Original subtitles

All I remember about the next thing is a blinding flash and, you know, a terrible bloody smell

of cordite and things like that, but it was all just a mess, because the Germans, anything

that was moving, they were shooting.

The beach was covered in bodies and tanks and smoke.

Everything was brighter, in my mind, than it would have been normally.

This was it.

Can you tell me about D-Day itself?

Testing, testing, one, two, three. Testing, testing, one, two, three.

Testing, testing, one, two, three.

What had they told you beforehand to expect?

Expect hell. They didn't lie to us about that.

It was sheer nerves. Exhilarating nerves, if you know what I mean.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped and battle-hardened.

He will fight savagely.

Mr Kelly, real one, can you tell me whereabouts you were born, please, first of all?

Well, I was born in Liverpool, in a street called Doncaster Street.

And what did your father do?

My father was a sailmaker, and so was his entire family, actually.

When the war came, what were you doing then?

I think I was about 17 years of age. The bombing started at the end of, well, the early 1941.

The corner of the street was actually destroyed by a semi-bomb.

So I signed up for the Royal Marines.

Because my eldest brother was already in the Marines then, and he was on leave.

And he looked absolutely magnificent in his blue uniform.

Why did you immediately volunteer?

Well, it was a feeling amongst young men at that time that something was going to happen,

and the Germans were at it again, and we weren't going to let them do that.

And pride, I suppose, and patriotism, and the unknown sense of adventure again, I suppose.

I told my mother that I was going to join the Marines, and of course she was upset.

What did your mother say to you when you found out?

Er...

Please don't go.

Wait until your father comes home. I'll talk it over with him.

In 1944, World War II has been raging for over four years.

From one side of Europe virtually to the other is under German control.

This is Nazi territory.

Germany is beginning to bring the war increasingly to Britain's doorstep,

and there's a sense that, really, Britain's the only little bit that's left.

The Allies had been thinking about how to get back into Europe

ever since the defeat at Dunkirk in 1940.

The ultimate goal is to get into Germany,

the end point being that they get to Berlin,

that they can overthrow Hitler in his own city at the very centre of the Third Reich.

The Allies contemplated various different options for how this could be done,

the best way, ultimately, to get to Germany.

And they reasoned that the only way to do that is via northern France,

just across the Channel from Britain.

But to do this, they would need hundreds of thousands of men,

and volunteers like James Kelly were key.

I got a text emerald out of Majesty's safe.

She said, what's this?

So I said, I don't know.

She said, what are you going to tell your father?

So I said, I'm not sure.

But I said, I'll do it on the face of the Germans and him.

GERMANY, SEPTEMBER 1941

For six months, I was at the Resistance Nest 62

on the beach of the Kolewilfsee Sea.

We wanted to defend our homeland.

Because for us, our homeland was,

through the many bomb attacks,

more and more drawn into the Greeks.

Every single soldier in these Resistance Nests

was ordered to fight to the last cartridge and not to surrender.

People like Franz Goeppel believed,

if the Allies land, he would have to fight and die.

There was only a slim chance to survive.

Germany always knew that the Allies

were highly likely to mount an invasion.

And in anticipation of that,

they created a huge series of fortifications

all along the north of Europe that became known as the Atlantic Wall.

Gun positions, bunkers, etc,

that were all put together with the single intention of ensuring

that if the Allies were to come, when the Allies came,

then they would be pushed straight back into the ocean.

The Germans also started to fortify the beaches,

putting all sorts of armaments, barbed wire, huge pieces of equipment

that would basically stop any landing force from being able to get too far.

The beaches themselves were also mined.

And above the beaches, there were strongpoints,

manned by German troops who were armed with machine guns.

When you look at the average German infantry division

in the West in June 1944,

they normally consist of 40% young recruits,

17 or 18 years old, with still a solid training,

but without any war experience.

The German infantry division,

which consisted of 40% young recruits,

17 or 18 years old,

with still a solid training,

but without any war experience.

