Divide and Conquer

This Warner Brothers short subject has a hysterical-sounding Knox Manning narrate the story of how Hitler conquered France: by sending in agents who gossiped endlessly about his secret weapons, how France was lost anyway, and so forth.

This should not be confused with the film released a year later as part of Frank Capra's WHY WE FIGHT series. Although looking at it a quarter of a century later, it shows itself as a purely propaganda piece, it undoubtedly had an outsized reaction at the time, when Japanese and German victories were still in the air, and the effects of the Battle of the Coral Sea were just beginning to penetrate into a population that were terrified at the thought of a long war which we might lose.