Original subtitles

October, 1940.

Winston Churchill to the defeated French people:

Good night, then.

Sleep to gather strength for the morning.

For the morning will come.

Brightly will it shine on the brave and true,

kindly on all who suffer for the cause.

Vive la France!

Allons, bonne nuit.

Dormez bien.

Rassemblez vos forces pour l'aube, car l'aube viendra.

Now, at last, after nearly four years,

that dawn was about to break.

The invasion of the Continent was at hand.

Dieppe, 1942.

The first major attempt to land Allied troops in France was a disaster.

Almost half the assaulting force of 7,000 was lost

trying to storm the port's powerful defences.

Many troops never got beyond the beaches.

Hundreds of others walked straight into captivity.

We learnt so much from Dieppe that I think it was quite invaluable

as far as the final invasion was concerned.

I think everything that could go wrong went wrong with that operation.

The result of it was that, by the end,

one was appallingly impressed

by the dangers and the hazards

of any kind of combined operation

on that kind of scale.

We'd never attempted to do a combined operation on that scale before.

And, really, nobody knew how to do it.

There are three conditions necessary for a successful invasion.

First, obviously, to get ashore against no matter what opposition.

Secondly, having got ashore,

to stay ashore no matter what the weather conditions.

Thirdly, to stop the enemy

from building up his forces against you quicker than you can,

otherwise he'll throw you back into the sea.

Given these essentials,

the two likeliest landing areas were the Pas-de-Calais,

across the English Channel at its narrowest point,

and Normandy to the west.

The choice was the first task of Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan

and his special Allied staff, known as COSSAC,

appointed in 1943 to frame the initial invasion plans.

Tentative invasion planning had gone on since 1941.

COSSAC's choice in the end was Normandy,

a 50-mile stretch of shore just east of the Cherbourg peninsula.

Normandy had several advantages over the Pas-de-Calais.

Though farther from England, it was less strongly fortified.

Its beaches, mostly without cliffs

and with a minimum of clay and depressions,

were more suited to the landing of troops and supplies

and to rapid deployment inland.

And it was close to Cherbourg and the Brittany ports.

At Quebec, in August, 1943,

COSSAC's outline plan for invasion was approved by Churchill and Roosevelt.

The cross-Channel assault was now, at last, to become reality.

Its codename - Overlord. Its target date - May, 1944.

The springboard for invasion would be England.

Britons, displaced once by Hitler's bombs, were on the move again.

This time, to make way for the great invasion armies.

For many, this meant upheaval, financial loss, personal problems.

But the cause was momentous -

the long-awaited second front.

Already from the United States,

the packed troop ships were streaming across the Atlantic.

By now, the number of Americans in Britain

approached one and a half million,

and London's streets displayed every known Allied uniform.

In this great floating barracks, morale was all-important.

We've had some grand trips.

But it's been wonderful. I'm very thrilled to be here.

I have nothing new to report from the States.

You know, the States - that's where Churchill lives. I...

But he really travels. Boy, he's been around.

He's been to Casablanca more than Humphrey Bogart.

On a different stage, another American,

General Dwight David Eisenhower,

named by Roosevelt Overlord's supreme commander.

Eisenhower had commanded the Allied North African expedition in 1942.

As well as generalship, he would need the finesse of a diplomat

because he was now to lead a huge multinational force.

You always have problems, but General Eisenhower,

being the supreme Allied commander, he had this wonderful knack

of getting along with people of all different nationalities.

He didn't think of himself as an American,

he didn't think of himself as British or French or Polish or anything.

He just thought what was best for the whole Allied effort.

Best known of Ike's commanders-to-be

was General Montgomery, victor of Alamein.

Famous for his plain speaking to his troops,

Monty now urged the war workers to maximum effort.

Why is it... why is it that today the tide has turned

and we are beating the Germans

and coming towards the final climax of the war?

I'll tell you why it is. It's because we've got far the best equipment

and we've got far the best men. And women too. Far the best.

If the battle front and the home front really get down to it this year,

we can get the thing almost finished,

we can get it so tight, that next year we just topple it over.

Goodbye to you all. Thank you very much.

Monty's optimism was infectious, but Britain, like America,

was already working at full pressure with or without music.

