Original subtitles

The morning of June 7th, you've got to imagine the two of us waking up in this field, it's

quiet.

We didn't know which way we want to go.

Where is the enemy?

Where is the line?

And you have to guess and boy, that's what you call being scared shitless.

Can you tell me about D-Day itself?

Testing, testing, one, two, three, testing, testing, one, two, three, all right, run.

What had they told you beforehand to expect?

Expect hell.

They didn't lie to us about that.

It was sheer nerves, but 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.

Normandy, 7th of June, 1944.

Daylight was coming upon us fast.

So I did a trooper alongside of me, a Polk, and I says, you better get your stuff together.

It's almost daylight.

And I'm looking at the sky and I said, my God, I welcome the daylight.

Now we can get on the move and maybe we can warm up a bit.

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

I know I was scared as hell.

I couldn't imagine what was going on there.

Those men who'd survived the beaches on D-Day would have woken up the next morning,

if they'd been asleep at all, completely exhausted.

Some of them had seen their friends killed on those beaches or they'd lost their commanders.

They have no idea how close the enemy is.

So there's this air of fear and uncertainty as they go into the next day.

They quite literally had no idea what was to come.

The battle ahead would last a grueling three months

and it would be a turning point in the entire war.

What D-Day had done was to create a foothold.

But that foothold would be completely meaningless.

The key strategic objective for the British and the Canadians in the Battle of Normandy

was to capture Caen.

It was this hub of communication, of roads, of railways.

There was an airfield just nearby.

So controlling Caen would allow the British to take control of the city.

It would allow the British to take control of the city.

It would allow the British to take control of the city.

It would allow the British to take control of the city.

So controlling Caen would allow the Allies to advance

and ultimately push the Nazis out of France and back to Germany.

But with an inevitable counter-attack coming from the Germans,

the Allies had no time to waste.

You'll tell me about the events following D-Day.

We moved off soon after dawn.

We had to move down and occupy Esquivel.

This had been planned in the UK.

And we studied maps and photographs.

John's next objective would be advancing towards Esquivel.

Esquivel is a crucial element in the taking of Caen.

It was on a ridge overlooking Caen to the north-east.

And taking it would be important for the Allies

to keep an eye on what the Germans were doing.

I think we had a couple of hours sleep, no more than that.

I still can't remember whether...

I think we had some grub in our pants or something.

I can't quite remember.

And then it was up, and we moved into Esquivel.

Forces that were protecting Esquivel were of a very different order

to the ones like John and Wally had been met by on D-Day itself.

And the point, I still remember the point.

There were eagles, and eagles, and eagles were coming at us.

Each of us had to report.

And our answer had to be a pitch.

Werner Kautenhaus is a young corporal

in the 21st Panzer Division.

They were an elite division.

They are better equipped, better trained

than the average German division.

On the morning of the 7th of June

they prepare for a big counteroffensive.

At this point, tens of thousands of German soldiers

are on their way to the Normandy Front,

tank formations heavily armed.

The German soldiers have been told again and again,

this is the decisive battle of the war, so you don't give up.

This is a battle we will win.

We drove down to the village of Esquivel.

John Howard and his men were met by German tanks

waiting to unleash a horrifying counterattack.

We lost communication with our HQ.

I thought I'd go around and find out

what damage had been done to the other platoons.

I went forward, put my binoculars to my eyes,

and then there was a zip, and I was knocked out.

When I came round, there was blood on my head and face,

and I had a hell of a headache.

Somebody was looking at me,

taking my helmet off to see what was wrong,

and told me that I got a bullet through my helmet,

and there it was, dead centre.

Whether I'd passed out again or not, I don't know.

But the whole of that half hour, an hour, is very hazy.

They all thought you were dead.

Yes, I believe them.

It's only people who told me that afterwards.

During that time, we were strafed by air

and counterattacked very heavily by 21 Panzer.

