Narrator quotes from The World at War

Man and woman, boy and girl, the survivors prepared to defend their homeland, to drive the invaders back into the sea with wooden rifles, bows and arrows, bamboo spears. But the end, when it came, was to be from the sky - irresistible, unimaginable, mushroom-shaped.

North Field on the Island of Tinian, in the Marianas - 1,500 miles south of Japan. Here on August the fifth, the world's first Uranium bomb was loaded into a B-29 Bomber, named Enola Gay - after its pilot's mother. The next day before dawn, the Enola Gay took off. It's target: Hiroshima.

(last lines) At the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, the day the soldiers came, they killed more than six hundred men, women ... and children. Remember.

(opening lines) Down this road on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, a community, which had lived for a thousand years, was dead. This is Oradour-sur-Glane, in France. The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together. The men were taken to garages and barns, the women and children were led down this road, and they were driven into this church. Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot. Then they were killed too. A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead, in battle. They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial. Its martyrdom stands for thousands upon thousands of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, China, in a world at war.

Forlorn monsters today. In May 1940, these forts of the Maginot line were France's first-line defence against the Germans. Half a million French soldiers lurked beneath these man-made hills. These were the most extensive, the most elaborate forts ever constructed. Here the guns would halt the Hun - provided the Hun came this way.

Fighter Command had shown how difficult it was for bombers to destroy a country which could defend its own airspace – a lesson the Air Staff apparently neglected to teach itself.