Eventually, the Allies identified five beach landing areas

across Normandy in northern France,

where over 100,000 troops would land on D-Day.

From the West, they went from Utah, Omaha,

Gold, Juneau, and Sorbonne.

The Allies were able to secure the beaches,

and the Germans were able to secure the beaches.

Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juneau, and Sorbonne.

So Utah and Omaha were identified as being the American beaches.

Juneau was going to be the Canadian beach,

and then Gold and Sorbonne were Britain's beaches.

It's really important to be clear about the fact

that nothing of this scale had ever been attempted in human history.

This is an event without precedent.

The undertaking that was D-Day was absolutely vast.

It's almost impossible to imagine.

It's an incredible test of logistics.

To have the right amount of aircraft, ships, landing craft,

everybody ready at the same moment when they could launch this attack.

It was going to need a massive amount of training for the troops involved,

and a massive amount of new technology to be refined.

Because, of course, the means of achieving this had never been done before.

It's all very well to talk about secrecy,

to hope that all this is private,

but you would have had to have been blind and deaf, really,

certainly in the south of England, not to notice that something was going on.

Every little lane, the tanks,

well, they turned bumper to bumper,

if I used that, track to track.

They were parked right down one side of the road,

underneath the overhanging trees, wherever they could get.

But even so, they weren't camouflaged.

You couldn't camouflage them properly.

And you were there for everybody to see.

You've got hundreds of thousands of troops.

All of them need to be trained and prepared.

And these aren't just troops from Britain, either.

They're from Canada and America.

OK, you're Harry NMI Parley.

That's right.

My serial number was 3297-3006, I recall that.

When did you go into the army?

I went into the army in 1943.

I got married before... I knew I was going to be drafted.

You were 23 years old.

Yes.

American troops had been arriving in record numbers

to Great Britain since 1943.

In fact, by the end of May 1944,

there were more than 1.5 million US personnel on British soil.

And they were there to support or participate in D-Day

and the Battle of Normandy that was to follow.

My name is Thomas William Porcella.

I was born in New York City, October 4th, 1923.

Men like Tom Porcella were brought over in huge troop ships

and they would land in places like Belfast or Liverpool

and then they would attend training camps.

These were mostly in southern England to prepare for the invasion.

I was thinking to myself,

I was thinking to myself,

this is it.

It's just a matter of time now and I will be in combat.

I wonder what the hell my folks are doing back home.

I wonder if they're thinking about the invasion like we are.

I wonder what they would think if they knew at this moment

their son Tom was preparing himself for this big invasion.

All sorts of thoughts went through my mind.

I was told that all the new arrivals were to be brought to company

from about 250 to 300,

that they expected about 30% casualty on the invasion

and that we were it.

One of the really difficult things about military planning

is that you have to plan for a number of your own men getting killed.

The strategists and the commanders knew that they were sending

a percentage of these young men to their deaths

because that's the only way that the invasion could have happened.

They just hoped that they'd done whatever they could

to mitigate the numbers.

We wanted to go, most of us anyway wanted to go.

It's something that had to be done.

It might sound a bit gung-ho,

but that's how we felt.

We had to go and do it.

I don't ever remember talking to anybody who was frightened or feared.

I don't think frightening is the word for a young man.

It's excitement really.

If you stand back from us and watch it, I suppose that it is frightening.

You do get this tingling.

But I don't think I can honestly say that I was actually frightened.

As well as the seaborne invasion,

there was another aspect to D-Day which was absolutely crucial

and this was the airborne assault.

In the middle of the night before D-Day,

hours before the troops would land on the Normandy beaches,

thousands of men would be dropped behind enemy lines.

And leading one of these units was Major John Howard.

John Howard, D-Day

Well, I'd like to begin, at the beginning, with you.

Well, I had a very poor childhood.

