We've been looking at the Second World War, at myths that many people have come to believe that need to be exposed and exploded. There are facts that you never knew about World War II. And I want to particularly focus on three very unique people in the Second World War as well. But before we get to that, most of us think we know our history because of what we've seen in Hollywood. From the hundreds of films made by Hollywood of the Second World War, you could be forgiven for getting the impression that the Allies had the greatest soldiers, the greatest airmen, the greatest seamen of all time, particularly the Americans. The Americans have shown often, they have the films, you're the best, the very best, and always the best. They're not just good, they're not just great, they're the best. And the trouble with all this is, I know that there's tremendous courage such as evidence of the Second World War on all sides. There's tremendous acts of sacrifice by all sides. My father was in the Second World War on the British side, in the Eighth Army in North Africa, and yet his highest respect was for his enemy. And I know that in Hollywood we've had one particular perspective brought out over and over. And that is, you'd get the impression from Hollywood that the Allies achieved stupendous victories against overwhelming odds. The normal scene in the films is A couple of American soldiers who've lost their supplies, who don't have any support, they're incredibly outnumbered, but they somehow win. Well, actually, that would be more true for the other side. The Americans tended to win when they overwhelmingly outnumbered the enemy. That's not to say they weren't brave and capable Americans. But you'll see what I mean as we get to some of the facts here. Here's some of the facts, which are very stubborn things. The facts are the German Wehrmacht was almost always outnumbered by the Allies and were very inadequately supplied. And this is just an interesting fact when you start looking into their history. Yet the Germans produced the top tank commanders of all time, just meaning in terms of number, count, battles won, enemy tanks destroyed and so on. The top commanders, Otto Skorzeny and others, and the top paratroopers of the war, in fact the first paratroopers in history. And the Luftwaffe, despite being outnumbered on every front and starved of fuel and supplies, frequently the bombers were coming over in the thousand bomber raids and they had top class Messerschmitt 262 fighter bomber jets on the runway with no fuel to take off. So despite being starved of fuel and supplies, they did produce the top air aces of all time. You can go into the American Air and Space Museum and see the biggest pictures on the wall are all of German air aces. At the start of World War II, Well over 4 million Polish, French and British soldiers confronted just over 2 million German soldiers. Now I find this interesting because the general picture you'd get on the Second World War is Germany outnumbered all their enemies and they overwhelmed them. However the German army, although outnumbered, was far better trained. Very, very seriously well trained. Now on paper Poland had 600,000 standing army but it could swell to 2.5 million men in uniform and they were totally mobilized by September of 1939. So the Polish army actually outnumbered the German army, not even counting the French and the British, but the Polish army alone had more men in uniform than the German army. What would also surprise you is to know how many tanks and aircraft they had. And Poland had concentrated most of its city divisions in an offensive forward position close to the German frontier. So it's not that they had a surprise attack. They were fully mobilized. And what also would surprise one when you start to look into the Second World War is that Poland was not a democracy. Poland was ruled by a military dictator. There were no free elections in Poland. So this business of fighting for freedom in Poland is actually a bit of a myth as well. But within the first three days of the campaign, the 1st to the 3rd of September 1939, the Luftwaffe destroyed the entire Polish air force. So that was Blitzkrieg, the world's first experience of lightning war, which was very efficient, and the amount of people killed in the war, much lower than any previous form of warfare, because the First World War, Napoleonic War warfare, was attrition, colossal amounts of deaths, and wars would drag out for years. But these were weeks over quickly and most of the people have survived the war, not this bludgeoning of people wiping out of whole generations in trenches as the First World War had done. So Blitzkrieg, while shocking, was very cost effective in terms of lives and time and ended very quickly. So the German army used its Blitzkrieg tactics to punch through the Polish divisions, encircle them and cut off their supply lines so that the vast amounts of them surrendered without a fight. Now on the Western Front, on the eve of the 10th of May 1940, the German army confronted a very superior force of French, British and Belgian troops who outnumbered them again. You do not get this impression from Hollywood, because a good form always has outnumbered heroes and overwhelming amounts of enemy, and somehow the outnumbered group win. But it just is that the reverse is the case when you look at both the Eastern and the Western Front. And by the way, Between the 1st of September 1939 and the 10th of May 1940, Germany made 16 different peace overtures to Britain, trying to make peace with Britain. They didn't want to fight Britain. So this idea that Germany wanted a world war is plainly false, because they not only didn't prepare for it, never went into war footing, never went into total war footing. Germany never mobilized, for example, a woman into the factories like Britain, America and so on did. Germany never produced four-engine bombers. Germany never went into 24-hour shifts working in factories. They worked in 8-hour shifts, while Britain and America worked in 24-hour shifts. And the factories were being kept in full cycle seven days a week. German factories