Titans of the 20th Century

The war is over and titans are on the move: Gandhi returns to India from South Africa to begin the fight that will bring him fame and his people their freedom; Lenin dies in 1924 and up steps a real titan - Josef Stalin; Franklin D Roosevelt is Secretary of the US Navy but in 1921 a promising career seems wrecked by polio; Adolf Hitler (age 29) ends the war in military hospital; Winston Churchill struggles to resume a political career. The first of the titans to emerge grabs power in this episode - Benito Mussolini.

Masking his disability in a way that would not be possible today, Franklin Delano Roosevelt reaches the Oval Office. The crash of '29 morphs seamlessly into the Great Depression that reaches every country on earth. Titans rise and fall in the calamitous era of unemployment and hunger - Hitler becomes chancellor in Germany, Mussolini secures absolute power, Spain begins the political convulsion that will bring Francisco Franco onto our stage (we meet La Pasionaria) and Stalin tightens his grip, even further, with purges and show trials and, in an increasingly unsettled India, Gandhi leads the Salt March.

The threat of war seems intensifies: war reaches Ethiopia with the Italian invasion and threatens in Europe with the German occupation of the Rhineland and annexation of Australia. Spain and China plunge into terrible civil wars. Mao Zedong leads the Chinese Communist Party to safety at the end of the Long March and the competing factions - Mao and Chiang Kai-shek - unite in the face of Japan's invasion.

The Spanish civil war reaches its bloody climax, the League of Nations seems toothless against the aggression of Italy, of Germany and of Japan. Neville Chamberlain is the man of the hour - but Adolf Hitler is the man of the times and 1938 brings a group of our titans together when Chamberlain invents 'shuttle diplomacy' at Munich, joining Hitler and Mussolini and thinking he has secured 'peace for our time' - "Good man!" telegraphs FDR. But peace is the last thing on Hitler's mind and the episode ends with war again burning across Europe.

Everywhere is now part of our story as we enter a period in history which, like no other, is dominated by the acts and personalities of a small group of powerful leaders - Titans. This is the time for Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, for Tojo to dominate both public and daily life. Peripheral figures to the main game are still part of the story - Eisenhower, of course, supreme commander in Europe and president-to-be and independence leaders Gandhi in India and De Valera in Ireland.

As the war draws to a close titans are leaving the scene - Roosevelt dies, Churchill is thrown out of office, Mussolini is shot by 'partisans' and Hitler shoots himself. Harry S Truman, a figure on our fringes, is pitched into the most powerful office in the world and asked to make a terrible decision, Stalin enjoys unrivalled power and sets the scene for forty years of Cold War, India gains independence which Gandhi, assassinated, never sees, and Mao Zedong prevails in China's civil war declaring the People's Republic to bring our story to a close. But not to an end.