Eventually, Joel and the men alongside him

were forced to withdraw when it became clear

that their assault on Esquivel wasn't going to be successful,

that it was just going to lead to catastrophic losses.

I wound him with 121 men and came out with 52.

As Johnny Meyer told you, we took a hell of a beat in there.

It took me a long time to get over those casualties at Esquivel,

so much so that I became very, very depressed.

Esquivel was a direct confrontation

with the reality of what the Battle of Normandy would really be like.

It was clearly going to be brutal,

and it was going to take a huge toll,

not just on the health and well-being and lives

of the people who were being asked to wage it,

but also on their minds too.

This was going to be a victory,

that if it was going to be secured, would have to be ground out.

Ultimately, the force that could provide the greatest firepower

would win this battle.

This was going to be a battle of machines,

ammunition, supplies and reinforcements.

So on the beaches, the activity, if anything, is increasing.

So the first question,

if you just tell me your name and what unit you were in.

My name is Alan Price.

I was with the 3275th Quartermaster Service Company.

Quartermaster Service Company was an outfit

that serviced all the other units,

everything to make the front line click.

What had they told you beforehand to expect?

Expect hell.

And it was true.

They didn't lie to us about that.

Everybody started going inland.

So we stayed on the beach another two or three days

cleaning the beach up.

Whatever they asked us to do, we did.

Picking up the dead.

It's a stinking job.

The lady in the arm there and the head here,

blood in the water, blood all over the place.

It's horrible.

I had nightmares when I first came home.

I had nightmares.

I still don't like to talk about it.

The beaches would have been littered with corpses,

broken machines, ruined German defences,

and it had to be cleared

because the follow-on forces and follow-on supplies

had to be landed on the beaches.

We didn't break our butts to get the gas,

the ammo and the food up to them.

They'd have been up shit creek without a paddle.

While the British front line was pushing towards Caen,

the Americans were trying to get to Cherbourg.

Cherbourg was critical to the Germans and the Allies

because it was a deep-water port.

And that meant a faster route to bring in supplies.

But getting to Cherbourg would be tough for the Americans.

They were about to face a steep learning curve

in the battle ahead.

Combat in Europe

is actually a simple stupid procedure.

You dig in from the night, get up early in the morning,

walk until you started to get killed,

then you have a battle during the day,

sometimes you have a battle in the morning,

sometimes you have a battle in the evening,

sometimes you have a battle in the evening,

then you have a battle during the day,

sundown with Caen, you dig in.

Time to go back, it's not all over yet.

This is all day after day after day after day.

As the Allies advanced inland towards Caen and Cherbourg,

they were forced to progress through this landscape in Normandy.

And this landscape was interlaced with these really dense hedgerows.

Very thick, very tall, very well established.

And that represents a real problem for an invading force

because they can't see over them and they can't see through them

and they can't move through them.

And that really, really favours the defender.

I want to tell you something about the hedgerows.

You've heard about the hedgerows.

The hedgerows were boundaries

and these became barriers or emplacements where we fought one another.

We would sometimes fight all day with the Germans firing down on us.

I was drafted into the 352nd Division.

We were put together with the SS Hitler Youth.

We were all young people.

We were all 17, 18-year-olds.

And if you imagine, in the square hedgerow,

in the square hedgerow, there too,

and then we went on together.

There were the hollow ways.

We were buried there.

Or buried in the hedgerows.

And that's where we were basically trained as individual fighters and so on.

If we came over with one of the hedgerows and dropped into the field

with the hedgerow toward our back, we were dead.

We'd say we'd be mounting an eschema.

So we just were running parallel, trying to flank them.

They were like mice.

The Allies could not play their biggest strategy.

The Allies could not play their biggest trump, their artillery there.

Because it was difficult to observe where the Germans actually are.

They had to pull through from field to field.

And each time they had just conquered a field,

the Germans were awaiting in the next field.

He had the explosive rounds in his rifle.

He sat on the other hedgerow and shot into the trees.

When the explosive rounds came, you thought,

he's already there.