stopped on Sundays, stopped every evening, started again in the morning. They had one shift a day. So Germany was not taking it seriously if they were thinking of a world war that didn't mobilize the population in a total war economy ever. The impression given by propaganda and Hollywood films that Germans had this overwhelming superiority, at least in tanks and aircraft. But you'd be surprised to know that that wasn't true either. In fact, the Allies had 3,124 tanks against 2,580 tanks on the German side. So the Allies had more tanks. You may say, well, didn't the Germans have bigger tanks? Actually, no. The Allied tanks had thicker armour, heavier weapons mounted on their tanks on average. Germany didn't outnumber the Allies either in weapons or in tanks, neither on the Eastern Front nor on the Western Front. But, as the Allies tended to deploy their tanks as infantry support weapons, the German panzer formations, which used concentration of forces, broke through and encircled Allied forces with breathtaking speed. So, their tactics on using the forces was better, even though they didn't have more manpower or more weapons, they used them wiser. And so you saw scenes like this, marching cheerfully into France, the French surrendering. Field Marshal Rommel is in the Guinness Book of Records for having advanced the fastest. His armoured unit, his Panzer Division, advanced the fastest in the face of continual warfare in history. Nobody had advanced faster. And there they are at the coast, marching through the Champs, down the Champs-Élysées, past the Arc de Triomphe. Somebody has said why are there trees on both sides of the Swansea museum? The answer is so the German army can march in the shade, which they did in the days of Bismarck too. What about the war in the air? The Allied planes were roughly equal to the number of aircraft in the Luftwaffe, however while the British Spitfire was superior. Most of the French aircraft were hopelessly outclassed by the German Messerschmitts. So the German Messerschmitts were much better than the French aircraft, but they weren't quite as good as the Spitfire. The Spitfire, which came just in time, gave the British a slight superiority in fighter aircraft. What about the Ward C? Now here you'll see The British, the French and the German navies. Now you'll be surprised to see Germany's got one aircraft carrier. That was a Graf Spree. In fact it was never launched, it never went operational. So I'm not sure why they have it there. It was still in a dry-dodge being made. They didn't have the resources to finish the ship before the war ended. So effectively Germany never had an aircraft carrier. Whereas the British had 11 aircraft carriers, the French had two. Battleships, the British had 17 battleships, the French had 9, and the German had 9 battleships or cruisers. Cruisers, the British had 76, the Germans had 11, the French had 19. So, on everything, destroyers 243, British 76, French destroyers 241, German destroyers. Escort vessels, British 52, French 42, Germans 11. Here's a surprise. Submarines. France had a much bigger submarine fleet, 78, than Germany had. Britain actually had a bigger submarine fleet at the beginning of the war than Germany had. They had 51. Germany only had 25 submarines operational at the beginning of the war. 25, not much. All that swelled to 57 later. So in terms of the war at sea, Only 25 U-boats fitted for Atlantic service at the beginning of World War II, the German Navy was not ready for war, and Britain had far more submarines than Germany had, and in terms of battleships, aircraft carriers, destroyers, nothing could match the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy outnumbered everybody's Navy combined, and of course the German Navy really didn't have a chance against the Royal Navy. But once the Americans came into it, Goodness me, their industrial power produced vast amounts of weaponry that nobody else could compete with. Now, if the British, the Germans and the Americans had combined together, they could have beaten anyone in the world. I mean, they were the best armies in the world, but they were the three Protestant forces. The largest conflict in history was Operation Barbarossa. 22 June 1941, Germany faced a Soviet army of 5,774,000. The Soviet Union had 316 divisions. This broke down to 117,000 artillery pieces, 25,000 tanks, 18,000 combat aircraft. The German Wehrmacht at this time had only 5,200 tanks, of which only 3,350 could be committed to the Eastern Front. because they had, of course, other fronts to deal with. They were in North Africa, they were on the Western Front and so on. So the Soviets had a 4 to 1 advantage in armour, and most of their forces were right on the border, forward position, aggressive position. There's a lot of evidence that's come out, especially with the coming down the Berlin Wall and opening up the Soviet records, that the Soviets were planning to invade Europe anyway. And Barbarossa was not an attack as much as a pre-emptive raid. on the Russians who were already so forward that they were about to invade anywhere. The Luftwaffe had only 4,000 aircraft to oppose the 18,700 Soviet military aircraft. So this business of Germany outnumbering the enemies is of course fiction and Hollywood has distorted this time and again. It's just not so. Operation Barbarossa was the largest military operation ever launched to that date. It was fought over 2,900 kilometre fronts stretching from the Baltic Sea all the way down to the Black Sea. That's a phenomenal front to fight amongst. It involved 600,000 motor vehicles, this is on the German and European side, 750,000 horses. Most people would be surprised to know that even on the Eastern Front, Germany depended for 90% of their transport on horses. You know, you always have this picture of panzer divisions, but in fact there weren't that many for that size. They depended on horses for most of their supplies. And you'd also be surprised how many European volunteers were involved in this operation to liberate Russia from communism and to end the Soviet threat to Europe. There were vast amounts of volunteers from all over