Original subtitles

1944, and on the Eastern Front,

Hitler's forces were being pushed back

towards the German border.

But Germany was about to face a new threat.

In the west, Allied forces had been preparing for months

to open a new front in north-west France.

Training for it was well underway.

But it was an attack Hitler had long been expecting.

His problem was knowing when, and above all,

where it would come.

The stage was set for one of the greatest battles

of World War Two - D-Day,

the Allied landings along the Normandy coast of France.

Since the early years of the war,

Britain's Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,

had always been certain that at some point

an Allied invasion of northern Europe would be necessary.

The only questions were when, where and how?

To test the waters, British forces had already mounted

a number of practice operations.

In December 1941,

British Commandos raided the Vaagso Islands

off the coast of Nazi-occupied Norway.

It was an attempt to probe German defenses

and tie down Hitler's troops in the north.

A fish oil factory and coastal defenses were blown up

before the Commandos withdrew.

Eight months later, Canadian and British troops were sent in

to mount a more ambitious raid on the French port of Dieppe.

It too was designed to test the defenses

and also to provide combat experience for the Canadians.

But this time, it was a catastrophe.

As landing craft approached the main beach,

they were met by withering fire.

Those troops that made it ashore were immediately pinned down.

Behind them, the supporting tanks

became bogged down in the shingle.

Few managed to scale the sea wall.

Over 3,000 Allied soldiers were killed or taken prisoner.

Britain had learnt an important lesson -

never attempt a direct assault on a German-occupied port.

Equally importantly, the Dieppe disaster reinforced

the British view that an invasion of Europe could not be rushed.

Churchill understood it would require careful planning.

Eventually, in April 1943,

at an Allied conference in Washington,

Churchill and the US President, Franklin Roosevelt,

agreed upon a date.

D-Day, or Operation Overlord,

as the seaborne invasion of France was formally called,

would take place in the summer of 1944.

But by now the Germans were preparing for it in earnest.

Since the winter of 1941,

they had been building an Atlantic Wall.

It was a massive series of fortifications

running along the European coast from Denmark

to the Spanish border.

Gun emplacements had been constructed at likely landing sites.

Beaches had been mined and covered in barbed wire.

Obstacles had been placed in strategic places

to block landing craft.

Hitler had boasted:

"I am the greatest builder of fortifications of all time."

In the summer of 1942, in the wake of the Dieppe attack,

work on the Atlantic Wall had been stepped up.

Hitler had also ordered an increase in troop numbers in the region.

The German overall commander in the west,

Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt,

had been given 15 further divisions.

But the western European coast stretched for some 2,000 miles.

He didn't have the numbers to man the entire length.

Von Rundstedt faced a difficult decision.

Where should he position his over-stretched forces

to maximize their effect?

The question led to bitter arguments

inside the German leadership.

Von Rundstedt proposed holding a large force of Panzers

in reserve north-west of Paris.

He could then send it in against an invasion

once he knew where it was happening.

But the hugely respected Field Marshal, Erwin Rommel,

commander of the troops covering the sector from Holland

along the French coast to the Loire, had a different view.

Rommel's concern was Allied air power.

He'd seen it first-hand when he'd fought the British in North Africa

and it had left a profound impression.

He feared that that any counterattack would be broken up

by Allied aircraft long before it could go into action.

Rommel had also inspected Hitler's Atlantic Wall

and found much of it wanting.

It had forced him to the conclusion that the best place

to position the Panzers was as close as possible

to the most likely landing sites.

That way an invasion could be immediately pushed back

before it got a foothold.

Hitler compromised.

Rundstedt was given a small force he could hold in reserve,

though Hitler himself would have the final say

as to when it could be used.

The rest of the additional troops were scattered along

the entire Atlantic seaboard in accordance with Rommel's wishes.

It would turn out to be the worst of all the solutions.

There were neither enough reserves

not enough tanks near the coast.

But in the autumn of 1943, none of this was clear.

In Britain, the Allied planners were also grappling

with the problem of location.

Where was the best place to land?

Their chief planner, General Frederick Morgan,

quickly realized there were two principle options -

the Pas de Calais and Normandy.

