Lights Out in Europe

In the summer of 1939, Adolph Hitler makes public threats against England, but the English take little heed and are unaware of the calamity about to befall them. At a London nightclub, the European war is lampooned. While foreign Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels' spreads Nazi propaganda campaign on the airwaves and in the newspapers, Lord Neville Chamberlain tries to deal with the Nazi regime through diplomacy. Londoners are soon instructed to work overtime and stockpile food in preparation for a possible Nazi attack. As boatloads of Austrian and Czechoslovakian refugees arrive in England, exercises in air raids on local docks are played out. Across the English Channel, in Danzig, Poland, a banner spanning a city street calls for Germany's return to the Reich. Anti-Jewish and anti-Polish propaganda is pictured, as are scenes showing the Jews being dispossessed of their homes and driven out of Danzig. While synogogues are destroyed in Danzig, tensions build in the outskirts of the city, where Poles take oaths to preserve their independence. Anti-aircraft artillery are mounted on the city's bridges to protect the roads, and Poles send cavalry brigades to fight the Reich. Back in London, posters around the city make an appeal to citizens to join the National Service and aid in the defense of their country. A London air raid drill is witnessed, as is the fitting of gas masks on children and the construction of bomb shelters in back yards. The film's commentator calls British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley a "Hitler with an English accent." While the first peacetime conscription in English history is enacted, labor exchanges are converted into recruiting centers, where the unemployed are recruited into the military. Also, as munitions plants buzz with activity, producing a thousand English war planes a month, signs in London reading "Don't Mind Hitler, Take Your Holiday," encourage Britons to ignore the war. When panic hits the streets of London, merchants sandbag their storefronts to protect their property from attack, and blackout paper becomes widely available to the English citizens. The English appear stunned when the Warsaw-German Pact is announced and England is catapaulted into the European fighting. The wearing of gas masks is made compulsory, and women and children are soon evacuated from London to the provinces. Following a surprise Nazi attack on Poland by the Germans on 1 Sep 1940, a Polish woman who was struck by gunfire is shown dying on a train. Two days later, after England and France declare war on Germany, British ships band together in a convoy to sweep the seas in search of enemy mines. As a full-scale European war unfolds, the Europeans realize that World War I was not the "war to end all wars," and "the lights are out in Europe" once again.