Europe, even from countries that were neutral. There were volunteers from as far afield as South Africa fighting in the Waffen-SS in an all-European force to end the threat of communism. The Norwegians, sorry? And Canada. Tremendous amount of people from all over the world, and I didn't know from Canada, that's interesting. There were French, there were Belgian units, tremendous amounts of volunteers from all over, and in the incredible force of three million people combined, if you put the Romanians, the Italians, the Norwegians, Germans all together, and they were going on a crusade to free Europe from communism. In the first day, one quarter of the Soviet Union's air force was destroyed. I mean, this is an unprecedented military achievement. The German blitzkrieg tactics devastated the Red Army and made stupendous progress. By October, over three million Red Army soldiers had been taken as prisoners of war. Had anything like this ever happened in the history of warfare before? However, the further the Wehrmacht advanced into Russia, the more their logistical complications were compounded. Because the further you go, the further you are from your supply bases, your bases, your railway lines. The Russian infrastructure was primitive, to put it nicely. Their dirt roads turned to mud. to supply the front line troops became an almost impossible assignment. So the more successful the German army was, the more impossible their supply lines became. Because Russia's just so vast. And cavalry just going on and on. And how many times do you see pictures of this or scenes of this depicted in Hollywood films of the Russian civilians welcoming the German army as liberators? Which is what happened. The people, especially in Ukraine and the Baltic states, were praise God, freedom from communism, from the commissars, they were just absolutely delighted to be freed from Stalin's dictatorship. And so many in the German army saw themselves as not only an offensive force to end the threat of Soviet communism, but a liberating force that was actually liberating people from the most oppressive, exploitative regime on the planet. And it was a tough, hard, rough battle. This was some of the worst battles imaginable. Look at the territory that was conquered. Phenomenal amounts of advance made. In the history of warfare, I don't know when more has been achieved against greater odds by a small amount of people. You just look at the phenomenal amount of territory liberated from communism. The world would have been a better place if Operation Barbarossa had been allowed to continue successfully. But something happened that changed everything. Before Pearl Harbor, before the Japanese even attacked America and brought America into the war, America was already supplying arms to the Soviet Union. This is something that shocks one. What no one could have anticipated was the vast amount of aid which United States of America would give to the Soviet Union. Now we've seen these pictures of Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, the so-called pig three, who are fighting for freedom apparently, but the trouble is this man is the worst mass murdering dictator, the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world. Now, then Greece This is the American's own pictures. It includes aid being given to Russia by sea coming through Murmansk by the Arctic convoys. Of course all the way along they were harassed by the Luftwaffe and by the Kriegsmarine so that many of them ended up at the bottom of the sea but a lot got through. A lot came through what today is called Iran, through Persia into Russia, Tractum, but a lot was flown from Alaska into Russia. Massive, massive amounts. Even before America officially entered World War II, vast quantities of military hardware were being flown, shipped, trucked into Russia via Alaska, Persia, and the Manx. Absolutely colossal. Now, you can see that there was what they say here, lend-lease. Well, The West paid, South Africa paid every penny that America gave us in terms of weapons. So America lent to South Africa. I see Rhodesia is down there too. I know that Rhodesia and South Africa are two of the only places that actually paid Russia, I mean paid America in full for all the military hardware that they received. I can tell you Britain paid most of it, I'm not sure if Britain paid all of it, but they certainly paid most of it to America. And they didn't just pay in weapons, they paid in British gold. Just about all of the gold of Britain was shipped off to America before they started and they paid in ports and access to British colonial markets and strategic military bases in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. So Britain paid through the nose. In fact Britain basically committed suicide and lost the empire. Mortgage the empire is the way one historian put it in order to win the war. So Britain didn't do very well. But there was never an attempt to extract a ruble from Stalin. Everything that went to Russia was free. Gift. Gratis. No payment. And here's an official list. This is the official list. I don't know if it's accurate. I don't know if there was a lot more given. But this is the official list. Just for America. 7,056 tanks shipped to Russia. By the way, this is the Grant tank, right? Have you ever seen a picture or film on the Second World War where you see some of the thousands of Grant tanks or Sherman tanks on the Russian side, with the Russian star on the side? They don't show that, they only show T-34s. 14,795 military aircraft given to Russia. You can see them being trucked, shipped, and they assembled on the other side, and whole air wings, totally equipped for the Soviets. So the Germans might have been wiping out the Soviet air force, but what they didn't expect was they were going to get even more free from the Americans and then later from the British and the Canadians. 