The Second World War lasted six years and one day. This is the whole of it, told
in one night — from a battleship that came to a Polish harbour as a guest, to a
green baize table in Tokyo Bay where the war ended in twenty-three minutes and
one man signed on the wrong line.

No music stings. No shouting. No cliffhangers. Just the whole war, in the order
the calendar tells it, read slowly enough to sleep through.

Almost nothing here rests on memory. The surrenders were typed and signed, and
the sheets are still in their archives. The letters were kept — forty billion of
them. The poem written in a dugout outside Moscow is still printed with the name
of its village under it. Where the record disagrees with itself, this film says
so.

Two hours and five minutes. Sleep whenever you like. The war will still be over
when you wake up.

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CHAPTERS

0:00 The War in One Breath
1:57 What This Film Rests On
3:12 Prologue — The Last Paper
10:09 Chapter 1 — The Ship That Came Visiting
18:28 Chapter 2 — Firewood Winter
26:14 Chapter 3 — The Dynamo Room
33:13 Chapter 4 — A Ticket for a Bunk
40:11 Chapter 5 — The Cramped Little Stove
47:13 Chapter 6 — One Hundred and Twenty-Five Grams
54:45 Chapter 7 — A Walk to Kunming
1:02:01 Chapter 8 — Light, Life, Love
1:09:32 Chapter 9 — Forty Letters a Minute
1:17:02 Chapter 10 — Forty-One in a Month
1:24:20 Chapter 11 — Marble, Do Not Drop
1:31:13 Chapter 12 — What's Merry About All This
1:38:30 Chapter 13 — Without a Word
1:45:46 Chapter 14 — The Floodlights
1:53:04 Chapter 15 — Twenty-Three Minutes
2:00:08 Epilogue — The Hole in the Snow

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MORE LONG SLEEP STORIES

Sleep Stories for Adults — the full archive:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWJACvRowzvk

Mythology Sleep Stories:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLACnjvJuiLvc

Bible & Apocrypha Sleep Stories:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZrwtikv8lo

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HOW TO USE THIS VIDEO

Headphones or a low speaker. Screen face down. Volume low enough that the words
blur at the edges. The narration is level throughout — no sudden loud passages,
no jump cuts, nothing that will pull you back out once you've gone.

If you wake at three in the morning, start it again anywhere. The chapters stand
on their own.

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A NOTE ON THE HISTORY

This is a documentary told for sleep, not a lecture. Dates, documents and named
people are as the record has them; where five countries count the beginning of
the war from five different mornings, the film keeps all five rather than
choosing one. Nothing here is intended to sensationalise the war or the people
who lived and died in it.

Narration and visuals are AI-assisted. Written, researched and edited by a human.

If you can't sleep for reasons this channel can't help with, please talk to
someone who can.

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Cradle of Myth — long, slow stories for adults who need to sleep.
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