1944 arrives with the Axis unraveling on every front: German forces pull back from Russia, American troops push through Saipan and Guam against kamikaze resistance in the Pacific, Rome falls to the Allies, and the D-Day landings open a Western front in France. The film's center of gravity is Paris, where Charles de Gaulle leads Free French forces into a city that has spent four years under occupation. Archival footage and battlefield photography carry the narrative through the collapsing German position, with the liberation of the French capital framed as both a military operation and a political statement, De Gaulle asserting French sovereignty before the Allies can decide the country's postwar status for him. The episode moves between theaters, from the Eastern Front to the Pacific islands to the Normandy hedgerows, tracing how each collapse fed the next. It closes with Paris free but Europe still very much at war, the endgame against Germany only beginning.