We took two shots from that side and from that side.

And when he... we let him over the hedgerow

and then we shot him together.

There were about six of us, about two feet apart,

heads down, squatting walk along the hedgerow.

And suddenly there was this pop

and the sergeant's head was blown apart,

flew to the helmet and left his skull like a saucer

and fell over to my arms.

We had not been trained for hedgerow fighting.

And I think I'd carried that watch for years.

I had terrific training for the assault,

self-preservation, killing the enemy,

but they'd never told me about the hedgerows.

The ongoing campaign through Normandy became a real slog

as they were confronted with this landscape.

It really slowed the Americans' advance on Cherbourg.

As the Americans were pushing towards Cherbourg,

British commandos were tasked with taking German strongpoints

as the British advanced towards Caen.

We were detailed for a job a mile and a half inland.

There was an underground radar station

which had about 300 or 400 German troops in it.

The Dove radar station was an incredibly important position to take.

It was a communications hub.

It was a vast network of underground bunkers

which had been sending vital intelligence

back to German headquarters in Caen.

The station was close to the landing beaches

and Warwick and James's commando unit were sent to take it.

They had hoped to capture us on the first day,

but in actual fact they didn't.

We only mustered about 30 men,

whether we should have had something like a baron or not.

So we were well below strength.

The radar station was becoming a thorn in the side of the Allies

that the Allies had to smash to move beyond and advance into France.

When we arrived there,

there must have been about 600 yards of dead, flat, open field.

And you could see the wire and the bunkers

and the gun emplacements on top of these concrete bunkers that they had.

There was a minefield surrounding it.

It was a minefield.

It was a minefield.

It was a minefield.

There was a minefield surrounding it

and we had to clear the mines before we could actually go in.

It was a very dangerous situation.

And entrenched underneath the radar station

there were hundreds of German soldiers,

so it was imperative that the Allies took it as quickly as they could.

The German defences were so strong

that the commandos needed to call in specialist units.

We did many, many little patrols against it from different angles.

It was very well booby-trapped.

So we mounted this big fighting patrol

and we had Bangalore torpedoes, which the engineers brought.

They were like scaffolding tubes filled with high explosives.

You could link them all together, you see.

You'd have one big, long scaffolding pole eventually.

The idea was that it would blast all the wire out of the way

and destinate any mines that were underneath it.

The German jet had opened up space away.

As soon as the explosion had gone, we started to run.

As soon as it started to fire, it was flashing all over the place.

After several days of patrolling the station,

they were finally able to mount an attack strong enough to reach the bunkers.

Eventually the time comes when the powers that be say,

right, enough's enough, take them out.

We were given a couple of Churchill tanks.

They trundled up over the wire and blew up any anti-personnel mines

and we followed behind.

And that was the most curious attack I've ever known in my life.

We all wandered in at the back of these tanks and spread out

and occupied the various positions that the Germans had built there.

And we did that in broad daylight.

The Germans were all on the ground.

Eventually they all came out. There were about 300 of them.

They surrendered then and packed it up all together.

So we had a very relaxing day after that.

We were allowed to wash and clean up and generally relax completely, you know.

I remember the officer in charge of this underground radar station.

I don't know whether he was SS or not, but he was tall, he was arrogant

and he had a lovely leather jacket.

Arrogant and he had a lovely leather raincoat, overcoat, which I liked.

So I asked my sergeant major if I could have it.

And he went over to this bloke and said, take it off, which he did.

And the sergeant major gave it to me and I used it for months as a ground sheet

in my foxholes, various places.

Lovely coat.

On the edges of the Allied invasion zone, pockets of German strongholds had resisted capture.

One of the largest was the Merville gun battery

and it was repeatedly attacked by the Allied troops.

As an officer, I knew I was responsible for my people.

And I took that very seriously.

That's from my upbringing.

I was a soldier.

