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Using archive video and images from the Imperial War Museum, as well as first-person testimony from veterans and eye-witnesses, this series of short films offers a comprehensive overview of World War Two for primary schools.
These short films are suitable for teaching history at KS2 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and 2nd Level in Scotland.

They could also be incorporated into cross-curricular learning as they cover a variety of subjects including:
Created in partnership with Imperial War Museums.

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Using archive video and images from the Imperial War Museum, as well as first-person testimony from veterans and eye-witnesses, this series of short films offers a comprehensive overview of World War Two for primary schools.

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Narrator: In September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany, joining the biggest war ever fought in history.

But how did it start? Let's rewind.

Since Victorian times, Germany had been a very large and powerful country at the heart of Europe.

But when it was defeated in the First World War in 1918, Germany had to give up a lot of its land and pay harsh penalties as punishment.

It was also forbidden from having a large army or navy or any air force at all.

This made many Germans very angry. On top of that, in 1929, the Great Depression hit.

There were shortages of food and money all over the world, including in Germany. People lost their jobs and money began to run out.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany.

Many Germans desperately hoped Hitler would bring change and make life better. He lead the National Socialist Party, the Nazis, and promised to make Germany a powerful country again.

But Hitler also spread hatred. This hatred would eventually lead to The Holocaust, the killing of millions of Jewish people, as well as gay people, disabled people, political opponents, and ethnic groups like the Roma people or the Poles. Simply because of who they were.

Hitler believed that the German race was naturally better than other people, and therefore were entitled to dominate all of Europe.

He planned to forcibly take back all of Germany's lost land as well as capture parts of other countries.

He started in 1938, by sending soldiers to take over, or occupy, Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia, which is now split in to Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Then in September 1939, German troops invaded Poland. Britain and France had agreed to defend Poland against German attack, so they gave Hitler an ultimatum. Withdraw his troops or they would declare war.

At eleven am on Sunday the third of September 1939, Neville Chamberlain, who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the time, went on the radio. He explained that the British government had demanded that German troops withdraw from Poland immediately.

But the Germans had not responded, meaning Britain was now at war with Germany.

Moya remembers hearing the news.

Moya: I just remembered that my mother grabbed my dad and he was standing, they were both standing as I remember it. The thing that was running through my mind all the time well, yesterday was my birthday and I'd really love that book with the shiny cover that's in Nelly's shop at the post office and will I get it? And if there is a war will you be able to do things like that?

Narrator: Did you know? When the war was announced it wasn't a surprise. The British government had been watching Hitler's advance across Europe for several years and had prepared for the worst.

Moya: People were aware that the possibility of war being declared was in the air. And the year before at school in Hammersmith, we had practiced being evacuated and had our gas masks issued and so on.

Narrator: As well as gas masks, the first air raid shelters were distributed in the year before the war. Plans were also drawn up toprepare for food, fuel and clothing rationing, limiting how much people could have to make sure there would be enough to go round.

To make the war a success, everyone would have to pitch in. Many men were conscripted into the armed forces. At first, women could choose whether to join up, but from 1941 they too were made to serve either in factories or the services. Even Princess Elizabeth, who would later become Queen Elizabeth II, trained as a mechanic and a military truck driver.

However, despite the detailed preparations for war and the enthusiastic participation on the home front, nobody could have possibly have foreseen how long it would last.

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This short film offers an overview of the events that led to Britain declaring war on Germany in 1939.

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This short film provides insight into the scope of the war and how many countries were involved.

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Narrator: After France was defeated in June 1940, Hitler hoped the British forces would surrender and agree to an armistice, to stop fighting. However, the British held firm and so Hitler decided to prepare for an invasion of Britain.

But first, he had to destroy the RAF, which controlled the skies above Britain.

RAF stands for the Royal Air Force and they fought the war from aeroplanes built specially for fighting. This was where the Battle of Britain was fought, in the skies over southern Britain, against the German air force, the Luftwaffe.

The Germans first tried to destroy British air fields, so the RAF had fewer places to fly from. To stop these attacks, Britain had to use a new and complex communication system, using radar and information from people watching on the ground, incoming German planes were spotted early.

Once they knew where they were coming from, RAF planes and anti-aircraft guns were called into action. To make this system work, over one thousand observer posts had to be continuously manned by volunteers.

Full-time soldiers, which later on included the Women's Army, could then fire the guns where needed.

The fight back worked and eventually Germany realised they had failed to gain control over the skies. The planned invasion of Britain by the Nazis was stopped.

However, the Germans continued to bomb cities and other non-military targets for many more months. In what became known as the blitz.

As well as the Battle of Britain and the blitz, German aircrafts continued to attack Britain for the rest of the war. As they did this, RAF bombers were also sent to attack Germany.

Frank was a bomb aimer in a Lancaster bomber squadron, which flew on missions to Germany.

Interviewer: Which one are you?

Frank: The handsome one!

Narrator: He was responsible for insuring that the bombs accurately hit their targets. This was a very dangerous job.