My father, when he married my mother,

slightly older than him,

was a baker's roundsman with a horse and cart in London,

in the Tomahawk Road area.

As the eldest of a very poor family,

I had to become a breadwinner as soon as possible.

So I joined the army.

I was promoted to Major.

John Howard, he was an officer slightly different

than the normal officer type, if you can use that expression.

He was a dedicated man. He was a fanatic.

He was determined to make that company the company,

not only the best company in the outfit, in the regiment,

but in the division.

And the next thing I heard was that the 52nd,

that's the 2nd Battalion, who'd come home from India,

was going to be airborne.

Going to be glider troops.

And I was interested in this.

The plan on D-Day was for some of the airborne troops

to fly in on gliders.

Essentially a new concept in warfare.

They were really lightweight wooden gliders.

They were to be towed across on D-Day on bombers

and then they would be released.

Of course, one of the most useful things about the gliders,

quite apart from the fact they could put these people

all together into one place at one time,

is that as soon as they'd been released,

they were completely silent.

They were a really useful means of a surprise attack.

What was the appeal?

I suppose there was a bit of glamour about it as well.

Everything was a bit hush-hush as it happened, you know.

In the final weeks before D-Day,

soldiers were moved to sealed camps

where they learnt their missions.

The soldiers inside these camps were effectively sealed off.

They weren't allowed in or out of the camp boundaries.

No telephone calls home, for example.

Any correspondence would be censored.

Secrecy was paramount.

And I imagine that the tension started to build

in these sealed camps as well.

There was a sort of fever.

And we knew that there was definitely something going on.

A rumour started from nowhere.

We had to attack some places, take some bridges.

My camera was lucky to be selected for what turned out to be

a wonderful operation.

Glydebourne, to capture two bridges in Normandy.

John Howard's objective on D-Day was to secure the Bennuville Bridge,

later became known as Pegasus Bridge.

This bridge was really critical.

It's really close to the landing beach at Sword.

So securing this bridge should allow the troops coming in from Sword

and those further along to come across

and move on towards their objectives.

If it's not secured, it allows the Germans to do the opposite

and move tanks and troops towards them

and potentially to wreak havoc upon them on the beach.

This was an incredibly bold plan by an elite unit

that would become the start of D-Day.

It's only a few days before D-Day itself

that they're showing this scale model

so that when they stepped off the plane,

the idea was that nothing would come as a surprise.

We all had to go into a big tent,

and there, laying on the table, was this thing.

We just looked at it, and there it was.

The bridge, rivers.

We knew there was something to do with the river.

We knew there was something to do with the bridge.

There was all sorts of guesses as to where it could be.

Nobody had a clue.

And even when we were shown it and everything else,

we weren't told where it was.

In the briefing, did you give them a pretty good rundown

on not only the immediate objectives,

but did you also then say, now, the big picture is?

Oh, yes, everybody had that quite clear in their mind

and knew where we fit into the picture.

The first people to land that night,

and it really did hit them between the eyes.

MUSIC PLAYS

The night before D-Day, over 7,000 boats set off,

laden with troops, weapons, tanks and explosives

from different points all along the south coast of Britain.

They would travel through the night and wait off the French coast,

ready to launch the assault the next morning.

Well, on the night of the 5th, we went.

It's an amazing, amazing sight.

Everywhere you looked, there were ships of all shapes and sizes.

The sky always seemed to be full of hour planes

with the black and white stripes on them.

And everything seemed to stand out in technical.

It seemed to be...

..a psychedelic picture.

But it was a lovely feeling, because they were all ours.

Everything was ours.

And then we went off to Normandy, through the night.

Everything seemed to be ex... What's the word I'm looking for?

Exaggerated. Exaggerated, yes.

Everything in colour. Technical.

We went to support these landing craft infantry.

They were very, very cramped.

And, you know, you have memories of...

..of just things that may happen to you, you know.

And what I associate with those craft were self-eating soup.

I know it sounds outlandish, but...

