PRESS RELEASE | RACE TO VICTORY - Part of WWII 75 Commemoration On HISTORY®

Join HISTORY® in commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII and the Liberation of the Netherlands with a landmark factual series about the Second World War: Race to Victory and a collection of brand new supporting programming.

The new six-part documentary series reveals how and why the central alliance between Great Britain, the United States and The Soviet Union was formed leading into World War II. The series paints an in-depth picture of the race to ultimate victory and post-war supremacy, concluding with Victory in Europe Day on 8^th May 1945.

Race to Victory hones in on the personal battles between wartime leaders Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, and illuminates the behind-the-scenes battles fought between these men – the war behind the war. The trio manoeuvred and grappled to exert their will over one another, to win the conflict on their terms and impose their competing ideologies on what was left of Europe.

This relationship between the three leaders was, despite their allied opposition to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, was marked from the beginning by deception, suspicion and mistrust. World War II and its aftermath were shaped away from the battlefields, behind closed doors by a small number of men who could just as easily have been enemies based on their conflicting ideologies and beliefs.

Featuring former Head of the British Army, General Sir Michael Jackson, as well as celebrated Dutch military commander, Major-General Rudi Hemmes, the series focuses on the critical moments and locations where World War II was won and lost. It was not only a race to defeat the fascist Axis Powers, but also to gain territory, to create alliances and to win the right to shape the post-war world.

Each episode begins with a decisive moment in the war – sometimes a great victory, such as El Alamein and Stalingrad, sometimes a moment of horror or shame, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor or the massacre at Katyn – and then back-tracks to explore who was responsible, who rushed to take the credit and who managed to escape the blame.

The penultimate episode of the series deals with the climactic events of D-Day, and the Allies’ race through Northern Europe in their bid to finish the war by Christmas, 1944. This period prompted the ill-fated Operation Market Garden (as seen in the film: ‘A Bridge Too Far’) the Battle of The Bulge and the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, to try and break the Siegfried Line and liberate the Netherlands and Belgium from the tyranny of Nazism.

Expert interviews with today’s historians, military personnel and political figures give the series a contemporary relevance.

Race to Victory (6x1) premieres on HISTORY® Thursday 11 June at 19.40