Frank: On one occasion, we'd been debriefed and we were going out to the mess, a crew comes in and the bomb aimer is carrying his parachute and it's torn to ribbons. A piece of shrapnel from this anti-aircraft shell comes through, hits him in the chest, throws him off the foot of the pilot controls and he was not marked at all. On another occasion, the crew brought a bomb aimer back and he'd been hit and he was dead, he was killed, yeah. I was one of the lucky ones, came out without a scratch.

Narrator: As well as being dangerous, the job was very difficult. Frank remembers one of the missions he was sent on to destroy a bridge in Germany.

Frank: I watched those bombs go, miss the bridge, as all the others did, nobody hit the bridge on that occasion. That split second can make all the difference. If you're travelling up there at twenty five thousand feet, at two hundred miles an hour, you've just got to be on target if you possibly can.

Narrator: Did you know? As the war progressed, the RAF strategy changed from bombing strategic points like bridges and factories, to bombing cities as well, as the Germans had done. These bombings became increasingly powerful. Much heavier than those carried out by the Germans on British cities.

In the attack of the German city of Dresden in 1945, over a thousand British and American planes bombed the city.

Over three days, tens of thousands of people were killed.

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History KS2: The Battle of Britain and beyond

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This short film explains what the Battle of Britain was, who was involved and how radar was used throughout the battle.

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This short film offers a digestible insight into the blitz and how the British people responded.

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Narrator: During the Second World War keeping information secret became incredibly important. The intelligence service inside Britian, MI5, was concerned about people sending important information to the enemy.

Posters warned people to be careful about what they said, because 'careless talk costs lives.' British spies were also working hard to confuse the Germans. Double agents even captured secret German messages, changed them and fed them back wrong.

Confusion tactics like this were critical to the success of military operations like D-Day. And so having trustworthy information was a matter of winning or losing the war. To make sure the enemy wouldn't know what was being said, people used coded messages.

This involved taking a readable message and turning it into an unbreakable code.

This ensured that messages could be sent safely to other allies, the countries who were working together to stop the Nazis. The Allies knew the code, so they could decipher the messages without the enemy understanding it.

Bernard worked in codes and ciphers for the Royal Air Force, the RAF. He remembers first joining the unit.

Bernard: There was a machine there, it was like a large typewriter. I said to the officer I said, 'what's this machine I've notseen that before.' He said, 'that's a machine we use for decoding the messages.'

This is a Typex machine, which was used to code and decode all the secret messages which we received.

Narrator: On missions, these Typex machines were carried around in a large truck called a cipher vehicle.

Bernard: The cipher vehicle was like a mobile classroom because we had two of these Typex machines and they were so bigit took four men to lift them and we had two of those in the cipher vehicle. One to set up for the previous day in case you got any late messages and one for the current day.

Narrator: Secrecy was of utmost importance for his work and Bernard took it very seriously.

Bernard: But I couldn't tell any of that information until fifty years afterwards. We couldn't tell anybody and we were the first peopleto know two days before that the war was going to finish in two days time. The message tells you nobody to be advised but we had been so used to the secrecy all through the war, we never told anybody.

Narrator: Did you know? The German encryption machine, was called the Enigma. It had one hundred and three billion trillion possible settings for encoding messages. For much of the war it was thought to be unbreakable. However, Enigma encryption had fatal flaws. A letter could not be encrypted as itself and multiple letters could not be encoded with the same letter. So A couldn't be encoded as A, nor could A be encoded as both B and C at the same time.

Knowing this, British code breakers designed a machine that could eliminate the vast majority of possible ciphers that weren't possible with Enigma's limitations. This left far fewer to be analysed by hand.

One of the main mathematicians working on this was Alan Turing, who helped to develop multiple code breaking systems. His work also created the foundations of modern computers. He has since been recognised for this incredible work and is now the face on the new fifty pound note.

Overall however, codebreaking was a team effort. Before the invention of electronic computers, computer was a job description not a machine. Both men and women were employed as computers but women were more prominent in the field.

At Bletchley Park, the centre of British code breaking during the war, teams of both men and women worked on complicated problems round the clock, hoping to crack the German codes and bring about a quicker end to the war.

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This short film explains how cracking Nazi Germany's coded messages helped win World War Two.

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This short film explores the significance of D-Day as well as highlighting what took place that day.

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Narrator: By 1945, the Second World War had gone on for nearly six years of bloodshed and sacrifice, but things were beginning to change.

Following the success of D-Day, the Allied armies in Western Europe from Britain, France, Canada and the United States started to advance on Berlin from the West. Meanwhile, Soviet forces were attacking from the East, leaving Nazi Germany surrounded.

On the seventh of May 1945 Nazi German officials agreed to a complete surrender. Special issues of newspapers were printed to announce the surrender and news that the war in Europe was finally over spread very quickly.

Details circulated that the next day, the eighth of May, would be a public holiday known as Victory in Europe Day, or VE day.

On VE Day the Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the royal family appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. They were met by a huge crowd and chants of we 'want the king' for the reigning King George the sixth.