..self-eating soup.

It was the only way you were going to get a hot meal.

That's what I remember about the landing craft.

Self-eating soup and a desire to be sick.

It was a terrible, rough crossing.

From the Allies' perspective, D-Day was a massive gamble.

Because if those men were to be lost

and that equipment was to be destroyed,

then how do you start again?

But not only that, they would then know

that the Germans knew what their plan was.

So they would have to completely reconceive

how any sort of future invasion could have worked.

The stakes are extraordinarily high.

And it's really impossible to overstate that point.

You must have been apprehensive

about the possibility of being killed on men.

No. As a matter of fact, looking back to the fellows I spoke to

when we did, they were so keen,

but at the same time so ignorant of true warfare.

And this is one of the things that keeps a man going in battle.

He can always imagine his mate being killed.

He can always imagine his mate being killed.

He can always imagine himself getting a nice, tidy wound

across the head or through the leg or the shoulder.

The thing that keeps most men going in battle is,

despite seeing men die left, right and centre,

they always seem to get this idea that it's not going to be them.

The risks with the gliders were incredibly high

because they had no engines.

When they were released, the pilots had really limited means

of controlling what was happening.

And what they were essentially doing

was kind of a controlled crash landing.

If they were to hit anything solid

or to miss their original landing point,

there was nothing that the pilot could do but accept what was to come.

Up at the airfield, everybody went to their gliders

to check the equipment was all tied all right.

Before that glider went off,

I managed to get the longest piece of chalk.

I put Lady Irene right along the side of it.

Lady what? Lady Irene.

That's my wife's name.

I put Lady Irene in great big white letters all along the side.

And I kept that bit of chalk and I wouldn't let anybody else have it.

Nobody else was going to scrawl on that.

That was Lady Irene.

And then Jack Bailey, my old mate down there,

he's still down there with me, said,

let's have a bit of chalk.

Come from the same area, Lewisham.

He said, I'll let you have it, Jack, and I want it back.

And he put Lewisham Special on the other side.

Lewisham Special? Lewisham.

The borough we live in, South London.

My clearest memory was a somewhat sad one

of going round and giving farewell.

It really was a tough time going round

with a lump in your throat.

I got back to my glider and shut the doors.

And right on the dot of 2256 I was airborne.

WHIRRING

As soon as we got up to 5,000 or 6,000 feet,

the men started loosening their tongues

and a lot of singing went on.

We sang everything, anything we could lay our tongues to.

Simple as that. It was sheer nerves.

But exhilarating nerves, if you know what I mean.

Absolutely.

Going through my own mind, apart from the plan

and what was going to meet us at the other end.

I mean, one couldn't help thinking of your family.

Dan Brotheridge, he was the platoon commander I was closest with.

He was the oldest officer next to me.

Most of his platoon were cocknets.

And I was a Londoner myself and felt very much at home with cocknets.

My wife, Joy, and Margaret, Dan's wife, were pregnant together.

And we discussed it quite often, Dan and I.

He was obviously very worried

because the date that Margaret's child was due

was the fortnight after D-Day.

Having a journey out, shout out.

Something about we're over the coast, or words to that effect.

Now you begin to get a little bit.

Canary over occupied Europe.

You know where I've been.

And the next thing, we cast off.

Seeing them stopped.

When we levelled out a bit at 1,000 feet,

we opened the doors of the gliders.

Now I could look forward at the fields of France

and it had an amazing tranquilising effect on me.

And it was so quiet, it was like being on an exercise in England.

But they all flew very, very high

and soon bombarded my line.

But we suddenly heard

at least one very, very low-flying aircraft.

From the noise.

But that had irritated us.

What was that?

That was new to us.

The glider suddenly did a right-hand turn.

And we came to what we knew was going to be

the toughest moment of the lot.

The crash land.

I could see the glider pilot holding that bloody great machine

and driving it in at the last minute.

Those damn great footballs of sweat.