Reimund was an interesting character because he was politically an opponent to the Nazis,

but still he is an officer serving for the Germans,

knowing that this is probably not the right cause he's fighting for,

but still he felt a loyalty towards his men.

Before the Nazis invaded Austria, my father and the future head of the Gau

always argued because my father said, Hitler is a criminal.

There will be war.

It didn't take long before he came to Dachau, to the KZ Dachau.

And when he came back, I was already enlisted in the military.

One day, the young man in my company

suddenly started singing melancholic songs

and tears came to his eyes.

Then I said, Arnold, what's wrong with you?

Just like a boy.

Then he said, yes, I have such nice parents

and I love your sister so much.

Then I said, yes, you will see her again.

He said, I have such a feeling that I will never see her again.

Then I said, Arnold, you know what?

You stay here tonight.

You go to the bunker and don't let her look at you anymore.

You clean up tonight and you'll be safe.

We'll pick you up at night.

And after the call, there was only a telephone connection.

No Arnold.

But I'm still in Arnold's bunker.

He looked out, there was a sea slit.

He looked out.

At that moment, a grenade had to go right through the sea slit.

And from his eyes downwards, his head was gone.

I went to his heart.

He was also crying.

And then I sat down and wrote to his parents.

That was my sister's letter.

After struggling, trying to progress towards Cannes,

it became really clear to British forces

that actually capturing Cannes was not going to be straightforward at all

as any route towards it was increasingly well reinforced

by the British forces.

They were going to capture it.

They were going to capture it.

They were going to capture it.

It was increasingly well reinforced by Germans in the area.

Getting to the city itself became nigh on impossible.

And for that very reason, the Allies turned to increasingly applying air power,

bombing Cannes, in order to break the German defence.

Nobody quite expected that extent of bombing

over Cannes and over Normandy in those days.

Bombing is, you know, inaccurate at the best of times.

All around are the homes and the neighbourhoods

and the workplaces of French civilians.

The city was subject to this bombardment

with huge consequences for the civilian population.

But it was considered to be so necessary

to target the German tanks, servicemen, resources in the area

that it was a price worth paying.

Je suis resté au Bon Sauveur

avant de garder ceux qui débarquaient des ambulances

pour les emmener ce qu'on appelait triage.

Andre je suis resté au Bon Sauveur

avant de garder ceux qui débarquaient des ambulances

pour les emmener à ce qu'on appelait triage.

Andre had been working secretly with the Resistance for a very long time

and when the bombing started on 11 June 1944,

Andre had been working secretly with the Resistance for a very long time

and when the bombings started to come,

he went with his sister to the hospital,

you know, helping anyone he could.

We were going to be hit,

and all we heard was that there was a hospital

that was improvising in there.

The operating beds were already covered in blood.

Let's take these beds.

We put them in the blood bags that were already there,

and we collected the blood from the operations.

To dye them completely red,

my sister and I spread out

so many religious vegetable gardens in the back

to spread it out on the green frames,

thinking it would reflect better.

I was going to spread it out on the fourth side of the cross,

the fourth sheet.

A plane pierced the clouds

and we thought it was going to hit us,

and this plane went back up.

We understood that they had seen it,

and inside, this glass was protected.

The Germans threw as many of their forces

as they could into defending Cannes,

because they knew that was the gateway into France.

They had to hold it,

but it came at the expense of the defence of Cherbourg.

The advantage of that for the Allies

was that the American forces could advance with greater ease.

We were marching to a village.

Everywhere you looked, you could see homes were damaged,

destroyed, blown up.

It was a horrible sight to see.

And I thought to myself,

what the hell have we done

to these people over here in their houses?

My God!

Don't forget the French were supposed to be our friends

and all that.

Then I thought to myself,

this is the price that they have to pay for their freedom.

They have to sacrifice their lives, their homes.

It's a horrible thing.

After a grinding and bloody four-day battle,

the Americans finally managed to take the port of Cherbourg.

But they discovered that the German garrison,

who had been in retreat, had destroyed the port installations.