The Pas De Calais was clearly the favorite.

It offered the shortest sea crossing.

And it offered the shortest and most direct way to Germany.

But it was also the most obvious route,

and Morgan was sure the Germans were expecting it.

So he decided to wrong foot them.

Morgan would land in Normandy.

It was the beginning of a huge gamble

on which the fate of hundreds of thousands

of soldiers would depend.

In the autumn of 1943,

Allied photo-reconnaissance aircraft

swept over the beaches of northern France.

It was part of a huge planning operation

for the seaborne invasion of Europe.

The fortifications of the Atlantic Wall

were monitored by the French Resistance.

Men crept ashore to collect sand samples

to test whether armored vehicles could be landed.

Northern France became the most reconnoitered coastline

in the history of warfare.

It soon became clear any landing would need

some kind of port facilities.

But the disaster at Dieppe had shown that it was too dangerous

to attempt a direct assault on a German-occupied port.

Britain's planners were forced to come up with an ingenious alternative.

Giant, hollow, concrete boxes were constructed in Britain

that could later be towed to the French coast.

There they would be sunk to form an artificial harbor.

They were known by their codename "Mulberries".

The Mulberries would be supplied with fuel by a pipe line

unwound from giant reels and dropped on the seabed.

It would run for a hundred miles.

The pumping station on the Isle of Wight

was disguised as an ice-cream parlor.

But the raid on Dieppe had also revealed a second problem.

How to get the first wave of troops off the beaches

and through the German fortifications.

The man told to solve that question

was General Percy Hobart,

one of the pioneers of armored warfare.

Hobart came up with a series of ingenious devices.

The troops called them "the Funnies".

They included such extraordinary machines

as flame throwers and floating tanks.

Flail tanks for clearing mines.

The "Bobbin" for laying firm paths across sand or shingle.

An armored ramp for climbing sea walls.

The Fascine Carrier for tackling ditches.

And the bridging tank for wider obstacles.

That left just one problem.

How to stop the Germans rushing in overwhelming reinforcements

before the Allies had established a foothold?

The answer was to keep them guessing

until the very last moment

as to where the invasion would take place.

Operation Bodyguard was a massive and complex

deception campaign.

German double agents in Britain

now began sending back to Germany

huge amounts of carefully co-ordinated false information.

This emphasized that the main landings

would be in the Pas de Calais,

although a feint attack might be launched in Normandy.

To muddy the waters still further,

the Allied military created a fictitious army unit,

the so-called First US Army Group or FUSAG.

It was stationed, very obviously, in Kent,

bang opposite the Pas de Calais.

The man in charge of it was the pistol-toting US General,

George Patton, who'd been removed from action in Sicily

after slapping shell-shocked soldiers.

Patton was rated by the Germans

as the Allies' best attacking general,

just the man they expected to command the invasion of Western Europe.

Basha 5-2, this is Basha 1-1 on Alpha...

Radio transmissions mimicked the wireless traffic of an army.

For the benefit of any Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft

flying over Britain, the fields of Kent

were filled with inflatable tanks...

and carefully faked track marks.

There were dummy aircraft made of wood and canvas.

Harbors along the Kent coast

were filled with dummy landing craft.

There were even troops,

though these were, in reality, back-up units.

In late 1943, the Allies appointed US General Dwight Eisenhower

as Supreme Allied Commander for the invasion of Europe.

British General Bernard Montgomery would be

in overall command of the initial assault troops.

D-Day was fixed for June 5th, 1944.

Two months before the landing,

Eisenhower launched an elaborate air offensive

to disrupt German links to the coast.

Once again, it was carefully planned to give the impression

the Allies' target was the Pas de Calais region.

As the date of the invasion approached,

Allied troop numbers in England reached over two million.

They were supported by more than 3,000 tanks

and 12,000 aircraft.

The Germans were well aware an invasion was imminent.

But they had been completely taken in

by the Allies' phony preparations in Kent

and were convinced the most likely landing spot

was the Pas de Calais.

Everything seemed to be going the Allies way.

The troops were briefed.

Then the weather turned against them.

