The Day When: Pivotal Decisions of WWII

On 28 May 1940, while the Wehrmacht crushed the allied armies in France, British officials are prepared to deal with Hitler. Alone against all in the war cabinet, Churchill, by his cleverness and willingness, finally convinced his collaborators to fight. Without him the course of the Second World War would have been very different.

On 16 June 1940 in Bordeaux, an almost stranger decides to secede and to rebel openly against the policy adopted by the French legal government. He would later become De Gaulle, leader of Free France, without whom the country would have ended the war in the camp of the vanquished.

On 7 December 1941, while Japanese aviation has just sunk a large part of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt puts the United States in a state of war and decides to focus the main efforts not against Japan but against Germany. Without him, Germany would probably have won.

Adolf Hitler died on 30 April 1945 marking the end of the third Reich. The following day, Nazi Germany capitulated. However, it was not in Berlin that the fate of the war was decided. The German defeat had been unavoidable, from the day Hitler launched an attack, four years earlier, against the USSR.