The massive effort was straining towards the final Overlord targets.

Aircraft - 13,000.

Tanks and vehicles - 17,000.

Parachutes - 90,000. Bombs and shells in millions.

And Overlord would also need 4,000 assault and landing craft.

But, at first, they simply weren't there.

The absolutely crucial thing for an invasion

is to get the troops across the water.

For that you want landing ships and craft.

They had to be built in large quantities,

at a time when all ship-building facilities

were required to fight the Battle of the Atlantic.

By the spring of 1944, the landing craft were built

and ready for intensive, constantly rehearsed, invasion training

in tough battle conditions.

Many Overlord troops would invade from the air.

More than 20,000 were earmarked

for the biggest airborne operation of the war so far.

Some assault troops would have to scale cliffs.

Training in rough Channel waters could be as deadly as the real thing.

Across those waters, Von Rundstedt and Rommel

had divided views on how to meet the invasion.

Von Rundstedt, the commander-in-chief,

wanted a mobile reserve kept back to fight inland.

Rommel, commander of the anti-invasion forces,

wanted to repel the assault on the beaches.

But Hitler's Atlantic Wall, a chain of steel-and-concrete fortifications

planned to stretch from Denmark to the Spanish border, was incomplete.

Rommel made belated efforts to fill the gaps

by laying lines of formidable underwater obstacles,

including millions of hidden mines.

To overcome these defences, the Allies evolved various ingenious contraptions.

To help tanks over sand and mud and concrete,

the Swiss Roll and the Carpet Layer.

The Panjandrum, supposed to destroy beach obstacles, was not successful.

Pluto - PipeLines Under The Ocean -

a flexible pipeline miles long.

Pluto would minimise the hazards of transporting petrol to France by tanker.

It could carry over a million tons of fuel daily to the continent, underwater.

Shore pumping stations were innocently camouflaged.

Still more remarkable was Mulberry,

two artificial harbours each the size of Dover harbour.

All the components had to be towed across the Channel.

The problem of staying ashore was a difficult one,

because of weather conditions in the Channel.

You couldn't expect more than three or four consecutive days

of weather fine enough to supply across the beaches.

So, obviously, we thought we'd have to take a port.

That's why we tried Dieppe.

But we found in Dieppe that we couldn't capture a port

without using such heavy bombardment

as would destroy the facilities we wanted to use.

So the obvious thing was to bring our own artificial harbour with us,

which we called Mulberry, and which everybody thought was absolutely crazy.

Eisenhower met constantly with his commanders

to coordinate strategy.

His deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, Admiral Ramsay,

Generals Bradley and Montgomery,

and Air Marshal Leigh-Mallory.

A major preoccupation was the weather that could be expected

for the start of Overlord.

General Eisenhower made it clear quite early

that he wanted to build up confidence,

not only in what we could do as forecasters,

and I in particular for him personally,

but he wanted to know what reliance

he could put on the very words I used

and the tone of voice I used.

He could tell, even before I presented the forecast,

almost each time what I was going to say.

He used my face, I think, as a kind of hall barometer.

Deception plans also occupied Supreme Command.

Among the most elaborate were fake preparations for an attack on Norway,

to be launched from Scotland.

And, more credibly, for a main assault on the Pas-de-Calais

from the southeast ports.

Also crucial was the bombing plan

to cut German communications to invasion areas - interdiction.

What one had to do was to interfere with the communications.

Again, I think this was a lesson learned from Dieppe.

That we hadn't realised at Dieppe

how absolutely essential it was

to have an absolutely overwhelming weight of firepower

both from the air and from the land. The result of this was,

and I think this caused a good deal of difficulties at high level,

was that Air Marshal Harris,

who still thought that he could win the war on his own,

had to be persuaded to use his heavy bombers

to attack the German road and rail communications.

And I think he resisted very strongly.

He thought it was really a diversion from the whole point of the war.

But he was made to do it, and it was done enormously effectively.

Spring 1944 saw widespread air attacks

on road and rail targets and on airfields.

At the same time, all over the South of England, camps were springing up,

ready for the tens of thousands of invasion troops.

The staging areas for Overlord

were spread the length of England's south coast,

round the ports of Falmouth, Dartmouth, Weymouth, Portsmouth and Newhaven.

