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tide was coming in. The bullets were hitting the water and hitting men. I went down the

ramp. And I went under. Completely under.

Real one. Can you tell me about the D-Day itself?

They were trained beforehand. They fought until the very end.

They did try to save their lives. And that's why they fought.

What had they told you beforehand to expect? Expect hell. They didn't lie to us about that.

They were sheer nerds. Exhilarating nerds 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.

Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

I tried to get up. I couldn't get up. I know there's no help coming. I said goodbye to my mother, my wife.

As I struggled, somebody pulled me out.

After months, years really, of planning, the Allies finally launched their surprise attack on the German forces guarding the Normandy coast of occupied France.

The stakes for those troops on that morning were incredibly high. And in many respects, it was very much a now or never moment.

The Allies identified five beach landing areas. Those codenamed Utah and Omaha were the American beaches.

And it was always known that it was necessary to take Omaha because it sat between the other beaches.

The soldiers like Harry arriving on the beaches in these landing craft, it's the reality of war very much in their faces really for the first time that they've encountered something like this.

There had been a sense of shock. What they were faced with was far greater than they had been prepared for.

At the shoreline, there was a lot of wounded, dead floating. I had to crawl in. I was exhausted. Crawling over them, I didn't know who was wounded, who was dead.

I was in the wrong place, really. I could hear the bullets going into the sand. I heard a little sucking sound. It appeared that the beach was sucking something up.

Now I'm up there, half drowned, full of water, with 80 pounds of shit on my back. And I'm alone.

The landings were planned to be based on waves of troops hitting the beaches.

The first wave understood that they would take the highest casualties.

But they hadn't expected the volume of fire that they were experiencing with the full force of the German firepower raining down on them.

Omaha, from the perspective of the Allied invaders, was the most formidable beach because it was surrounded by gun positions on the high ground.

The Americans were incredibly vulnerable. The Germans could just pick off these Americans stepping off the boats almost at will.

I got up to the first layer of shingles of shale, rock, and laid there. Then I'd get my wind under fire. There was mortars hitting along the shore. I could see the sand going straight up.

The shingles were firing. Artillery shells were hitting.

I lay on my side and I opened my fly and urinated. I guess I was being neat. Anyhow, I was soaking wet anyway. It didn't matter. Under fire was sort of crazy, I guess.

Eventually, I climbed up to the next layer of shale. There was a bunch of GIs there getting hit and wounded.

We came under intense fire and they covered the beach with automatic weapons fire. It seemed like an inferno.

Did you expect that?

No, we didn't. We didn't expect it. This was our first taste of combat.

It must have been a bit like hell.

Well, I've never been there, but if it's like that, I'm certain I don't want to go there. And it's worse, I'm certain.

I'd see your friends, people you'd served with for years, floating face down or face up. A lot of the wounded drowned. I think I was in shock at the time. At times I was frightened.

There wasn't much to think about, actually. Except the German soldier on the machine gun.

We were trained to fight to the end. You had to hold your ground. We didn't think about retreating.

There were unimaginable amounts of boats for us. It was very shocking to see.

At Omaha, the earlier Allied naval bombardment was quite ineffective, so the German assistance nests were still intact.

Franz Gockel, his mission was to sit in his bunker and kill as many Allied soldiers as possible.

As Franz Gockel looked down onto the beach, he'd have seen these heavily laden soldiers, sometimes drenched from having just got out of the water, to them not moving particularly fast.

There was basically no natural cover at all. There was nothing between them and these guns. Almost nothing to stop the bullets.

The shooting was automatic. The water was red from the blood.

I was wounded just as I came off the boat. And it crossed the beach on my stomach. And it crawled. It seemed like an eternity, almost.

Omaha was unusual because there was a huge expanse of sand to cover in order to get to the cliffs or bluffs.

But there's five gaps, natural gaps, in that elevated ground.

The Americans' key objective is to secure these natural exits and overpower the German strong points.

This was all supposed to happen within a couple of hours.

We were supposed to land on the beach where the bluffs separated.

We came in approximately 500 to 1,000 yards east of where we were supposed to.

We didn't know what to do.

What was ahead of us was the bluffs.

The bluffs ranged anywhere from two to three stories in height. Quite steep.

You thought everything was lost because there were tanks coming off and trucks coming off, falling out in the water and sinking and were being hit down.

You just turned away. You couldn't look.