51,000 jeeps, 375,000 trucks, 375,000 trucks, 35,000 motorcycles. And here you see the pictures, this is being offloaded in the Minsk. some of the trucks that came from Europe. Workers probably thought they were building these trucks to help the Allied war effort, and the next thing they know it's going to help the worst dictator on the planet to enforce his dictatorship over not just Russia, but then later all of Eastern Europe. Here you can see some of the lines coming up from Persia of this never-ending convoy of supplies coming in. 8,000 tractors, 8,218 artillery pieces, 131,000 machine guns, 345,000 tons of explosives. Can you imagine how much this represents in terms of the metal, the hardware, the work, the money, the taxes of American citizens? 1,900 locomotives, 90 cargo ships, 4.5 million tons of food supplies, over a billion dollars, 1940s money, a billion dollars of machines and equipment in addition. That's not counting the cost of the tanks and the trucks and so on. In addition, over two and a half million tons of petroleum products, 49,000 tons of leather, 3,700,000 tires, Fifteen and a half million pairs of army boots. 106 million tonnes of cotton. By the way, the cotton is for their uniforms and so on. Building equipment valued at 10 billion dollars. 10 billion dollars of building equipment. You wonder how America could afford that. I'm sure they were paying for it for generations to follow. Non-iron metals. 800,000 tons, along with 29 tankers, 433 combat ships, as well as mobile bridges, railway equipment, aircraft, radio equipment, and many other items. Who knows what's under that? Now, this does not include the very generous gifts given by Great Britain to the Soviet Union either, by the way. Britain supplied 5,800 aircraft, including the Hurricanes, which are superb fighters. 4,292 tanks, 12 minesweepers, ship minesweepers. Canada supplied the Soviet Union with another 1,188 tanks, 842 armored cars, a million shells, and 208,000 tons of wheat and flour. That's from Canada! Who knows what Sarovka supplied. There's no doubt that without the Western aid, the Soviet Union wouldn't have been able to survive a year. The war would have been over. 1941, but for this extremely generous and misguided Western aid, which has got to be one of the dumbest things the West has ever done, or one of the most treacherous. It is wicked. And so, I'm sure these soldiers here didn't know any better, but when General Patton met the Russians, his immediate response was, we've been fighting the wrong people. The Germans are our natural allies, the Russians are our natural enemies, and to quote him, what the hell have we been doing fighting for the Russians? They're not our allies. They're the enemies of everything we stand for. They're the enemies of freedom. These people are anti-Christ pagans. You should read what General Patton has to say about the Russians. It sort of explains why he got killed the day he resigned his commission. And here you see fighting for freedom. Really? How can you be fighting for freedom when the main beneficiaries of the Second World War were the worst dictatorial regime in the history of mankind? So these are just some of the pictures of tanks being shipped from the West, and by the way, even the T-34 tank, which sounds like Russian technology. Do you know the T-34 tank was American designed by the American tank designer Christie? He offered it to the American Water Party, they didn't want to use it for America, they shipped their entire plans to Russia, Russia made the T-34s, total American design, refused by the State Department, but given. to the Soviets long before the war started, but the tanks were ready in time for Barbarossa to counter it. American Sherman tanks, British cruisers, again these are the Crusader tanks. Can you think of one film that has ever shown any of these tens of thousands of Western tanks being used on the Russian front by Russian troops? They never show it. They don't show British types of vehicles, they don't show Woolies jeeps, they don't show Sherman tanks, it's always just Russian T-34s and so on. It's just not accurate. Well, here you can see a Russian book about the tanks. They have no problem showing the Grand Tank being used, which is a totally obvious American design on the Russian side, but will you ever see a Hollywood film recognising the American weaponry being used in Russia? Not in your life. T-34 passing through some poor town in Eastern Europe where they're bludgeoning the poor people. This is a British Matilda tank on the Russian front, shot out. Here's a T-34 tank taken out. What tank's this one, Kelvin? That's definitely an ex-German tank. Here's some of the lend-lease from the UK and they're showing shipped to Russia from the quartermaster corps, the corps of engineers, the medical corps, the chemical warfare service. What are they shipping? Ordnance corps, transportation corps. So every different corps in Britain or in America were required to ship a certain amount of their equipment to the Russians. Why? Is this a war for freedom, for democracy, against tyranny, against dictatorship? Then why are they helping the worst dictatorship in the history of the world? This is from 1943. Each symbol represents a hundred million dollars of goods. Remember, a hundred million dollars in 1940 is worth a lot more than a thousand million would be now. Each symbol represents a hundred million dollars in goods. This is up to April 1943. Can you grasp what they're talking about? Aircraft, foodstuffs, ammunition, tanks, watercraft, metals, motor vehicles, ordnance, petroleum products, machinery. Services, munitions, I mean billions and billions of dollars. 