Rain lashed down,

visibility was poor and the Channel was stormy.

Nevertheless on June 4th, 1944,

the assault troops boarded their landing ships

and the armada of more than 5,000 vessels set sail.

But the rain continued to lash down

and later that day the invasion had to be postponed.

The ships returned to port

and the assault troops faced a nerve-shredding wait.

Early the next morning, the military leadership met again.

The naval commanders were keen to go ahead.

But the air chiefs were doubtful.

They worried the visibility would still be too poor

to provide, effective air support.

After a long silence, Eisenhower looked up.

"Let's go," he said.

Operation Overlord,

the greatest seaborne invasion ever, was underway.

D-Day had begun.

At 01:15 in the morning of June 6th, 1944,

British aircraft, towing gliders,

arrived over the coast of northern France.

Then the gliders were released and plunged down

to capture vital bridges over the Caen Canal

in eastern Normandy.

The Allies had launched their great gamble

to invade Hitler's empire in Western Europe.

50 miles to the west,

US paratroops came down around the village of St Mère-Eglise.

There was a fierce fire fight.

But three hours later, the village was in US hands.

One of the most crucial battles of World War Two was underway.

An hour later, horrified German sentries along the Normandy coast

saw a vast armada appear out of the mist.

They had had no warning.

The Allied fleet had sailed under cover of darkness.

Moreover Allied countermeasures had confused the German radar

into believing the main weight of the attack was approaching

the French coast further east, at the Pas de Calais.

Allied warships off the Normandy coast

now began pounding the German defensive positions.

Wave after wave of aircraft swept overhead.

Under cover of the bombardment,

assault troops headed for the shore.

But as they closed in,

German artillery and machine guns opened fire.

A number of the landing craft were hit.

Others fell foul of underwater obstructions.

But at 6:30 in the morning,

the first waves of troops hit the beaches.

At the far western end, the US 4th Infantry Division

came ashore near at what they called Utah Beach.

Within two hours, it was linking up with the US paratroopers

who'd landed at St Mère-Eglise.

Next door, at Omaha Beach, it was more difficult.

The beach was a defenders' dream with high cliffs

and few ways inland.

As the US 1st Infantry Division waded ashore,

they were mown down by German machine guns.

To make matters worse,

the Americans' amphibious tanks were swamped.

The troops were trapped on the beach.

Disaster was looming.

But finally, a few of the soldiers managed to scale the cliffs.

Against all the odds, the Americans hung on to beach-head.

Further east, in the center of the landing area,

Britain's 50th Infantry Division came ashore at Gold Beach.

They too met savage fire.

But now the British deployed their "Funnies".

The troops were soon moving inland.

At the adjoining landing spot, Juno Beach,

the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division faced a similar situation.

Here too, Britain's Funnies were vital

in helping the troops off the beach.

Finally, on the far left flank, at Sword Beach,

the British 3rd Infantry Division

met only patchy resistance.

Within hours, its Commandos had linked up with

the glider-borne troops at the Caen Canal.

By early afternoon, the Allies had successfully

established all of the beach-heads.

The timing of the invasion had caught the Germans

completely by surprise.

They'd expected the Allies to wait until the weather had cleared.

Rommel, the operational German commander

for the whole of the north-west French coast,

had taken the opportunity of bad weather

to visit his family in Germany.

His immediate subordinate in Normandy and Brittany,

General Friedrich Dollman, was over 100 miles away,

taking part in a war game exercise.

Only the overall German commander for the whole of Western Europe,

Field-Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt, was at his HQ.

But he needed Hitler's permission

to move his Panzer reserves to the battlefield.

However, Hitler was asleep and his aides wouldn't wake him.

It wasn't until mid-day that the Fuhrer

finally learnt about the invasion.

But he didn't take it seriously.

He was still convinced the main attack

would come in the Pas de Calais.

Normandy, he believed, was just a feint.

Finally, in the late afternoon, when the scale of the invasion

was becoming all too clear, Hitler unleashed his reserves.

But they were too far away to provide immediate support.

Despite stubborn German resistance,

the beach-heads around Utah, Gold and Juno, and Sword were secure.