Those damn great footballs of sweat

across his forehead and all over his face.

And then the summit bang.

More bang.

Onto the top of the trees.

And there was zombies.

Rending.

Splash.

Made to lumber.

Made to lumber.

I wasn't prepared for that bump.

And everything going all quiet.

He looked around.

God only.

And for a moment, there wasn't a sound.

I felt my head had been knocked rather badly.

First thing I saw was that the door had disappeared.

It had completely telescoped.

I could hear the glider pilots on my right

moaning in their cockpit,

which seemed to have been smashed.

But I was conscious that everybody in the glider was moving.

I could hear the click of the safety belts being undone.

And I knew that men were getting out of the glider

and people were pushing in front of me

to get through the broken door.

As I stood there, I could see the tower of the bridge

about 50 yards from where I was standing.

I suppose that really was the most exhilarating moment of my life.

I saw the smoke bomb explode.

The phosphorus bomb.

I heard the thud, thud, thud in the pillbox

as the grenades exploded.

I knew we'd get no more trouble from there.

And the legion platoon ran across the bridge.

We were supposed to meet up with Dan Broderidge.

Where's Dan?

He said, I don't know. He said, I haven't seen him.

I haven't seen anything.

Only as far as here.

I started to run to go around the back end

where he should have been.

I ran past a bloke lying on the floor in the road.

I looked at him.

I went to run on and I stopped dead.

I said, hang on.

I came back, knelt down,

looked at Dan Broderidge.

I just knelt down beside him.

His eyes were open and his lips were moving.

I just looked at him.

I put my hand under his head to lift him up.

I took my hand away and put my mouth back.

And Dan was covered in it.

I just looked at him.

I just didn't go like that a lot of times.

His eyes sort of rolled back.

Just showed from their back.

I just looked at him right in the middle of it.

I looked at him like, my God.

I don't know if it was...

Do you know what?

I don't know if it was the bloke himself

or all the years of training he'd put in to do a job.

It only lasted 20 seconds, 30 seconds.

First news I got from Den's platoon

was the fact that he'd been...

hit.

And that really shook me.

And I could see it was fatal.

And the fact that I knew that Margaret, his wife,

was expecting a baby almost any time.

In the event it arrived fortnight later.

It was at the top of my mind

as I saw Dan carry past on that stretcher.

A very sad moment for myself.

And for everybody concerned.

I was just so sad.

John Howard and his airborne troops

had managed to capture Banneville Bridge

in less than 20 minutes.

But now the airborne had to keep hold of it

whilst they waited for the troops to arrive from Sword Beach.

That was going to be a long night.

In those early hours of D-Day,

it wasn't just the British airborne troops

who were landing behind enemy lines.

All of a sudden we heard,

are you ready?

All the troopers shouted all at once,

yeah, let's go.

Let's go.

The Americans dropped six parachute regiments

behind enemy lines on the morning of the D-Day invasion.

About 13,000 men.

As the chute popped open,

my head snapped forward and my feet came up.

My elbow was pushed slightly over my face.

The jolt of the opening of the chute

soon made everything a reality.

I looked up at my chute to make sure it was OK.

Then looked down and I couldn't see anything but blackness.

Tom Porcella's regiment's mission

was to secure two bridges beyond Utah Beach.

One thing that the Germans had done

was flood fields in order to turn them into quagmires

to slow the Allied advance down.

Of course, the paratroopers dropped into these soaked fields

and found themselves, in some cases,

shoulder or neck deep in cold, freezing water

and weighed down by their own equipment.

Many of them drowned.

I had the shock of my life.

I plunged into water.

My heart was pounding

and my thoughts were running a mile a minute.

How deep is this water?

Can I get free of my chute?

Am I too heavy? Will the weight keep me on the bottom?

All the training I had received

had not prepared me for such a landing.

My eyes strained to see the landmarks

but I could see nothing in the darkness.