53% munitions, 12% agricultural products, 21% industrial materials, 12% services. We know the Soviet Union needed this material, they couldn't have survived without it. But what could the West say to justify it? Have you ever seen a film or a history book on the Second World War that depicted the vast amount of weaponry that the West gave to the Communists during the Second World War? Why is this stuff being depicted? It cost more than all that they had to do on their own fighting. I believe, looking at this, that the Americans shipped more weapons to the Soviets than they shipped to the British, and probably more than they even shipped to their own men fighting in Europe. And I know for sure they shipped more to Russia than they ever gave to MacArthur fighting in the Pacific, because General MacArthur complained, we've been attacked in the Pacific, we've got American troops rotting on Bataan with no help, not a destroyer or a submarine coming to help them. But 90% of America's manpower, men and machinery is going to Europe. Why? America's interests were in the Pacific. America was attacked in the Pacific. And yet 90% of all of their manpower and weaponry and industry goes to Europe. Why? Because the Soviet Union was under attack and that caused the crisis. There's a lot of books that have been written on how Elnor Roosevelt was a communist, the wife of the president, how Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a useful idiot, to use Lenin's term, who helped the communists, he put a lot of key communists in positions. I think that'll come out in the agenda film too. But the point is, he didn't care that American soldiers were dying on islands all over the Pacific for lack of support. didn't care about General MacArthur's people. General MacArthur didn't get as much supplies and weaponry and equipment as Stalin got. Roosevelt was more concerned to save Stalin from collapsing in Russia than he was to save American lives in islands all over the Pacific, or things would have been very different. And here you can see tanks in the Soviet Union, Red Square, May Day Parades, And the cotton comes from Canada and America. The metal helmets come from America. All of the uniforms, even the metal they've used for their badges, their medals and their ribbons, it comes from the West. There's nothing these people have that wasn't supplied by the West. Everything, the leather of their belts, the metal, the weapons, the vehicles, the artillery pieces, all gifts from the West. What they're showing you here is not what communism can make, but what capitalism can give. And so no wonder, as somebody put it, you might as well just be dumping it all into the ocean. But that would have done a lot more good than giving it to the enemies of civilization. In the scandals, we've spoken about the last secrets and the betrayal of millions of Russians who were in Western Europe into the hands of the communists after the war but the concentration camps you know about Alexander Solzhenitsyn has written about his experiences in the gulags and he was a prophet of freedom speaking and documenting the communist atrocities not only under Lenin and Stalin but under Khrushchev and Brezhnev and all the ones who followed. Communism is the worst mass murdering machine in the history of the world and the West handed over the whole of Eastern Europe to them at Yalta, and the blood on these people's hands. Absolutely disgraceful. FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is the worst president in America's history. I was having a debate just recently at the summit with some students on who's the worst president in America's history. And I said, because they were saying Obama. And I said, actually, I think Carter's even worse than Obama, although we haven't seen all the effects of Obama's policies yet. But 13 countries were betrayed at the hands of communism in four years of Jimmy Carter. Not just fell at the hands of the communists, but were betrayed. The deliberate policy of the U.S. State Department, including Nicaragua, Rhodesia, and so on. Dr. David Noble interrupted me and says, no, Peter, you're wrong. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the worst president America has ever had. If you look in terms of the damage done, the socialism he promoted, the countries he betrayed, one third of the world's land surface entrenched under communism because of the direct policies of FDR, FDR makes Carter and Obama look mild in comparison to the damage he did. And that's from an American. Well, Truman wasn't too much better, I'm sorry to say, because he solidified a lot of us. But that's another story. Potsdam, he has these nasty characters redoing the boundaries of Europe, the look that all the communists could gain as a result of the Second World War. Well, that's another story. I don't want to spend much time on Potsdam and Yalta tonight, but just to remind us of the fact that Operation Barbarossa, which could have ended communism forever, was unfortunately reversed because of Western technology and aid. Dukes is a nice name for it. And this is well documented under the Black Book of Communism. There's many stories waiting to be told. One wonders why no Hollywood film seemed to have focused on the largest military offensive in the history of warfare Barbarossa, some of the largest battles in history like Operation Centerville or Battle of Kursk, the biggest tank battle in history, some of the largest battles, some of the greatest air aces and tankers which came out of the Colossal Conflict and they've never made a film on them, they haven't even alluded to them. So while I know that there's some great heroes on the West, but many of them have had some forms made in them, Douglas Bardo, Reach for the Sky and so on, but the top fighter air ace of all time is Eric Hartman. When you go into the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, the first and the biggest place to see is this. Eric Hartman, the top air ace of all time, and they've got their huge big picture, I mean it's bigger than this room, on the wall, and 352 aerial victories. Eric Hartman is the greatest air acer in all time and it's unlikely anyone will ever beat this figure because it's unlikely we'll ever have any conflict by this figure. That means he shot down 352 enemy aircraft. But look, born in 1922, he must have been about 23 years old in 1945. Yes, exactly. At age 19 he joined the Luftwaffe and was posted to Eastern Front in Jagdgeschwader, so it's a hunting group or squadron, 52. So he only started in October 1942. The Eastern Front battles had been going on for a year and a half already. And he scored his first kill in November and his second three months later. So, you know, he has taken time learning. However, during Operation Citadel, the greatest tank battle in history, the Battle of Kursk, when thousands of tanks on both sides