Only at Omaha was the situation more precarious.

Here German resistance had prevented the US troops

moving more than a mile inland.

By nightfall on June 6th,

over a hundred thousand Allied troops

had been landed in Normandy.

It had been an extraordinary feat of planning,

ingenuity and courage.

The first day of the Allies' great gamble had paid off.

But it was just the beginning.

Now they had to build up, break out and push on into Europe.

As the second day dawned

on the greatest seaborne invasion ever attempted,

thousands of Allied troops had broken out of their beach-heads

and were moving inland.

But they found the Normandy countryside hard going.

The patchwork of woodland and small fields

provided ideal terrain for German tanks and machine guns.

The Allies suffered heavy casualties.

Allied air power provided crucial support.

When Von Runstedt's Panzer reinforcements arrived,

they'd been so depleted by the air attacks

that they were unable to mount a major counterattack.

The German reinforcements were also hampered

by French Resistance fighters operating behind German lines.

They ambushed troop convoys and blew up bridges.

As a result, the "Das Reich" SS Panzer Division

took over two weeks to make a journey

which should have lasted a mere three days.

Its troops took their fury out

on the French civilian population.

The village of Oradour-sur-Glane

and its 642 inhabitants were wiped out.

After four days of fighting, all the Allied beach-heads

were finally able to link up.

But they'd still only managed to penetrate ten miles inland.

Eventually, six days after the landing,

the British commander General Montgomery

launched a major assault

on the strategically important town of Caen.

The British 7th Armored Division,

the "Desert Rats" advanced.

But its spearhead ran into four German Tiger tanks.

The Allies Sherman tanks were completely outclassed.

Their guns were out-ranged and their shells unable

to penetrate the German armor.

They were particularly vulnerable

because many ran on petrol fuel

and were liable to burst into flames when hit.

The Germans nicknamed the Sherman the "Ronson"

after the cigarette lighter,

or more macabrely the "Tommy cooker".

In less than five minutes more than ten British tanks were destroyed.

The attack on Caen stalled.

Outmatched by the German tanks,

the Allies relied on air power and artillery.

But it wasn't enough.

The Desert Rats retreated.

Caen remained in German hands.

Meanwhile further west,

US forces advanced on the equally important port

of Cherbourg.

It would take them nearly ten days to get close to it.

They weren't helped by the weather.

During the first week of the invasion,

it had been relatively calm

and supplies and reinforcements had poured in

through the Mulberry artificial harbors.

But now the weather turned. Gales swept the English Channel.

The US Mulberry harbor at Omaha was destroyed.

The other Mulberry, in the British sector,

was badly damaged and put out of action for several days.

The flow of reinforcements slowed.

It meant the port of Cherbourg

was an even more vital objective.

As the US forces now approached it,

the German garrison resisted.

There was fierce house-to-house fighting.

It would take the Allies a week to secure the city.

But the port had been trashed by the fleeing Germans.

It would take a further month

before it could be brought back into service.

Meanwhile, Montgomery launched another assault on Caen.

But the storms had turned the fields into a sea of mud.

Low cloud meant air support was impossible.

To make matters worse, the newly-arrived elite German

2nd SS Panzer Corps was thrown into the defense of the city.

After four days the British were, again, forced to halt.

Then, as the clouds cleared,

nearly 500 Allied bombers devastated Caen.

British troops fought their way into the north suburbs.

But the ruins made ideal defensive positions for the Germans.

Allied casualties mounted.

After 48 hours, the attack was, yet again, called off.

Three weeks later, Montgomery tried for a fourth time.

The plan was to capture the remaining German strongholds

and then push on south deeper into France.

After two more days of fighting, the city was finally won.

The way now seemed open for the British tanks

to move south, deeper into France.

But the Germans were waiting with a large force of Panzers.

The British advance stopped again.

The Americans in the west, however,

were having an easier time.

The fighting around Caen had sucked in

the majority of the German defenders.

As the American forces prepared to thrust deeper into France,

they faced only scattered opposition.

The scene was set for the Allied forces to break out at last.