One guy next to me got a slug through his helmet. He missed his head because he had socks in his helmet.

Another guy had part of his buttocks blown open.

We put sulfur powder on him. He was numb from shock and he was laughing.

Couldn't feel it, I guess.

The Germans were pinning down the Americans to the sea line, which from their perspective is what they were trained to do to ensure that these men couldn't even get as far as the cliffs.

Casualty rates were incredibly high and the Americans, they were starting to get really bogged down.

In some cases, all of the men stepping off their boats were killed.

There was a very real prospect that they might actually lose the beach.

How many did you lose, do you know?

There were 17 on my boat to start with and only five of us came off the line.

It did horrify me to lose these men that we'd trained with, some of them I'd grown up with from childhood.

And I witnessed so many of our people getting killed.

I mean, it's kind of difficult.

I just want to watch you, sir.

I don't know whether I can do this or not.

It's peck-a-can.

I don't know whether I can do this or not.

One thought was, why do they keep coming back?

They see how many are already lying on the beach.

Every two meters, a dead man.

But when I think about how many were wounded,

and how they couldn't avoid stepping on dead soldiers while running to the beach.

They used every little opportunity to get to cover.

Poor guys.

Pockets of men advance across the beach and make it to the base of the bluffs where there are German defences, mines and obstacles.

The bluffs would be the toughest nut to crack.

Some were trying to dig in with their bare hands.

There were mortar and artillery shells landing all over the place.

There was one fucking mess.

Guys were trying to dig themselves back to deeper.

So, if you're in a clan, you're just there.

Just there, trying to stay alive.

Yeah.

While soldiers like Harry were trapped at the base of the bluffs, pinned down and unable to move forward,

another wave of British were about to land on the eastern boundary of the D-Day beaches, known as Sword Beach.

Sword Beach

When we got there, it was just a shambles.

It was one of the first three meadows.

You got to crouch on the deck then.

I saw the thing going on there on the beach.

I thought, how the hell are we going to get through that?

Sword Beach

Unknown to James, the first wave at Sword Beach had already suffered terrible casualties

and this is what would have confronted him as he approached the beach.

When the commandos came on behind them, some of them described it as being like a sea of khaki that was laid out in front of them

due to the sheer number of casualties lying in the sand.

Sword Beach

Our job was to get off the beach as fast as you can.

That was the instructions that we were given.

So the initial mission for some of those invading on Sword Beach was to make their way directly to Bonneville Bridge,

later known as Pegasus Bridge, in order to relieve John Howard and his men,

who had of course seized control of that bridge at the very, very start of the operation on D-Day.

This bridge was a really important means of either Germany moving troops towards the D-Day beaches

or the Allies moving troops off the beaches and onwards to gain a foothold in northern France.

And they told you help would be coming up from the beach in the form of the commandos?

Yes.

We must expect a counter-attack any time and it was vital that the crossing places be held.

It was rather frightening to realise exactly what was happening

and give me now fingers crossed for those poor buggers coming in by sea.

The German fortifications at Sword Beach were quite strong.

You had minefields, you had heavy weapons, you had concealed machine gun positions,

you had minefields, you had heavy weapons, you had concealed machine gun positions in the houses.

So the British forces there had to overcome a lot of challenges to break through the Atlantic wall.

As far as we were concerned, to us young lads, it was an adventure.

This was it.

There was another chap, a fellow named Charlie Hall, who came with me.

I was a brain gunner then and Charlie was my number two.

Charlie Hall.

They liked you to have your mates because two of you would work much better, you know, you'd fight better.

You'd always have the company and the friendship under the person with you.

The weather at the beach, there was only one thing on my mind, it was to get up.

Captain Powell was in charge, he was leading, followed by me, followed by Charlie Hall.

All I remember is a blinding flash and...

My friend, Charlie Hall, was down on the deck and he was bleeding.

The blood was pumping out of his neck.

Right out of his combine lock badge that was on his shoulder,

and the blood was pouring out, it was pumping out of both places.

And I'd only just got down and it was only a matter of saying to him,

come on Charlie, come on.

And this voice said, get going, you're not supposed to stop, get going.

So I went.

Get up!

Get up!

Get up!

Get up!

Get up!

Get up!

Get up, come on, move!

Just left.

For those men landing at Sword, the first challenge is to get off the beach itself.

Young men like James and Warwick, they were totally vulnerable.