Now, this meant that they couldn't use it

for those all-important supplies.

They turned south towards the town of Saint-Lô

and relied more than ever on supplies being brought up to them

from the landing beaches by road.

We were up at Saint-Lô.

23rd Regiment of the 2nd Infantry Division

got annihilated up there,

and we had to go up there and clean all them bodies up.

And we had a few fellas killed, some wounded.

Every time somebody go up a hill,

somebody's not coming back.

Every time you go into detail, somebody's not coming back.

Allen was running supplies up to the front line,

part of the Quartermaster Battalion,

which was a predominantly black unit.

The army was segregated.

Blacks served in separate units

and were subjected to the exact same kind of racism

they experienced in the United States.

Allen was coming from a country where

blacks in the South couldn't drink out of the same water fountain as white people.

You couldn't share the same bathrooms.

You couldn't go to the same schools.

When we was in England,

seven of us went over to try to get in the paratroopers.

I asked him, I said, what you want?

I said, we understand you're looking for paratroopers.

He said, you see anybody in this room your color?

Me?

He said, you see anybody in this room your color?

We said, no. He said, get the hell out.

They wouldn't accept us.

I said, what are you going to do?

It's a hell of a thing.

You wanted to fight.

Yeah, we wanted to fight.

What the hell did we go to the service for?

To fight?

It was very, very hard to be a black soldier in the U.S. Army.

You were almost always put in roles that were subservient to white people.

They weren't allowed to fight with dignity on the front lines.

And they liked to keep you far away from anything where glory could happen,

where you could be a hero, where you were doing something honorable.

We was in the black army and they were the white army.

We were second class citizens.

We did all the dirty work.

And I admired the fellows up there that were being popped.

And we supplied them.

And we got popped at going up to take supplies to them.

See, that's what hurt me.

And when you go up there at shower time, some of them didn't want to feed you.

And after you brought them food and ammo and gas and water

and all that other stuff you bring up to them, and they don't want to feed you.

That's what I got ticked off at.

Still makes you angry when you talk about it.

That's the way they would start to think.

They were superior to anything other than white.

They were superior, so that's the way they would start.

As collective allied forces attempt to press German defenses out of Caen,

the war became one of attacks and counterattacks.

Progress was very slow and casualty rates were incredibly high.

James and the commandos were stuck trying to hold the eastern edge of the allied territory

whilst losing men at an appalling rate.

It was very hard going because they never stopped firing us.

Somebody was always shooting us.

And you've got to lie concealed all through the day.

You can't drink or eat properly.

Your movement is the thing that's going to give you away.

I proposed it to a corporal.

When I said I didn't want to be a corporal and I didn't want any responsibility,

I said, I don't want to do that.

They said, well, you're already doing it.

Looking after other people became a thing with me more than looking after myself.

There was always the feeling there that the more of these things we do,

the more of the troop will disappear.

And, you know, it would be a tale that would come eventually.

My men were in a pretty poor state.

Some of the men, actually, were on the breaking point.

They were ready to refuse without taking us from rest.

It's a very hard thing to tell men, you know,

to ask a man to go over there and do this and do that,

knowing that he's likely to be killed.

And really, you know, you're sending him to his death.

Did you see the enemy as a human being or just as a target?

At that moment, you say, man, he's just as human as I am.

But when you see that the enemy is aiming at you

and the bullets are flying left and right away from you,

you can't do anything else.

Because he wants to shoot you too.

Either him or me, one of the two.

There's no other way.

We had been joined by some of these British commandos

and our own rangers and paratroopers.

I thought I was crazy. They were absolutely crazy.

I witnessed a number of what I would call instances of butchery,

where we did capture a German or two

and witnessed the throat-cutting and disembowelment.

We were crazy.

It was kind of creepy because I considered myself a good soldier

and the next few hours I was robbed.

But I was out of madness.

One of the things which really marks out the Normandy campaign

from D-Day onwards is the level of brutality.