The royal family made eight appearances on the balcony that day to celebrate with the people and dancing, music and other celebrations continued into the night.

Alan recalls seeing the celebrations in London as he went on his paper round the next day.

Alan: People had had sing songs, bonfires, no bonfires allowed for six years and here we are with all this timber. People have carried a piano and other musical instruments out into the street and there had been a lot of jollity. But I went to bed reasonably early because I've got to get up at six and get this news out. And I went round my paper round where everyone had had a fire, a bonfire in the street. I kicked the embers back in and got all the fires going again and that was my contribution to VE Day.

Everyone had one thing in common, they had all survived and it was very very happy.

Narrator: But even though the war had ended in Europe VE Day was not the end of the Second World War. Fighting continued in the Asia Pacific region. While Germany had surrendered, Japan continued to fight.

The US had developed a terrifying weapon called the Atomic Bomb. In August 1945 they used this bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan, destroying almost the entire city. Three days later another atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, resulting in even more devastation.

On the same day, troops from the Soviet Union fought their way into Northern China, which had been ruled by the Japanese since 1931. Wanting to avoid further destruction and unable to stop the Soviet advance, Japan called for an end to the war and surrendered on the fifteenth of August 1945. This became known as VJ Day, Victory over Japan day.

Did you know? VE Day and VJ Day mark the end of hostilities and that soldiers, sailors and airmen would soon be coming home. But just because the fighting was over didn't mean everything had been fixed. Rationing continued until 1954, nearly ten years after the war had ended. And many women were not allowed to keep the important roles they had taken on during the war.

Despite the widespread celebrations after the war, many people also had bittersweet reactions. They had lost so much in the conflict, their homes, their friends and, for some, their family. Alan lost his mother in the war, during a bombing.

Alan: At the time, the feeling was keep a stiff upper lip, you are not to show them that you are upset and I didn't. But years later, I was. There is nothing like your mother, in terms of warmth and encouragement and that we missed.

Narrator: The war had come to an end and the Allies had been victorious but for everyone who survived, their lives had been changed forever.

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This short film explains what VE Day and VJ Day were, and the events that led to the end of the war.

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Narrator: Britain's success in the war depended on people joining together and not losing hope. But living through the Second World War was very scary. You might have to go and fight or endure bombings at home. If the public lost faith that the country would win the war, or couldn't see what they were fighting for, it could prove disastrous as they were the ones powering the war effort.

To counter this, the British government formed The Ministry of Information. They produced posters and films aspropaganda; information that changed how the public viewed the war and encouraged them to continue with the war effort.

Propaganda was also used to tell people what they needed to know to understand the war. That might be by telling people to wear visible clothing during black out or it might be by warning people against things that were bad for the war. Like bringing children home from evacuation.

Often propaganda was used to get people involved in the war effort, like volunteering as an air warden.

Gladys remembers seeing propaganda posters when she was a child.

Gladys: Well, there was posters everywhere. One for Potato Pete, which was a potato with legs and arms and eyes. I think that took your eye off what was missing. I used to have to do shopping for my mum. Get King Edwards potatoes and above King Edwards potatoes was this picture of Potato Pete, eat more potatoes.

And other posters were, save water, dig for victory, grow more vegetables, careless talk costs lives.

Narrator: Living through a war could be very hard, so having a strong sense of purpose and belief helped people get through the situation they were in.

Gladys: The mentality was, Hitler is not going to get us. We are going to win the war. We gotta help the war effort, we were fighting for freedom and our country

Narrator: Did you know? One of the most significant uses of propaganda was the response to the rescue of soldiers from Dunkirk in France.

In May 1940, the Germans forced the French and British armies back through France, towards the English Channel.

Over four hundred thousand French and British soldiers were trapped along the beaches around Dunkirk. It seemed like there was no way out. An emergency rescue was organised to bring the soldiers to Britain in a fleet of over eight hundred boats.

Many of the smaller boats were crewed by non-military or civilian volunteers, as the government had put out a desperate call for assistance.

Instead of presenting the story as an embarrassing defeat and a serious loss of men and equipment, the British government told it as an impressive feat of bravery and daring rescue, where Britain lived to fight another day.

Radio archive: A whole navy of little ships cooperated in a super human task. In spite of their tribulations, defeat was not written on their faces.

Narrator: This response became known as the miracle of Dunkirk. And the country's ability to band together, despite hardship was seen as Dunkirk spirit.

The use of propaganda managed to turn Dunkirk from a defeat into a defiant victory and helped the British people stay positive. But propaganda could also be used in deliberately harmful ways.

For example, the Nazis used propaganda to spread anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jewish people. The terrible consequences of this racist propaganda led to the Holocaust, and the death of more than six million Jews.

Overall, propaganda was a government tool, to be used for good or evil.

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KS2 History: How propaganda was used during World War Two

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This short film explains how people were persuaded to join the war effort, and the importance of motivational campaigns.

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This short film highlights the importance of technology in the war effort and the key roles that tanks, planes and ships played.