Behind them is the English Channel, so they can't go backwards.

The only way to survive here is to do what must have seemed to be the most counterintuitive thing,

which is to run towards the fire coming from the gun positions above the beach.

I had two young marines as a signal unit.

We got ashore, one line not killed incidentally.

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

Once we got into the smoke, the whole thing seemed so unreal.

I got my camera and I started taking pictures of the troops coming ashore.

And we started coming across bodies, British bodies.

And I remember the first one I saw was an infantryman.

And what fascinated me was he had no head.

He was just lying there with no head, there was no sign of his head.

What happened next?

We grouped for about ten minutes on the beach, until the beachmaster came along.

The most calm man I'd ever met in my life.

He came along swinging a cane.

And he was just standing there.

He was just standing there.

He came along swinging a cane.

And he was just standing there shouting,

Over here! Keep over there!

And it's half a cover.

How long he lasted, I don't know.

But it didn't stop.

People are falling and being killed and wounded.

And this guy's walking through it.

And we were off the beach.

I suddenly spotted two very tiny infantrymen

marching along with a very tall German soldier

who was absolutely terrified.

He had a bandage around his face.

And there were these two rather cheerful cockneys on either side of them.

I said, just a minute.

And they posed as though they might be posing in Piccadilly Circus for their picture

with this German in between them.

And took the classic picture.

Which you're always told to look out for.

Captured prisoners, very good for the morale and all the rest of it.

You were saying there were lots of dead British soldiers lying around.

There's lots of dead bodies lying in the little sand hills

just below the promenade.

Did you not think that these were worth filming?

No.

They would not use pictures of dead bodies.

Use pictures of dead Germans.

But not pictures of dead British.

The objective of all marine commandos, such as James Kelly,

was to attack and take the village of Lyons-sur-Mer.

One of the interesting things about D-Day

was, I guess, the disorientation for the troops.

They're coming off these packed beaches

and finding themselves in the countryside

trying to get their bearings.

And perhaps more importantly,

to find their rendezvous points with the rest of their troops.

I got off and I found the road.

And the curious thing about that

was you couldn't have stood around

and not had a conversation without any danger

on the corner by the church.

And it's, like, Sunday afternoon.

Nothing. Nothing happening.

And I'm sitting there,

and it's, like, Sunday afternoon.

Nothing. Nothing happening.

And there's a fella getting murdered

a couple of hundred yards further back,

down on the beach.

The invading British go from fighting on a beach

to fighting in an urban environment,

in a street fight.

That at any point,

there could be hidden German forces

training their guns upon them.

They don't know where the threat is.

So it's a completely different proposition.

The success of the landings was still in the balance.

For people on those shores,

there's a sentiment of disbelief.

Families peering out of windows,

wondering, what is happening?

They see these shadows coming up

and onto the shores.

And here you start to realize,

this is actually it.

The sense of disbelief was transformed

into a sense of hope.

The sense of disbelief was transforming

into a growing fear

that maybe they were going to die

if they were in that line of fire.

When we got there, I said,

there's nothing to do.

There's the factory,

so I said, are you crazy?

I tried to go there.

I went a hundred yards,

and it was jumping everywhere.

When I got home,

we went into the garden,

under an iron table,

and we were stuck,

my mother, my brother and me,

all the way from the depot.

We heard footsteps in the street.

We saw men passing by,

and I got closer,

and I asked,

and I saw they were Englishmen,

and they asked me where they were.

So I explained that it was the hangar.

It didn't mean anything to them.

And I was even more scared

because I really had the impression

that it was just us who were landing.

It brought me back to my senses.

Someone from the town hall

came to ask us to dig graves.

Let's do it for a month,

because we were still young,

and there were dead soldiers,

and we had to dig graves.

We put two young Englishmen there.

It was a very difficult situation,

because we didn't know

what to do.

We didn't know what to do.

It was very moving,

because they were buried

as they were,

with all their clothes,

even the chocolate bars

they had for the population.

For Jacqueline and family,

Didier was like being

in a trance.

People would have been

so excited, thrilled,

that this could actually be

the moment where we see

the beginning of the end

of the Nazi grip on Europe.

But it's also a day

where no one knows

what's going to happen next,

and you're seeing dead bodies

all around you.

As the surrounding progresses,

things weren't going anywhere

near as well on Omaha

as they were on the other beaches.

Progress was really slow.