All was now prepared for the great move south.

The lines were cleared for invasion traffic.

Amid the rash of military notices, one telltale sign stood out.

The vast concentration reached its Channel rendezvous.

Some wit claimed that only the barrage balloons

floating overhead kept Britain from sinking.

Late May, 1944.

The assault troops were sealed within their marshalling areas, ready to go.

Now - a pause.

Fear feeds on delay, of course.

And we didn't really know just when we were going.

Shot crap, played cards, lost all our money.

Some people won money. I lost all mine.

Didn't do me any good. I had no place to spend it when I got on the beach.

Rations, currency, ammunition, kit.

Packing and repacking, checking equipment.

The exact invasion date was not yet revealed.

Most men still did not know the beaches they were going to attack.

Only officers and NCOs had been told the precise landing areas.

100 miles across the Channel in Normandy,

these landing areas comprised five beaches.

From west to east, Utah and Omaha waited for the Americans.

Gold, Juno and Sword for the British and Canadians.

But all now depended on the weather.

On the evening of that Wednesday, 31 May,

even then I advised General Eisenhower

that conditions for the oncoming weekend,

especially over Sunday night and Monday morning,

the crucial times for Overlord,

were going to be stormy, but we went on with the meetings.

I had to go before General Eisenhower and his commanders,

who met for nothing else twice a day during those fateful days -

1, 2 and 3 June.

On 3 June, despite Supreme Command's concern about the weather,

embarkation went ahead.

The troops knew nothing of a possible hitch,

though some men thought it was just another exercise.

When we first went aboard, we had no knowledge of the actual day.

We had been aboard ship so many times.

For six months, we were constantly on and off ships.

In the ports and harbours of England's Channel coast,

the vast and complex process of loading and embarkation went on.

In the Channel, the worsening weather

now faced the supreme commander with a grave crisis.

It was a time of dreadful tension.

We all knew that there could be only one day's deferment.

If there had to be another day,

then all the landing craft would need to return to base,

so it couldn't be done on a second day's postponement.

It would have to be deferred for a whole fortnight

until the next tides were right.

And at that time, our charts were so black in the Atlantic

that there didn't seem to be any prospect

of getting this operation going at all.

We didn't know how long it was going to be postponed.

Because the weather looked so bad, we wondered if it would ever clear up,

and whether the whole thing would be called off

and we would be taken back off the ship.

Troops primed for action.

An armada ready to sail.

And, then, anticlimax.

We were then told

that the invasion had been put back for at least 24 hours.

Of course, this increased our apprehension.

And we used to have these long conversations with each other

about the kind of things that might happen,

whether we'd ever get off the beach alive.

Routine continued under a cloud of uncertainty.

All the troops could do was wait.

As the hours passed, it seemed that only a miracle could get Overlord going.

Then, mercifully, the almost unbelievable happened

about midday on that Sunday.

We spotted that there might be an interlude between two depressions.

By the evening, my own confidence

in the forecast for this quieter period

had so increased from further reports that had come in,

that I convinced General Eisenhower and his commanders

that it would indeed arrive later on Monday,

after the storm of Sunday night and Monday morning.

It would indeed arrive late on Monday,

continue through Tuesday and probably into Wednesday.

The next morning, early on 5 June,

they met again to confirm this decision.

When I could tell them that we were even more confident

than we had been the previous night

that the fine, or improved, quieter interlude would indeed come along,

the joy on the faces

of the supreme commander and his commanders

after the deep gloom of the preceding days,

was a marvel to behold.

I remember it very well. 4:15am on the morning of 5 June.

I wasn't at the meeting, but I drove him there,

and he came out and he really looked so serious as he got in the car.

And he said, "D-day is on. Nothing can stop us now."

It was an historic decision.

Overlord's further postponement might have meant total cancellation.

The troop commander read a message from General Eisenhower.

"God speed" and all that sort of stuff.

We read this great message from Monty

about "good hunting in the fields of Europe" and all this rubbish.

Naturally, being a soldier, we thought what a load of old cods it was.

Never had Channel waters seen such a mighty force.

Heading for France were some 6,500 vessels of all types,

marshalled and escorted by the Allied navies.