clashed at one place, the biggest tank battle, there'll never be a tank battle like that again. It began on the 5th of July 1943, Hartmann's school began to mount. His Staffel was assigned to protect the Wehrmacht's Panzers from Soviet illusion to Sturmoviks. The Sturmoviks were armoured tank-busting aircraft armed with twin 37mm cannons. Very deadly. So flying as Messerschmitt 109, Hartmann took off on the morning of the 7th of July as the sun rose in northern Ukraine at 3am. Sun rose at 3 in the morning. And Adler, the German forward-spotting post, radioed through a report of a group of between 10 and 20 Russian aircraft heading west Sir Hartman gained altitude, spotted the Sturmoviks and ordered an attack. With its armour and its red gunner, the Sturmovik was a tough target. Hartman dived below, picked up airspeed, banked around, came up behind underneath the Lushin II, aiming for the eventual air radiator. He closed to 100 metres before firing, and as blue flames and black sooty smoke streamed from the Sturmovik's radiator, he had scored his 22nd victory of the war. As the Russian formation began to break up, he targeted another Ilyushin-2. At 150 meters, he opened fire. More blue flame and black smoke poured out from this 23rd air victory. He landed at 4 a.m. He scrambled back into air at 5.50 a.m. This is still before breakfast. He downed another Stromovik and a LaGG-3 fighter that made four victories before breakfast. Later that afternoon he led a stuffle up again, engaged in a sprawling dogfight with Soviet log fighters. He quickly shot down three enemy fighters, making it seven victories for one day. By August 1943 he had shot down 50 Soviet aircraft. That's greater than the biggest total of any Allied fighter for the whole war. By the end of the year he had downed 148 Soviet aircraft, and he had earned his knight's cross. He was shot down and captured 12 August 1943, and during the momentous battle of Kursk, Hartmann shot down 32 Stormoviks before being hit himself. He crash-landed, removed the precious clock of the Bf 109 before being captured by Russian infantry. He managed to jump out of a moving truck, plunged into a field of tall sunflower plants with bullets whizzing overhead. He successfully made his way back to the German lines. By the way, you can see he's got his fiancée's name and heart on the side of his plane. By the 2nd of March 1944, he had reached a total of 202 enemy aircraft. This earned him the Oak Leaves. He's awarded the Third Reich's highest military decoration, the Knight's Cross to the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords with Diamonds. That is the highest you could possibly get. This was only awarded to 27 soldiers throughout World War II, 12 of whom were Luftwaffe pilots, almost all of whom were on the Eastern Front. By the end of the Second World War, in May 1945, his commander ordered Major Hartmann, he was then the Gruppencommandeur of the famous Jager 52, to fly to the British sector, where they expected better treatment than he'd get from the Russians. But he disregarded this order because he felt responsible for his sector's pilots, and the ground crew and the family members. So they destroyed the unit's aircraft so the Russians wouldn't get the aircraft. They moved on foot into Bavaria, which was then occupied by US forces. However, a week after surrendering to the American forces, they were delivered across the border to the Red Army. This was a specific request of Stalin at the Yalta. He wanted Hartmann. And they handed him over. The Russians sentenced him to 50 years hard labor as a slave in Siberia. So now he's only 23. The Soviets placed enormous pressure on him to build up an East German air force and he refused. He was steadfast. He wasn't allowed to return to Germany until 1955 when they established diplomatic relations between West Germany and Soviet Union and only then were the last German prisoners of war released. My one uncle, Uncle Wolf, who flew Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs in the Eastern Front, he was 10 years a slave and Stalin's concentration camps in Siberia as well, he came back with Altsa's left hand which was a stump from gangrene. Imagine that, ten years in those hell holes. 1956 Hartmann joined the newly established West German Luftwaffe and worked at building up the new fighter units. In 1959 he became the first commander of Jagdgeschwader 71, the Richthofen squadron. And this story is told in the Blonde Night of Germany. Why have they not made a film on this man? I mean, what an incredible hero. He wasn't just on top of it when he was beating the enemy. He was on top of it for 10 years under enemy torture and torment as a slave in the concentration camps of Stalin. That is strength. And imagine he, and all those years that he lost his freedom and he came back and he served his country well again. Now I don't know if you've heard of Hans Ulrich Rudel. He's the Stuka ace of all time. The greatest tank destroyer in history has got to be Hans Ulrich Rudel of the Luftwaffe. He destroyed an unbelievable 519 Soviet tanks. Hans Ulrich Rudel was born in Silesia in 1916, the son of a clergyman. He excelled in sports. In 1936 he joined the Luftwaffe as a cadet officer. He served as a reconnaissance observer during the Polish campaign, September 1939. In 1940 he joined the Stuka, which is short for Stuttgart Training Course, near Stuttgart. The Redoubt took part in the airborne invasion of Crete, May 1941, the biggest airborne invasion to that date. was a major British base, and from here they could threaten the oil supplies of Romania, which was Germany's only source of oil, aside from oil from coal, and so they had to take Crete. And the only way they could get there, because the British Navy dominated the Pacific, they couldn't beat the British Navy, so they had to go over there with the paratroopers, and the paratroopers landed unwisely at multiple places. It's believed that if they'd concentrated all the airborne landing in one place, and spread out, it would have been easier. They succeeded, but they lost a lot of men. This was a very harsh victory for the German airborne, but