As the tide moved in,

the amount of ground

that was available

for the troops there

was diminishing and diminishing

and diminishing,

and that represented

a huge threat.

Four hours after they landed,

the Germans were still raging.

Omaha Beach was still

in German hands.

Some of the resistance nests

had already been taken

by the Americans,

but largely the Germans

still held their positions.

Originally, all resistance nests

had enough ammunition

to fight a prolonged fight

for about 48 hours.

They were wounded and dead

and chopped up guys,

nobody could move,

they were terrorized.

We didn't know where we were.

We had no officers.

My captain was killed on the beach.

Given the chaos in Omaha,

much came down

to the individual initiative

and courage of soldiers

like Chuck and Harry.

The Germans had placed

wire entanglements, mines,

tank traps,

and of course these had to be

knocked out with demolition teams.

I had five guys

blowing up the block ahead of me.

What's remarkable about Omaha Beach

is that despite the fact

that many of these specialist teams

were disrupted or dead,

that soldiers like Chuck

managed to assemble demolitions,

Bangalore torpedoes

to blow up wire entanglements.

We got Bangalore torpedoes,

that's long tubes of TNT

screwed together

and we put that under the wire.

Finally blew the wire.

It just collapsed.

We started one at a time

in between machine gun fire

jumping over the wire

and I ran for it,

tripped, fell in it,

but crawled through alright.

I could hear the explosion

of the Bangalore torpedoes.

I crawled quarter of the way

and then I found out

a wall had been blown up.

And another guy

had thrown together

bolts of ice were off

and trying to catch them

on the spikes

on the beach.

After we got to the top of the hill

I looked down on the beach

and it was a real mess.

So we were up there

maybe 30 guys in our area

and we could have been swept off there

with brooms if the Germans knew

there were so few of us.

Just about to get up the hill

when they started screaming back for me

on the beach come on down

we're going to shell the hill.

I just came down

to say the block was like

let's assume the block was

two and a half stories high.

I came down to about

one story off sea level.

That was a stupid thing to do

and the USS Arkansas opened fire.

By late morning

the situation at Omaha

seemed quite desperate.

At one point the Allied commanders

thought that they would have to

pull out and end the attempt

to take Omaha Beach.

The Allies brought up

naval gunfire to try and

knock out the German defenses

to pave the way for the American

infantry to get off the beach.

I could see

these giant shells were

falling apart.

They were coming over my head.

They were sitting in the

front row of the building

looking up at the screen.

That's the way it looked.

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From 12 o'clock onwards, we'd been expecting to see and hear the commandos.

It went on very, very, very wearing. Very wearing indeed. All the time, you could feel

movement out there and closer contact coming. We were to blow a bugle call once we saw them

coming down from the beaches. We heard a bugle playing. We heard this bugle. It was quite

nice. And everybody cheered. That's what we were waiting for. The commandos, completely

what we really needed, a squadron of tanks. I don't forget the sight. Of course, we went

bloody, didn't we? A lot of joking went on between our troops and theirs, asking about

how they'd been and all that sort of business. We opened up the Café Gondray alongside

the bridge. The patron was George Gondray. And the first thing George Gondray did, bless

him, went down into his garden and dug up nearly 100 bottles of champagne that he'd

buried away in the garden, away from the Germans. And all of a sudden, Mr. Gondray came out

with a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses. I looked at Gondray and I said, yes,

we did it. Oh, dear. Oh, it's that good. I don't know when it was champagne, not after

champagne. It could have been cider, it could have been anything, but oh boy, did it go

down well. It really went down well. And of course, that's what you want to do in battle,

is to give vent to your feelings. A pent-up, subjected to all this pressure and to have

a good shout releases it all. For John Howard and the whole of D Company, it was a moment

of really kind of qualified happiness, because they knew that this was really just the beginning.

There was so much more to do. The scale of the task that was ahead of them, and they

must have known that not all of them would live to see the end of all the days ahead.

Getting across the beaches and taking the coastal towns was just the beginning of the invasion.

The key objective for the British commanders on D-Day was to take Caen.

The idea had been that the troops would get across the beaches and get inland and take the city,

but trying to get eight miles to Caen on the first day is hugely ambitious.

Taking Caen was crucial because, of course, they understand that they are in a race with the Germans.

Caen is a hub of communications, of roads, rail, canals, and it's how you access the rest of France

beyond. So they are going to pound Caen in order to disrupt and destroy the German defenders.