I was cold and I began to shiver.

We realized that time was running out.

If we were going to do anything, we better do it fast.

So we moved as fast as we could.

We knew it was very important

that we leave the water before daylight.

The first signs were on the left of us.

We could see the weather.

The first parachutists had already come down.

Then we saw a lot of flashes of guns.

We had also seen the detonation.

We knew that something was going to happen.

In the past weeks, German soldiers

had been put on alert again and again.

Many of them had become complacent.

And even in the night from the 5th to the 6th of June

when the first information went in

that there was an Allied parachute drop,

the Germans did not fully believe

that this is the big invasion.

The Germans did not fully believe

that this is the big invasion.

The Germans did not fully believe

that this is the big invasion.

The Allies were attacking German defences

right across Normandy.

And one of their targets was the Merville Battery,

a battery commanded by Raymond Steiner.

The Merville Battery was a collection of guns

within reach of Sword Beach.

The battery was stormed

by British glider-borne infantry.

But at the time, Raymond was a mile away

at an observation post.

At the time, Raymond was a mile away

at an observation post.

And therefore he could only hear what was happening.

The Allies had now started the next phase of the operation.

The Allies had now started the next phase of the operation.

And this was pounding the German coastal defences

with a massive aerial bombardment.

It was so impressive that they flew right down.

So the plan for D-Day

was that before the landing troops

got to the beaches,

the Atlantic Wall in Normandy

would be absolutely bombarded.

What they knew

is that it would have dreadful consequences

for French civilians.

France had been occupied by the Nazis

for almost four years at that point to the day.

People on those shores

and a little bit inland,

they didn't see the landings.

They heard the landings.

They didn't know what it was.

It was like these rumblings.

You know, is it thunder?

Is it some bombardment?

I mean, there had been bombardment all throughout 1944.

So it wasn't completely unfamiliar,

but there was something much more intense about it.

And as daylight starts to come,

then they see that this is probably the landings,

that something is happening,

and all they're thinking is,

let them land elsewhere.

Let them not land where we are,

because that's the most dangerous.

♪

♪

Andre Heinz was quite a typical resister.

He was a young man.

His whole generation during the occupation

was targeted by the forced labour service

imposed by the Germans,

which involved young men his age

going to Germany to work for the German military cause.

And he was infuriated.

He had been seeing the grip of the Germans

of the occupation on France for years now.

He had been waiting for this day for a long time.

But he couldn't have known what this would really be like

and how damaging it would be for the French people.

♪

While the Allied air forces are pounding the Atlantic wall,

the American troop ships are anchored

several miles off the French coast.

These troop ships would contain the main body

of the landing forces to hit the Normandy beaches.

It's very uncomfortable, very, very crowded.

We talked about life,

and I would expect they'd take it if we were wounded

and what would happen to us.

We had breakfast about 4.30 a.m.,

then the planes went on the beach

and the warships sheltered.

We got on Higgins' boats on deck

so we didn't have to climb down rope ladders

like some other boats.

The American army used Higgins' boats

to carry platoons of soldiers from ship to shore.

These boats were lowered from the troop ships,

but many of the soldiers, of course,

would have to scramble down netting to get into them.

The boats were rising five to six feet in the air

as they were waiting to take you down.

We got into the boat, and with all this equipment,

these guys climbed down.

The first wave for all the beaches

were to get into the channel,

and then there was a certain amount of time

where they had to actually circle

while all the boats were lowered and loaded

until the entire first wave was ready and in line.

Everybody got sick, except me.

As the boats approached the beaches,

the Allies launched a massive naval bombardment

so that by the time the landing forces

stepped off their boats,

then the guns that would have been firing at them

had been destroyed.

How shall I put it?

Then I started to pray loudly,

and then I tried to think through this prayer,

what is happening now, what is coming from us.

The bombs were firing from above,

and they were firing from far away.

You could hear the shot,

and then it started.

You can only say this acoustically.