Both sides have been told that these people

are kind of an existential threat to them.

So there's two sides that are like coiled springs

and when they come face to face, they absolutely go at each other.

This is extraordinarily bloody and brutal.

It becomes particularly brutal when you've got formations

fighting against each other which consider themselves to be elite.

So particularly when you see SS troops

fighting against US paratroopers,

you see quite a lot of atrocities happening on both sides.

I asked what about my corporal from our company

and somebody related a story that they found his body.

The Germans, they burneted and mutilated his body.

They cut his testicle and his penis off

and they stuffed it in his mouth.

We found GI corpses, cotton trees and brent.

Brent alive.

The danger for the Allies is that the longer that this campaign was going on

and the more attritional it was becoming,

morale was starting to drift lower and lower and lower.

But one thing that the Allies did have very much going in their favour

was ongoing air superiority.

If the Allies could cut off the German supply chains,

they'd have a much better chance of winning the battle.

So they destroyed railways, they destroyed roads,

ammunition stumps, tanks,

convoys that they saw moving.

Anything to hold the Germans up.

Well, over time, that started to really take a toll on the Germans

because they weren't able to reinforce as quickly

as they otherwise would have been.

And so aerial bombardment really helped the Allies.

We were marching through a village that was heavily damaged.

It was like a nightmare. It was really horrible.

There were dead Germans lying all over the place.

The front part of the house was still standing.

All that remained was a window and a door.

I saw a rosemary clinging to the wall.

And I said to myself,

And I said to myself,

And to me, it seemed like it was in direct defiance

to all the horrors a man could create.

And there it stood.

I went over to the wall and I picked about three of them off the vine.

And we marched through the village.

No-one spoke.

Everything was quiet.

You could smell the death of the day.

You could smell it. You felt it.

You felt all the death that had happened that day.

I don't know why I told you this.

I just want you to know, I want you to know that it wasn't too easy.

There was a body in this road.

There was a body in this road.

So that's not the first body we've seen.

And I noticed the head was gone.

It was just the torso left.

And there was a big hole in the ribcage.

I couldn't believe it was a human being.

What got me all upset was that some of the G.I.s as they marched,

they were eating the kid rashes.

They were throwing the rubbers and cans inside his body.

My decency was stunned.

I couldn't believe, even if we were at war, that we'd have such disrespect

for the remains of a human body.

I just couldn't believe it.

I was wondering, why? Why did they do this?

Well, the only reason I could think of was that they felt

that a soldier's life is something to be wasted, to be discarded like a trash.

Your body means nothing after you're dead.

The only one you're alive.

Took the roses that I had and I dropped them in the cavity of the body

and I just kept going.

It was something I'll never forget.

By July, the Allies had been battling in Normandy for weeks.

They needed a final push.

And like the other forbidden act,

they had to make a final push.

They had to make a final push.

They had to make a final push.

Then I saw all the Allied planes take off.

They didn't fly high either.

From Züschaus, there was a heavy flak.

And then the bombs went off.

The sun was shining.

At first, they all fell out.

They looked up at the sun.

Then they got faster.

Of course, you couldn't see them anymore.

Then they ran like a hare.

It was decided that the only way to really free Caen of the Germans

was to absolutely obliterate the city.

It's a huge mass of smoke.

You think it's fire, but it's actually dust.

I had the impression it was a kind of hallucination.

It was terrifying.

It was a huge mass of smoke.

You think it's fire, but it's actually dust.

I had the impression it was a kind of hallucination.

It was terrifying.

Carpet bombing was a strategy during the war.

And here you see in Caen that strategy happening.

But no one in Normandy had experienced anything on this scale before.

Thousands of tons of bombs hit the city.

It's horrifying.

The sound is deafening.

People are running.

Time would have stopped for André.

He was drawn into a moment of urgency,

responding to immediate needs of those around him.

He was transported to the EBC.