And after lunch, we heard the planes coming in at 9 o'clock.

What surprised me at first was that when these bombs hit, they didn't go down like a passing

storm, but they went up in a whirlwind and in a bad balance.

And then, after being hit by a kind of whistling that became more and more frightening,

you would think that you are trapped on a railroad track and that the train would

launch at full speed and that you could not escape.

The city became engulfed in flames. Nobody would have anticipated that they would have caused

so much death, dust, flames, and terror. French civilians hadn't had time to evacuate,

and all of a sudden they were trapped.

What was more tragic was that, of course, there were injured people in the ruins.

I will never forget the courage of a police officer that I did not know, who was injured,

who had suffered terribly from his arm. He wanted us to take care of him last,

after he was sure that all the people had been saved from this neighborhood.

The bombing of Caen was one of those moments where warfare came to the city, it came to the people.

There's hundreds of civilian casualties, and they destroy some of the targets,

but the Allies still have a huge way to go.

We didn't know where we were. We had no witnesses. We were hungry and tired and scared.

I worked my way to go inland to a house, a bombed out house, just the walls were up.

There I located some of my buddies from my company. A lot of them didn't even have rifles.

I was walking around in a daze.

A sergeant from my company ran up the path, yelling down to his full of mines.

My best buddy from Chicago named David looked on his glasses and said,

Now I can see him. Ten minutes later he was killed. I felt sick about it.

Once the Allies get further inland, they are dragged into street fighting in some of the villages,

and the Germans in this part of Normandy have got also some fortified positions inland.

The German soldiers have been told again and again,

This is a battle we have to win, this is a battle we will win.

The rest of the day was spent like a bunch of guerrilla fighters.

Just a jumble of fright and running and firing and disappearing and hiding, panic and coldness.

And the guys were so trigger happy that if we were suspicious about a bomb out of something, we threw the hand grenade.

I think we killed French farmers that were resistance people or innocent people or that worked for the Germans,

but we had no time.

By early evening on D-Day, they had taken the five beaches.

The front line has moved to a few miles inland, not particularly far at this stage, and the Germans respond.

They are in no doubt now that this is the big Allied invasion and they have got to pull out all the stops.

Herbert Meyer's unit didn't get on their way until early evening from their base 100 miles south of the coast.

When they are ordered to march to the Normandy front, they want to be as quickly as possible on the beaches.

So they plan to travel through the night.

You need to bear in mind from the Germans' perspective, everything is on the line as well for them.

There was this sense that it should still have been possible to drive the Allies back, back into the water.

The Allies had got this foothold, but the battle for Normandy has barely begun.

The Allies didn't waste any time bringing in more ships with supplies for their troops.

Without enough food, ammunition and replacements of weapons and equipment, they would be vulnerable to German counter-attacks.

On the evening of D-Day, the troops are exhausted.

I mean, physically, they have not slept, they have not eaten, they have not had anything to drink.

They are, I think, mentally and physically at the end.

I got in a ditch near a road and it was getting dark.

I had my apple that was left over from breakfast.

Tried to get some sleep. I was in the ditch.

That night a few German planes came over and started bombing us so we didn't get quite a lot of sleep.

Now lay ahead the long, hard slog to liberate France.

And many wouldn't survive the next few days, let alone weeks.

From then on, things got significantly harder because it stopped being about speed of attack based on surprise.

Both sides, from this point onwards, would become locked in this brutal battle of wills and barbarity.

We decided to get into the middle of this field so we could see if someone was creeping up on us.

And we decided to dig a foxhole.

We were exhausted, dead tired and blank of thoughts.

We tried to dig and the sergeant said to me,

And that's the way I spent the night. We sat back to back waiting for someone to come and get us.

Well, fuck it Polly, let's just sit down here and if they come for us we take as many as we can.

And that's the way I spent the night. We sat back to back waiting for someone to come and get us.

And that's the way I spent the night. We sat back to back waiting for someone to come and get us.

With all the succeeding and not knowing where we were going, fear began to grip us.

I was scared as hell, I couldn't imagine what was going on ahead.

I was witness to a number of what I would call instances of butchery where we did capture a German at all.

We were well below strength. It was a very dangerous situation.

And we had a few fellas killed.

Every time somebody go up a hill, somebody's not coming back.

And you just hope that you make it.

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