It goes through the marrow of the leg

when they are firing, always taking aim.

Does it hit me now, or does it go over?

You are afraid of death, in any case.

Always afraid.

And it goes.

That's how it went for me.

I always thought of my mother.

I understood that the ships were pretty close to the beach here,

maybe 500-600 meters,

and before the first storm,

they fired like a fireball.

You hear people screaming,

you might see some of your colleagues dying,

perishing, bodies ripped apart.

Psychologically, this is one of the most terrifying things

soldiers probably can ever experience.

Those naval bombardments on top of the RAF

was absolutely terrific.

It's something everybody well remembered.

And then we thought of those poor devils

coming in by sea, in those landing launches.

And we were damn glad that we were where we were.

We were in the middle of the sea,

we were in the middle of the ocean,

and we were damn glad that we were where we were,

relatively safe.

I certainly wouldn't want it to be anywhere near the coast.

We were in the middle of the sea.

It was bombarding all night.

We went up, our house was on the third floor.

It was slightly overshadowed,

and we could see the sea perfectly.

What happened right after that?

We saw, as soon as it was light,

even though there was fog,

there was a lot of fog,

but we could perfectly see the shapes,

the sea, with the fire coming out of the cannons.

We could see flames on the harbour,

and then, little by little, all over the coast.

And we saw that it was coming at us,

and we were very scared.

On D-Day, lots of things went really, really well,

and a few of them didn't,

particularly the naval bombardment

and airborne bombardment that preceded the invasion.

Poor visibility and lack of time

meant that many German defences were knocked out,

and French civilians living near the targets

found themselves caught up in the chaos.

We stayed in the dining room for a while,

and then, all of a sudden,

the wall was crumpled,

and the windows, all the tiles had fallen.

So, it was really, really hard.

And what I found funny,

and I often thought about it,

was that the animals were screaming,

the neighbour's dog was howling,

but the birds were flying around as if nothing had happened.

We had the impression

that it wasn't affecting the birds.

All this time, they were shelling the beaches,

and they were bombing the beaches.

And it roared with the guns,

and it roared with the diesels,

and the thudding of the big ship itself.

You had to shout just to be heard by the guy next to you.

I had a very gentle lieutenant in charge of my platoon.

He asked me what I thought about dying.

It seemed very sad,

and I expected him to take me in his arms,

but that didn't happen.

When the ships came closer in the early hours of the morning,

and we could see the details,

it was unimaginable for us.

There were so many ships.

It was like a long fence in the shade.

From west to east, only ships.

From west to east, only ships.

For German defenders like Franz Gokul,

the sight of the approaching armada must have just been terrifying.

But despite the fact that the Allies

had pounded the beaches in advance of the landings,

many of the bunkers remained intact.

The German defenders were in place to rain fire down on the beaches.

On the way in, it was rough.

As we got near the shore, while going in,

we'd seen the rocket ships firing away the rockets.

We couldn't see much because we were supposed to keep our heads down,

and we couldn't hear anything.

Diesel motors on the boats

always remind me of the bus back home.

At this time in his life, boats were getting hit.

As we got closer, they were starting to fire.

Incoming enemy fire was starting to come out toward us.

I could smell the smoke, and I could hear yelling and carrying on,

and those guys, and every once in a while,

a guy would look up over the side and say,

oh, shit, they're ducked down again.

So I knew it wasn't good news.

He came into my bunker and yelled,

Franz, watch out, now...

They're coming.

Now you have to defend yourself.

We didn't know where we were.

We didn't know what to do.

The ramp went down.

And your asshole buggered up,

took a deep breath,

and he started to pray.

When we got there, it was just a shambles.

My friend was down on the deck.

And we got on the beach, which was covered in bodies.

There were tanks coming off and trucks coming off,

and sinking.

And then you just turned away, you couldn't look.

And then you just turned away, you couldn't look.

And then you just turned away, you couldn't look.