Divide and Conquer: Norway, the Low Countries and France

The Why We Fight series was made to explain to American soldiers why the United States had gone to war. Divide and Conquer, completed in 1943, follows the German conquest of Western Europe from the invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940 through the attack on the Netherlands and Belgium to the armistice of Compiègne in June.

Capra's team built it largely from captured German newsreels and propaganda films, together with British, French and American footage, animated maps and some re-enacted scenes. The clip texts say where the origin of a shot can be read from the picture and where the film sets borrowed material in a new context.