And there was one of his surgeons there

who said,

if they don't take me to the EBC,

I won't have the courage to operate on him.

And another said,

I can't see the sound either.

He couldn't physically.

The imprint after this bombing campaign

would be so heavy on the civilians in Caen

and on the town as a whole,

it would last for not years, but decades.

It would traumatize generations of families

who would live with this memory

of grayness, of darkness,

of fear.

Live with this memory of grayness,

of rubble, of death for years to come.

The attack on Caen was considered to be

one of the heaviest air attacks in the Second World War.

The Germans were overpowered,

and when the Allies moved in,

the Germans were either killed, captured, or they fled.

And from that moment on,

we only experienced defeat.

We never had a chance to retreat.

We already knew very quickly

that we couldn't take this decision.

We were also captured.

We were left with six men from one company.

We were left with six men from one company.

The others were all gone.

The opening the door at Caen

opened the road towards Paris

and ultimately towards victory.

It puts the Allies in a position

to finally liberate France

and then to move on towards Germany

and the liberation of all of mainland Europe.

The people who came from the front

were the ones you could rely on.

They said, you fought well, we fought well.

And above all, the Blacks.

They were fine, too.

The Blacks guarded us,

and the others, the Whites,

were only there to watch, and so on.

What was the attitude of civilians towards you in Normandy?

Oh, fantastic.

Absolutely fantastic.

Well, you can imagine, can't you,

they've had four, four and a half years of captivity

and they're now, for want of a better term,

they're free, they're liberated,

and they were delighted.

Winning the Battle of Normandy

was absolutely essential

in order to move onwards

and go on to win the Second World War.

But from the Allies' perspective,

D-Day was not the end of the world.

It was not the end of the world.

It was not the end of the world.

It was not the end of the world.

But from the Allies' perspective,

D-Day was a massive gamble, it was a huge risk.

It was a calculated risk, but it was a risk nonetheless.

And had it not succeeded,

it's impossible to know

what the consequences would have been.

This period is when you see the whole of humanity

and everything that humans are capable of,

from the most glorious aspects of it

to its most horrendous aspects.

This kind of spectrum of humanity and inhumanity,

which live side by side.

I often went to bed crying

and didn't say anything because I didn't want to hurt anyone.

Despite all the awful things that had happened to me and mine,

I'm proud, very proud indeed, to be a Royal Marine.

I was very proud of the company.

I hope I showed it at the time.

We came back to Bulford in the same rooms we were in

before we left.

I try to remember how many chaps we had in the company I had then.

Less than half.

And none of my original officers.

What would you say to the guys who you lost?

How would you remember those guys?

One hell of an outfit.

That's how I remember them.

I wouldn't want to serve with a better bunch of fellas.

Would you do it again if you were called up?

Yeah. This is my country.

Yep. This is my country.

The only home I ever known. What am I going to do?

You talk to most Afro-Americans, they'll tell you,

I'll go back if I was called up.

As we marched towards the boat,

I remembered the people of Normandy.

Their country was ravaged.

Their lives changed forever.

I remembered the dead enemy soldiers

who had once been alive and young, as fearful as we.

My thoughts were of all the troopers who died

and we were leaving behind.

Suddenly I felt that I was all alone.

I realized I was returning to England without my buddies.

I was the only one of 17 men who jumped with me on D-Day to return.

Tears still running down my face.

I turned towards the fields of Normandy.

And I gave a farewell salute to all those we left

in the swamps, in the fields, in the hedgerows.

We had come with so many,

and we are now leaving with so few.

We are leaving with so few.

We are leaving with so few.

I think the one thing that comes out of all looking back over the years

was the sheer bloody waste.

It's a waste.

You can put it down to any war there ever was.

Small one, big one, or whatever.

The sheer bloody waste.

God.

Experience should teach us something.

For more information on marking the 80th anniversary,

call 0300 303 0552

or go to bbc.co.uk forward slash ddaytapes

and follow the links to the Open University.

www.openuniversity.edu.au