This first installment is largely a warning against fascism. Capra described it as a contrast between a free world and a slave world, and traces events through the Japanese invasion of Manchuria starting in 1931 and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936.

A chapter of geopolitics. Hitler is able to take over the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia with impunity, and the appeasers oblige him. Only when he invades Poland does the real war begin.

The Nazis occupy Denmark and Norway, outflank the Maginot line and seize France, and drive the British into a corner at Dunkirk. A major theme here is how unprepared the democracies were for this onslaught.

The RAF vs. the Luftwaffe. Capra’s own synopsis: “Showing the gallant and victorious defense of Britain by the Royal Air Force, at a time when shattered, but unbeaten, British were the only people fighting Nazis."

This is quite an epic, running nearly an hour and a half for both parts. Considerable time is given to a description of Russia and its many peoples, and its implacable resistance to previous invaders through history. Wartime politics being what they were, such things as Stalin’s nonaggression pac...