they took the island, which was tough mountainous rough terrain, some of the toughest fighting of the war here, and the German paratroopers were greatly respected by the enemies at what incredible feats they achieved. On the 23rd of June 1941 at 3am he flew his first combat dive-bombing mission into the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa. In the next 18 hours he flew four combat missions. On the 23rd of September 1941 Riddell's F wing attacked the Soviet fleet in the Leningrad area and during this attack Riddell sunk the Soviet battleship Marat with a single 1000kg bomb. Now, Astuka only has one bomb. And he had one bomb, and he hits this battleship with such an excellent hit, it hits the ammunition store, breaks the ship in half. Bear in mind how many anti-aircraft weapons are on a battleship. And of course, a battleship's protected by other vessels too. And a dive-bomber's got to dive straight through all this. You need nerves of steel to be able to dive down on your target with all that flak coming in, and just at the right moment, release your bomb and come up That is incredible, and one shot, one bomb, he gets this battleship. On Christmas 1941, Riddell flies his 500th mission, and on 30th of December, he's awarded the German Cross and Gold by General Freiherr von Richthofen, a cousin of the great World War I air ace, Baron von Richthofen, or the Red Baron. Hans Riddell was then sent to Graz to train new Stuka crews and on his own request he was returned to the Eastern Front in June 1942. He received command of the 1st Staffel of the 1st Wing of the Stuka Squadron 2 operating in the Stalingrad area. Some of the worst fighting of the war. 10th of February 1943 Hans Riddell flew his 1000th mission. Posted to the newly formed Panzerjagdkommando Weiss. I seem to recall Americans had a film on Memphis Bell where the American pilots were expected to do 25 bombing missions and then they were rotated out and they could go back to America, but there were 25 missions that they had to do behind the lines. This man flew a thousand missions behind enemy lines. The modified Stukas now were armed with two 37mm cannons, one under each wing, with just six rounds of ammunition each. But in the space of three weeks, Riddell destroyed 70 Soviet boats in the Black Sea. That's his target practice. He's just getting started. March 1943, during a tank battle at Balgorod, Riddell knocked out his first tank with a prototype tank-busting Stuka, with these 37mm cannons. He says, the tank exploded like a bomb, bits of it crashing down behind us. Now these Junker 87 G1s were nicknamed the Panzerknacker, tank buster, the Kanonfugel, the cannon bird. In April 1943 Hans Riddell was awarded Oak Leaves to his Knight's Cross and a squadron of tank busting Junker 87s were assigned to support the German Panzers during Operation Citadel in the Great Battle of Kursk. On the first day of the battle, Riddell knocked out four Soviet tanks and by evening a score had grown to twelve. Twelve enemy tanks in one day. We were all seized with a kind of passion for the chase and a glorious feeling of having saved so much German blood with every Soviet tank destroyed," he said. Riddell developed new tactics for the Panzerstaffels, finding that the best way to knock out a Russian T-34 was from the rear, as the mounted engine and cooling system didn't permit the installation of heavy armor plating at the back. So the engine is its weak point because it's got to breathe, after all diesel engine, so you come and you hit it from the rear. The arm was always strongest and thickest in the front of the tank anywhere. March 1944 he flew his 1,500th mission and was promoted to the rank of Major. And during a mission behind enemy lines, one of his squadron was shot down and crash-landed. So he decided to land and rescue his comrade in enemy territory. How on earth he thought he could fit two more men into this little cockpit, I'm not sure, but after landing he realised because of the soft ground they'd never be able to take off. So they're forced to escape on foot towards German lines with the Russians pursuing them. And Rudel had to swim 600 metres in ice-cold water off the Dniester River. You think 600 metres, 100 metres is a football field length. Six football field lengths in icy water. Could you even do 100 metres without freezing up? I mean, that's a task. 29th of March 1944, Major Hans Ulrich Rodell was awarded diamonds to his knight's cross with oaks, leaves and swords, which is the highest German military award. November 1944, while flying near Budapest, Hungary, he was shot in the thigh, yet he returned to service only a few days later with his leg in a plaster cast and still wanted to fly. With his plaster cast. The 1st of January 1945, Riddell was awarded Knight's Cross with golden oak leaves, swords and diamonds. The only recipient of this award, which was specifically created for him, which made it the highest award, even above the highest awards I've had before. February 1945, Riddell was seriously wounded in his right thigh, was shattered by anti-aircraft fire near La Basse. He managed to land in German territory and was quickly taken to a field hospital where they amputated his leg. In Berlin he had an artificial limb fitted and he returned to his squadron. The 8th of May 1945, when Germany surrendered, Colonel Hans Riddell flew his last mission to Bohemia, from Bohemia, to escape capture from the Soviets. He's captured by the English, first interrogated in England, then in France, eventually they return him to Bavaria. During his career in the Luftwaffe, Riddell flew over 2,530 missions. He shot down 11 enemy aircraft, He destroyed 519 Soviet tanks, 150 artillery pieces, 70 boats, over 1,000 military vehicles, 2 LaGG fighters and Lushin 2 Stolomovik, sunk a destroyer, he sunk 2 cruisers and he sunk the Soviet battleship Mirot. He was responsible for such huge losses that the Red Army The dictator Joseph Stalin placed a 100,000 ruble price on his head. It's calculated that Hans Rudolf flew over 600,000 kilometres, and that's in the small Stuka, using more than 5 million litres of fuel. He dropped over