Often the story of World War II is told as if it began September 1, 1939, with Germany's invasion of Poland. But the empires involved in the war had been in conflict since Japan's invasion of China in 1937. When the Japanese attacked the American airbase at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the war encompassed the world, only to end with a new weapon for a new age. In this historic account of the war, interviews with eyewitnesses from all the major theatres of the war, captured in the British Movietone Archive, interlace memories of events, providing living testimony to those moments in time.