in ...
Flock to your local keep fit class - there's a war on and Britain needs its citizens in tip-top shap...
Poetic tribute to Mrs Turner's vegetable growing prowess, plus the delights of "wartime steaks".
It's the hope that sustains the spirit of every GI: the dream of the day when he will finally return...
Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecu...
After returning from a concentration camp, Susanne finds an ex-soldier living in her apartment. Toge...
Chronicle of the unheralded and unsuccessful invasion of the Soviet Union by the Italian army during...
In January 2012 Italian divers discovered the wreck of a massive plane off the coast of Sardinia. At...
Documentary about the female fighter pilots in the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Union. ...