At 9:30 in the morning of July 25th, 1944,

over 1,800 Allied aircraft carpet bombed

a four mile stretch of the German frontline

south of Cherbourg.

It was the beginning of Operation Cobra,

the US breakout into France.

The German defenders were stunned by the size of the assault.

But so too were some of the US soldiers.

The plan had been for the bombers to fly in from the east,

parallel to the US frontline,

to minimize the risk of bombing American troops.

But most of the aircraft

came in over the top of the US lines.

Bombs fell short.

Over a hundred US troops were hit and killed.

Yet despite the ferocity of the bombardment,

when the US forces later picked themselves up

and moved forward they found, to their astonishment,

substantial numbers of German troops had survived.

The survivors mounted a stubborn resistance.

As fighting raged, it looked as though the Americans

would fail to break through the German lines.

But then the German defenses crumbled.

The next morning US tanks broke through

and moved forward into open country.

There was now almost no German resistance left

and the Americans quickly pushed deeper into France.

The hill town of Coutances fell.

Then the cross-roads town of Avranches.

As the Allies pressed forward

they were helped by change and confusion

in the German High Command.

At the beginning of July, three weeks after the D-Day landings,

Hitler dismissed the German Commander-in-Chief,

Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt, for "defeatism".

Von Rundstedt had made little attempt to hide his belief

that Germany faced an unwinnable struggle.

He was replaced by Field Marshal Guenther Von Kluege,

fresh from the Eastern Front,

but with little knowledge of north-western France.

Two weeks later, Rommel,

the second most senior German officer on the front,

was severely injured when his staff car

was strafed by a British fighter.

Then, with the Nazi command already in confusion,

there was an assassination attempt on Hitler's life.

On July 20th, 1944,

a disillusioned aristocratic war hero,

Colonel Claus Schenck Graf von Stauffenburg,

planted a bomb in the planning hut

at Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia.

Four officers were killed.

But Hitler was sheltered by a heavy, solid-oak conference table

and escaped with only minor injuries.

The plot was swiftly and brutally put down.

Von Stauffenburg was shot

and his principal collaborators put on trial.

They would later be hanged.

Hitler put a brave face on it

and visited some of the wounded in hospital.

But it hardened still further

his distrust of his senior officers.

He would, despite his many earlier misjudgments,

demand even greater control over events on the battlefield.

Back in France, General George Patton,

back in charge of a real fighting force,

ordered his troops to fan out.

They took Rennes, Mayenne,

and headed for Le Mans.

They were now moving round behind the German forces

still battling it out with the British and Canadians near Caen.

With the Americans to their south

and the British to their north,

it seemed the German forces in Normandy

would be surrounded.

Hitler issued his usual order that there should be no retreat,

but as the Allies squeezed in on them,

the Germans began to flee.

They were remorselessly harried by Allied aircraft and artillery.

The casualties were appalling.

Finally, on August 20th, 1944,

the Allied forces moving in from both the north and south met up.

The so-called "Falaise Gap",

named after the nearby French village,

had been closed.

Large numbers of Germans were trapped.

Over 10,000 more Germans, caught in the Allied pincer, died.

A further 50,000 were taken prisoner.

The German army in Western Europe was in chaos.

Meanwhile, far to the south,

on the French Mediterranean coast near Cannes,

there was a second Allied seaborne invasion.

US troops came ashore, virtually unopposed.

They were helped by paratroopers from the Free French Army,

men who had escaped from German-occupied French territory

in Europe and North Africa.

The landing had always been opposed by the British,

who regarded it as a diversion.

But the United States had long regarded it

as an essential part of clearing the Germans out of France.

The troops were greeted by an ecstatic civilian population.

It was soon advancing rapidly up the Rhone Valley.

Lyons was liberated on September 3rd, 1944.

Ten days later, they reached Dijon

and made contact with Patton's forces

advancing from western France.

German units stationed across the region fled.

In barely three weeks of headlong advance,

the Allied invasion of Europe had liberated most of France.

That left Paris, where French resistance fighters

now rose up against the German occupation.

There seemed little to prevent the Allied onrush

from continuing to the German border.