Glider fleets were waiting, wearing their D-day markings.

The first division would go in by glider and parachute,

dropping behind the invasion beaches.

Their losses were expected to be as high as seven out of every ten men,

as Eisenhower well knew.

They all had blackened faces.

They were going to jump Nazi-occupied Europe in a short time.

You kept thinking, "I wonder how many are going to come back."

Later, General Eisenhower said,

"You know, Kay, it is very hard to look a soldier in the face,

knowing you might be sending him to his death."

In the last hours of 5 June, the airborne troops set out for France.

Butterflies in your stomach. You wonder what you're doing here.

"Why am I here? Why did I volunteer? Am I crazy?"

Everything is going through your mind.

You're worried. You know it's coming up soon.

I was afraid. I was 19, and I was afraid.

Many men were afraid that night.

They were storming Hitler's vaunted Festung Europa - Fortress Europe.

Across the water the Germans waited,

not knowing when or where the blow would fall.

D-day.

Ahead, the Normandy beaches.

After four years, this was the road back.

It was a fantastic sight to see so many ships of all shapes and sizes,

and all going one way.

Quite a few boys wrote letters and gave it to friends

so that they'd take them home or see that their parents got them.

It was their farewell letter.

The sea was rough.

They'd put their gas capes over them to keep dry,

and it made them sick cos they didn't get enough fresh air.

I had several men get seasick, and they upchucked,

and they had to use their helmets to catch it in.

We'd throw them over the side.

They were washed out and given back to the men.

One felt absolutely dreadful, physically,

just wishing to God that the whole thing would be over,

or at least that we could get onto dry land.

At 5:30 the armada was off the French coast.

After a massive air assault, a devastating naval bombardment.

As far as your eye could see,

you were surrounded with craft of some sort,

and it was just sending out shell after shell out of its turrets.

The Germans were surprised and stupefied,

but some batteries soon recovered.

It was far just more than sickness.

Men loaded their pants and everything else.

I had rarely seen that before.

I know the men were sick, many of them were very sick.

By this time the waves

were pitching the craft up and down, I would say, six or seven feet.

A lot of boys got caught in the nets.

We had quite a time getting them loose. Their legs got caught in there.

Smoke, smoke. There were a lot of shells coming over us.

All smoke, black smoke, just like a volcano from afar

that one would see in the movies.

The run-in to the beaches -

6:30 for the Americans, 7:30 for the British and Canadians.

After all the waiting, the training, the toughening,

this was it.

We were the first attackers, we were the initial wave.

There's always great losses in an initial wave,

so each of us had to be given at least 30 minutes to live on the beach.

Protected by total air supremacy, the first assault waves

raced and scrambled for the five invasion beaches.

The soldiers were so glad to get off the landing craft,

to escape the seasickness,

that they were just ready to go anywhere by that time.

For the men of the five assault divisions,

those first hours of D-day were hours of death, fear, courage,

of plans gone wrong, of rapid improvisation.

We expected a clear beach

with an indication as to exactly how we should proceed.

We were even told the military police would greet us.

It became quite obvious that the beach was in a considerable state of chaos.

On the run-in, craft ran into underwater obstacles and into mines.

One of them went over a mine. The front half of the craft,

with the personnel in it, went straight up in the air.

The sea was quite a different colour when that craft blew up.

Some units landed in the wrong area.

Some met unexpectedly light resistance,

others were cut down almost on the shoreline.

The Americans got the worst of it.

I didn't think I'd make it.

I didn't think there was any way to get across that beach and survive.

I really thought it was my last day.

The first man, the sergeant,

raised up to see how far we had to go to reach land,

and fell back dead.

We had been told that the air force would come in

with the heavy bombers

and would crater the beaches for us to give us a place to hide.

And this did not take place.

It was bloody awful. Every time I got up,

I thought that it was pure terror that was making my knees buckle,

until I finally hit the shale and I realised

that I had about 100lbs of sand in those pockets.

I remember taking my trench knife and pressing it in people's backs

to see if they were alive.

If they were, I'd kick 'em or say, "Let's go."

It dawned on me after I checked two or three

that some were alive but they wouldn't turn around. Just absolute terror.