a million kilograms of bombs, he fired over a million machine gun rounds, 150,000 20mm rounds, and over 5,000 37mm rounds. He is described as an outstanding pilot who hated to take leave, he even hated to take sick leave. Even after he lost his leg, he said he wasn't depressed because he could still do what he loved, which was to fly and to destroy the enemy. His personal bravery and toughness and unparalleled determination marks him out as one of the most extraordinary pilots in history. Which pilot in history has ever achieved as much under such adverse circumstances as Hans Ulrich Rudel? I wonder how many people have heard of him though. They haven't made a film on him in Hollywood yet. Riddell's famous quote was, lost are only those who abandon themselves, as he wrote on this picture here. He published two books, We Frontline Soldiers, now Opinion to the Rearmament of Germany, and Dagger Thrust, speaking about betrayal. And 1953, published his war diary, which was first called Trotzdem, or Nevertheless. Now it's published as Stuka Pilot. In 1985 his diary was published, and two of the greatest Allied fighter pilots, Douglas Bader, who was the man with the ten legs, remember, who was a Spitfire pilot, and Pierre Klosterman, they wrote warm and positive forwards to this edition, showing that in the air there's an honour amongst enemies who could honour one another, and I find that a good credit to the fact that you can have former enemies writing the forwards for one another. He's someone who needs a film-maiden. Well, the third character that you might not have heard of, and who they haven't made a film of that I'm aware of yet, but they should, is Michael Whitman. He's the greatest tank ace in history. Michael Whitman was born in 1914 in Bavaria, the second son of a local farmer. In 1934, he joined the German army. In 1936, at age 22, he joined the Waffen-SS, or the armed SS. He participated in the occupation of Austria, and then the Sudetenland, with armoured car platoon and then his first experience of action came in the Polish campaign in 1939. Then in the battle for France he was a commander of a self-propelled assault gun, the Sturmgeschütz 111. During the Great Campaign of April 1941 he helped capture Athens as part of the 9th Panzer Division. His unit operated in Operation Barbarossa and he served as commander of a Stuk 113 assault gun. During the winter of 1942-43 he was assigned for training and returned to the Eastern Front as a newly commissioned officer with the rank of second lieutenant and now he had a Tiger tank. Without doubt the finest tank ever made. At the Battle of Kursk, Operation Sidwell, he was commanding a Tiger tank and during the battle he survived a collision with a T-34 which was destroyed when its ammunition exploded and the Tiger tank survived, just showing how phenomenal the armour was of this tank. During the Battle of Kursk, Whitman destroyed at least 30 Soviet tanks. On one day, 21st of November 1943, he destroyed 13 T-34s. I mean, that's quite an achievement. By January 1944, he had destroyed 88 enemy tanks, Soviet tanks all. He was awarded the Knight's Cross or the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves. And here you can see his Tiger Tank crew when they received their awards and as the greatest tank-destroying tank crew in history up to that date. April 1944, as Tiger Tank Company was transferred to the Western Front and following the Allied invasion of Normandy he was ordered to move up from Breveau close to the expected attack point where where they expected Killay, down to Normandy. And that took five days to move the tanks that distance. By this time a 12km gap had opened up in the German lines under relentless Allied bombardment. Anticipating its importance, the British were assigned to the high ground near Villers-Bassage and Whitman positioned his company of tanks near the town. Now the British 7th Armoured Division was ordered to exploit the gap in the German lines and capture Villers-Bassage Whitman at this stage only had five tanks in his company and two of them were damaged. So effectively he only had three operational tanks to deal with the 7th Armoured Division. As Whitman's Tiger tank emerged from cover it engaged the rare most British tanks on the ridge and destroyed them. Whitman then moved his Tiger towards Phillip Bacarge destroying several transport vehicles and then engaged a number of light tanks followed by a couple of medium tanks. Under continuous fire, Whitman destroyed another British tank, a self-propelled gun, a scout car and a half-track. He then dueled against a Sherman Firefly. In less than 15 minutes, Whitman's Tiger tank had destroyed 14 Allied tanks, 2 anti-tank guns and 15 transport vehicles. Now, how does this compare with Hollywood's style of, you know, Kelly's Heroes and fictional junk like that? I mean, this is the reality. For his actions during this incredible battle, Whitman was promoted to captain, awarded swords to his Knight's Cross of the Iron's Cross, and there are some websites dedicated to heroes like this maintained by Americans and others who admire a top fighter ace like this, Tiger Tank Commanders of the Liebstandarte. Now, there are literally thousands of other examples of extraordinary heroism and achievements of German forces, especially on the Eastern Front. But you wouldn't tend to know that from Hollywood films and average history books which ignore this great battle against communism. But the facts are always stranger than fiction. The truth sets us free and that's why it's absolutely essential if we know the truth of history to recognize the lies of propaganda. We need to study the truth in the Bible so that we can be freed from the deceptions of the world. That's why the scripture says, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. And I was amazed to see that in the marble at CIA headquarters in America, just outside Washington DC. You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. Well they should know. Interesting how espionage units can use that verse, but obviously they deal in lies. We as Christians and historians must deal with the truth.