Original subtitles

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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 have been preparing

for months to open a new front in Northwest France.

Training for it was well underway.

But it was an attack that 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 II, 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 of 1941, British commanders raided

the Vaagso islands off the coast of Nazi occupied north.

It was an attempt to probe German defences

and tie down Hitler's troops in the north.

A fish oil factory and coastal defences

were blown up before the commanders 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 defences

and also to provide combat experience for the Canadians.

But this time it was a catastrophe.

As the 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 U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt,

agreed upon a date.

D-Day, or Operation Overlord as the seaborne

invasion of France was formerly 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 have been

constructed at likely landing sites.

Beaches have been mined and covered in barbed wire.

Obstacles have 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 lead to bitter arguments

inside the German leadership.

Von Rundstedt proposed holding a large force

of panzers in reserve northwest 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 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,

nor 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 realised there were two principle options,

the Pas de Calais and Normandy.

The Pas de Calais was clearly the favourite.

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 armoured vehicles could be landed.

Northern France became the most reconnoitred

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 suck to form an artificial harbour.

They were known by their code name, Mulberries.

The Mulberries would be supplied with

fuel by a pipeline 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 parlour.

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 armoured 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 of shingle.

An armoured ramp for climbing seawalls.

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 coordinated false information.

This emphasised that the main landings

would be in the Pas de Calais, although,

a faint attack might be launched in Normandy.

To muddy the waters still further,

the Allied military created a fictitious army unit,

the so-called First U.S. Army Group or FUSAG.

It was stationed, very obviously, in Kent,

bang opposite the Pas de Calais.

The man in charge of it was a pistol toting

U.S. general, George Patton, who had 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.

Basher-five-two, this is

basher-one-one on alpha.

Radio transmissions mimic

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.

Harbours along the Kent coast were

filled with dummy landing craft.

There were even troops, though these

were in reality, backup units.

In late 1943 the Allies appointed

U.S. 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 the 5th of June 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 storming.

Nevertheless, on the 4th of June 1944

the assault troops boarded their landing ships

and the amount 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 1:15 in the morning of the 6th of June 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, U.S. paratroops came

down around the village of Sainte-Mère-Église.

There was a fierce firefight.

But three hours later the village was in U.S. hands.

One of the most crucial battles of

World War II 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 undercover of darkness.

Moreover, Allied counter measures 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.

Undercover 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 U.S. 4th Infantry Division

came ashore near, at what they called, Utah Beach.

Within two hours it was linking up with

the U.S. paratroopers who'd landed at Sainte-Mère-Église.

Next door at Omaha Beach it was more difficult.

The beach was a defenders dream,

with high cliffs and few ways inland.

As the U.S. 1st Infantry Division waited ashore

they were mowed down by German machine guns.

To make matters worse,

the American's 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 the beachhead.

Further east, in the centre 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 commanders had linked up with

the glider-borne troops at the Caen Canal.

By early afternoon the Allies had

successfully established all of the beachheads.

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 Northwest French coast,

had taken the opportunity of bad weather

to visit his family in Germany.

His immediate subordinate in Normandy and Brittany,

General Friedrich Dollmann, was over a hundred

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 midday that the Fuehrer

finally learned 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 fake.

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 beachheads around Utah, Gold,

and Juno, and Sword were secure.

Only at Omaha was the situation more precarious.

Here German resistance had prevented

the U.S. troops moving more than a mile inland.

By nightfall on the 6th of June over a hundred thousand

Allied troops had been landed in Normandy.

It had been an extraordinary feet 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 beachheads 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 Rundstedt'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.

It's troops took out their fury on

the French civilian population.

The village of Oradour-sur-Glane

and it's 642 inhabitants were wiped out.

After four days of fighting all the Allied beachheads

were finally able to link up.

But they had still only managed

to penetrate 10 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 Armoured division,

the Desert Rats, advanced.

But it's spearhead ran into four German Tiger tanks.

The Allied Sherman tanks were completely outclassed.

Their guns were outranged and their shells

unable to penetrate the German armour.

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 macabrely, "the Tommy Cooker".

In less than five minutes more than

10 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, U.S. forces advanced on

the equally important port of Cherbourg.

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

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 harbours.

But now the weather turned.

Gales swept the English Channel.

The U.S. Mulberry harbour 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 U.S. 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 field into a sea of mud.

Low cloud meant air support was impossible.

To make matters worse, the newly arrived

elite German II SS Panzer Corps

was thrown into the defines 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 ideal defensive positions for the Germans.

Allied casualties mounted.

And 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

their 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 German defenders.

As the American forces prepared to thrust further

into France, they faced only scattered opposition.

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

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

over 1,800 Allied aircraft carpet bombed a four mile

stretch of the German front line, south of Cherbourg.

It was the beginning of Operation Cobra,

the U.S. breakout into France.

The German defenders were stunned

by the size of the assault.

So too were some of the U.S. soldiers.

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

parallel to the U.S. front line, to minimize

the risk of bombing American troops.

But most of the aircraft came in

over the top of the U.S. lines.

Bombs fell short.

Over a hundred U.S. troops were hit and killed.

Yet, despite the ferocity of the bombardment,

when the U.S. 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 defences crumbled.

The next morning U.S. 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 crossroads 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 when Germany faced an unwinnable struggle.

He was replaced by Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge,

fresh from the Eastern Front but with little

knowledge of Northwestern 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 the 20th 1944, a disillusioned,

aristocratic war hero,

Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg,

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 Stauffenberg was shot and his

principal collaborators put on trial.

They would later be hanged.

Hitler put a brave face on and visited

some of the wounded in hospitals.

But it hardened still further

his distrust of his senior officers.

He would, despite his many earlier misjudgements,

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 the 20th of August 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 Caen,

there was a second Allied seaborne invasion.

U.S. 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 the 3rd 1944.

10 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.