On the three British and Canadian beaches, opposition varied.

On Gold, while one unit was hammering at a strongpoint for eight hours,

another was off the beach in 40 minutes.

On Juno, the Canadians suffered heavy losses but advanced.

On Sword, the fighting was bloody but brief.

Many defenders emerged from their bunkers to surrender.

And on Utah, by the end of the day, the Americans were doing well.

They had taken prisoners, established a firm foothold,

driven five miles inland.

But on Omaha, the Americans ran into difficulties -

rough seas, strong defences

and a newly arrived German fighting division.

From where I was, it seemed a failure.

At that time there were so many people on the beach

you could literally walk on the bodies from one end to the other,

either the dead or the wounded.

I saw people laying out there with no head,

and some with arms blown off.

Some of my friends. It was pretty sickening.

At Omaha it took all day, with grievous losses,

to gain a beachhead a mile deep.

It was the most heart-rending experience that I ever had.

I hope I never have another one like it.

Look back and see the remains of a crack battalion strewn over the beach.

And men floating in the water, face-up.

Perhaps it was better that we were green,

because if I'd have known then what I know now,

I'd have got on that boat and went back to England.

A day of continuous thinking thoughts of home.

A day of prayer.

And, without a doubt, the longest day of my life.

You feel that you're... Well, you've accomplished something

that you didn't think you would probably end up being around after it was done.

I think we were proud in some way that we'd done it

and that the army we'd been in for so long,

and with all sorts of experiences of how they could bungle things,

had actually managed this invasion.

Oh, we feel very happy. Very happy.

Ah, the best day of my life. I think so.

La plus grande joie. How you say in English?

The biggest joys in our life.

And we admire those courageous soldiers.

They came from so far away to liberate us.

And we gave to them everything we could give them.

Cider and so.

Calvados, also.

And our... our friendship.

And...

It was very... emotional.

And...

We, we feel... we became free.

By midnight, 130,000 troops had got ashore.

Footholds had been gained on all five beaches.

Casualties: 9,000.

D-plus-one saw the first laying of the Mulberry harbours.

The early build-up of supplies was vital for the success of Overlord.

It was essential to pour in

the reinforcements of men and material faster than the enemy.

And pour in they did.

By D-plus-seven, miles of vehicles were ashore,

stretching inland from the beaches bumper to bumper.

At some points, traffic jams extended 15 miles.

At this critical phase, Mulberry's two harbours -

Arromanches for the British, Saint-Laurent for the Americans -

were the only ports available to the Allies.

In the four days before 18 June,

the average daily landings were troops: nearly 35,000,

vehicles: 5,000, stores: 25,000 tons.

If a single device invented for Overlord produced results, it was Mulberry.

Only the insistence of Eisenhower and the king himself

had stopped Churchill from coming over on D-day.

Now, within days of the landing, he was there to see how things were going.

The top commanders were aware

that the Overlord timetable was falling behind.

They were anxious now about phase two of the operation -

the battle of the bridgehead.

The Allies were fighting bitterly

for space to deploy the mass of men and materials assembling behind them.

It was a slow, dogged advance

against an enemy who had recovered strongly.

The close-hedged bocage countryside was difficult for the Allied tanks.

By 10 June, the Allies were opposed by only three panzer divisions.

The other seven available divisions

had not been released by the German high command.

Despite this, the invaders were little more than inching forward.

By 12 June, the five beachheads had been linked

to give a lodgement 60 miles long and up to 20 miles deep.

The ancient town of Bayeux

now welcomed the leader of the Free French, General de Gaulle,

setting foot in France for the first time since 1940.

19 June, and the unpredictable English Channel struck again.

For four days a raging storm, the worst in June for over 40 years,

battered Mulberry almost to destruction.

Vessels dragged anchor. Vital equipment foundered.

Unloading was drastically curtailed. Tonnage was down by four fifths.

Frantic efforts were made to repair the damage,

for the disruption had threatened the very continuance of Overlord.

Soon the traffic was rolling again.

The Overlord lifeline was restored.

A prime objective to supplement the Mulberry harbours

was the port of Cherbourg in the American sector.

By 19 June the Americans had cut off the Cherbourg peninsula

and were driving north towards the port.

