martes, 5 de mayo de 2020

4º British: Online World War II lesson. Stage 4: Victories of the Allies (First part: from 1943 to 1944)


The following link will show you the next chapter of my classroom presentation. Now that both Russia and USA have entered the war, with their maybe not well trained but inmense troops, the situation changed.

Representants of all the Allies were having different international meetings and submits: Stalin and his minister Molotov by Russia, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President of USA Franklyn D.Roosevelt (yes, the same one that created “The New Deal” to fix American economy after the Wall Street Crack of 1929!). As you can see in the first image of my pdf, sometimes they also invited Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French Resistance againts the Nazi occupation of France. Other important conferences during these years took place in Yalta and Teherán. Look at the photo, sitting at first row from left to right, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin:



And, as we mentioned Churchill... his speeches (both in the Parliament House and through radio to the general public) were extremely important to maintain British’ moral high and support war effort (remember that prior the entrance of Russia and USA in the war, UK was during a year the ONLY country officially fighting the Nazis). Churchill had a very peculiar oratory style, with the following characteristics:

1.Correct diction. Use of simple words, easy to understand (and remember) for everyone and, at the same time, good knowledge of vocabulary and sinonims.
2.Rethorical questions (for catching public’s attention)
3.Rythm. Repetition of ideas and main words.
4.Extravagance of lenguage (emotive metaphores).
5.Encourage of national feelings and sense of duty.
6.Actio (Voice and Movements as a way to emphasis his words)

In the following document: Extracts from the mostremarkables speeches from Winston Churchill during the II World War you can see remarcked in bold some of those characteristics. Do you want to listen to him? It's only a 3 minutes extract from We shall fight on the beaches (June 4, 1940; House of Parliament, London)


But let’s go back to the warfront... it is said that you need much more than just soldiers and weapons. Maybe it’s true! Jasper Maskelyne was a magician that joined the British army... as a magician! He managed to “created” a full (fake) army to fool the Nazis (watch the video: Deception at the El Alamein (6 minutes in English) to discover how). That event gave time to the Allies to prepare Operation Husky: the landing in Sicily (3 minutes news-video) as a first step to defeat and liberate Italy from Mussolini fascism.


The next step was Operation Overlord, the famous landing on the Normandy beaches. It was necessary to organise again a distraction scheme to avoid the Nazis to concentrated troops in the area. Who was the responsable of the successfull plan this time?... A Spanish spy! Actually, he was a double agent and was condecorated by both the British and the Germans :) Watch this video about Garbo, the spy who fooled the Nazis (official trailer from the BBC documentary, less than 2 minutes).

Operation Overlord (June 6th 1944) remains the largest ever seaborne invasion, with 5,000 ships, 11,000 aircraft, 50,000 vehicles and 150,000 troops (10,000 soldiers were reported dead at the end of that day) carrying out the daring mission. The five beaches were secure and the troops were pushing inland. Watch the Simple History video (3 minutes in English).




Finally, France was liberated and Charles De Gaulle entered Paris in a triumphal parade. But De Gaulle was not the first one in entering Paris, actually... can you guess who were the allied soldiers that really won the Battle of Paris and free the city?... Americans? No. British? No. They were Spanish! The 9th Company of the French "Regiment du Tchad" (also known as Division Leclerc) was nicknamed La Nueve (videoscribe by Memorias de Pez, 6 minutes in Spanish) because of the high number of Spanish republicans who, suffering exile after the Civil war, decided to go on the fight against European facism by joined the Free French Forces (“Legión extranjera”). It is a VERY interesting story and, of course, next week we’ll back to it with a special activity. But there is not hurry...


We are talking a lot about battles and weapons but... how did the war impact soldiers in the field and the people at home?. For many of the combatants, the homefront and the warfront were one and the same. Did you know, for example, that more British civilians were killed by enemy action during World War II than were members of the Royal Navy (60,595 civilians vs. 50,758 navals)? The war disrupted life for millions upon millions of people. You'll learn about the different experiences of the populations of various combatant states in this Crash Course video, by John Green (14 minutes in English).



Now as usual, to show that you have really revised all that information (if necessary, you can also do a quick online search), send the answers to the following questions to blogeducativo08@gmail.com before Tuesday, 12 May:

Question 1: Read again the LAST paragraph of the doc.: Extracts from Winston Churchill, belonging to the famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech. How many of the most famous resources of Churchill can you identify? Point them.

Question 2. The slide nº5 includes a photo of a "Pervitin" tube. What kind of medicament was that? Why was it used during a battle? What do you think about that use? Is it ethically correct in war-times? Why?

Question 3. The slide nº21 mentioned the “Roman massacre of Teotoburg”. Find out what was that (about 3-4 lines)

Question 4. Write a summay of the last video (Crash course: civilians and soldiers). It has to be about 10-15 lines long.



That’s all for this week. If any doubt, just ask me... or join the next Monday teams class, ok?




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