Cherbourg was strongly fortified.

The Germans hoped to delay the Allies by staging a long resistance there.

But by the 21st, after tough fighting,

the Americans reached the port's outskirts.

On the 26th, the garrison surrendered,

leaving only a few strongpoints to be mopped up.

Prisoners streamed out, among them the garrison commander.

Cherbourg was the first major objective to be captured in the campaign.

25,000 prisoners were taken in the Cherbourg area.

Some French women were losing their German lovers.

Right across the front from Cherbourg was the town of Caen.

Caen was the centre for German troops moving to the beachhead.

Montgomery had been attacking towards it since D-day.

Now at last, in early July, he prepared for the assault.

First the bombers went in.

On 18 July over 2,000 heavy and medium bombers hit Caen

with nearly 8,000 tons of high explosive and fragmentation bombs.

It was the heaviest and most concentrated air attack

in support of ground forces ever attempted.

Caen was christened "the crucible".

When it fell, the troops entered a bomb-cratered town choked with rubble.

Half of it was destroyed,

several thousand of its inhabitants killed or wounded.

For the people of Caen, it was liberation - at a grievous price.

Now, after seven grinding weeks, the start of the break-out.

The Americans broke through at Avranches.

They fanned out west and south into Brittany and east to Mortain,

and swept up to Argentan.

From the north, the British and Canadians

edged south towards Falaise, in an attempt to close the neck of a bag

now threatening to trap the German forces.

There were very great practical difficulties

in this closing of the Falaise Gap quickly.

And it was difficult for the one side,

British, Canadian, Polish,

to appreciate the point of view

of the other side, the Americans.

We were coming down from the north,

launched from the congested, bombed and difficult areas of the Caen sector.

Secondly, the Germans facing us on that north side of the corridor

they were trying to keep open for their escape,

were in areas where they had been fighting against us

for two months or more.

The Americans were coming up to meet us from the south

in more open country

and against much less prepared and organised German resistance.

Falaise, one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the campaign.

This was Montgomery's next target.

Hundreds of rocket-firing Typhoons

strafed enemy communications and transport,

leaving a trail of burning vehicles.

On 6 August, the Canadians were on the outskirts of Falaise.

They entered the town on the 16th.

By now only a narrow corridor separated the Canadian and American spearheads.

The remnants of the German 7th army, some 15 fighting divisions,

were pressed into a tiny sack.

At last the trap closed.

10,000 died. 50,000 were captured.

For the Germans, Falaise was one of the worst disasters since Stalingrad.

The toll of prisoners rubbed in the magnitude of the defeat.

But 40,000 German troops escaped,

and this caused friction between the Allies.

Had the British and Canadian forces

been able to move faster,

we might have trapped many more Germans in the Falaise pocket.

Very little of their equipment got out,

but quite a number of the Germans

were able to escape toward the Seine river.

And this was too bad.

I think perhaps the basic reason

was that Britain had been in the war for much longer than we

and had taken very heavy casualties.

And the Americans were fresh,

and they had had practically no casualties in comparison.

So while we were anxious to drive forward

and were not too concerned about the casualties

as long as we could get our objectives,

it was natural, I think, that the British and Canadian forces

did it in a more orderly, pacing way.

And perhaps this was part of Monty's characteristic,

and one of his drawbacks.

In other words, that he never did quite drive

the way the American commanders did.

This was part of his nature, I guess. He was a more cautious man,

combined with the fact that he couldn't afford the casualties

that we could take if it was necessary to take them.

Falaise earned the name of "the killing ground".

The carnage and destruction were appalling.

Eisenhower visited the battlefield and wrote:

"It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time,

stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh."

Paris.

The main Allied drive was going to bypass the French capital.

The Parisians, under Nazi domination for four years,

sensed liberation at last.

As the Germans began to pull out,

the Resistance forces emerged into the open to take revenge.

Remembering the oppression, indignities, humiliations,

Parisians gave vent to long-stored hatred.

In 1940 they had seen Paris fall without a shot.

Now they made up for it

in a burst of violence not seen in Paris throughout the war.

Parisians had one thought -

reprisal against the enemy, the settlement of old scores.

Morning had come.