Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

RAIN POURS, BOMBS WHISTLE

MUNITIONS EXPLODE

MACHINERY CLINKS

SHRAPNEL SPLINTERS

GUNFIRE

SILENCE

TAPE WHIRS

All I remember about the next thing is, er, a blinding flash and...

..er...

..you know, a terrible bloody smell of cordite and things like that.

And it was all just a mess.

The Germans, anything that was moving, they were shooting.

The beach was covered in bodies, and tanks, and smoke.

Everything was brighter in my mind

than it would have been normally.

Get up there!

Boys, keep moving!

And this was it.

Reel one.

Can you tell me about D-Day itself?

Testing, testing, one, two, three. Testing, testing, one, two, three.

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.

Mr Kelly, Reel 1.

Can you tell me whereabouts you were born, please, first of all?

Well, I was born in Liverpool. Uh-huh.

Er, in a street called Doncaster Street.

And what did your father do?

My father was, er, a sail maker.

And so was, er, the entire family, actually.

When the war came, what were you doing then?

I think I was about 17 years of age.

The bombing started at the end of, well, the early 1941.

The corner of the street was actually

destroyed by an incendiary bomb.

So I signed up for the Royal Marines.

Because my eldest brother, er, was already in the marines then.

And he was home on leave,

and he looked absolutely magnificent in the blue uniform.

Why did you immediately volunteer?

Well, it was a feeling amongst young men at that time that...

..er, something was going to happen and the Germans were at it again,

and we weren't going to let them do that.

And pride, I suppose, and patriotism and,

er...the unknown.

A sense of adventure again, I suppose.

I told my mother that I was going to join the marines.

And of course she was upset.

What did your mother say to you when she found out?

Er...

.."Please don't go.

"Wait until your father comes home and talk it over with him."

In 1944, World War II has been raging for over four years.

From one side of Europe, virtually to the other,

is under German control.

This is Nazi territory.

Germany is beginning to bring the war

increasingly to Britain's doorstep,

and there's a sense that really

Britain's the only little bit that's left.

The Allies had been thinking about how to get back into Europe

ever since the defeat at Dunkirk in 1940.

The ultimate goal is to get into Germany,

the end point being that they'd get to Berlin,

that they can overthrow Hitler

in his own city at the very centre of the Third Reich.

The Allies contemplated various different options

for how this could be done,

the best way ultimately to get to Germany.

And they reasoned the only way to do that is via northern France,

just across the Channel from Britain.

But to do this they would need hundreds of thousands of men

and volunteers like James Kelly were key.

It must have been four or five

months before I got, er, the papers came through.

And I'd forgotten all about it.

I put it out of my mind,

I thought, oh, they must have forgotten, you know, no chance.

One night I arrived home from work,

and my mother was there and she said...

She had this envelope - On His Majesty's Service.

She said, "What's this?"

So I said, "Oh, no."

She said, "What are you going to tell your father?"

So I said, "Oh, I'm not sure."

I said, "I'd rather face the Germans than him!"

IN GERMAN:

Every single soldier in these resistance nests

was ordered to fight to the last cartridge and not to surrender.

People like Franz Gockel believed

if the Allies land, he would have to fight and die.

There was only a slim chance to survive.

Germany always knew that the Allies were highly likely

to mount an invasion.

And in anticipation of that, they created a huge

series of fortifications all along the north of Europe

that became known as the Atlantic Wall.

Gun positions, bunkers, etc,

they were all put together with the single intention of ensuring

that if the Allies were to come,

when the Allies came,

then they would be pushed straight back into the ocean.

The Germans also started to fortify the beaches, putting all

sorts of armaments, barbed wire, huge pieces of equipment that would

basically stop any landing force from being able to get too far.

The beaches themselves were also mined.

And above the beaches there were strongpoints

manned by German troops who were armed with machine guns.

When you look at the average German infantry division

in the West, in June 1944,

they normally consist of 40% young recruits,

17 or 18 years old,

with still a solid training

but without any war experience.

Eventually, the Allies identified five beach landing areas

across Normandy in Northern France,

where over 100,000 troops would land on D-Day.

From the west, there were Utah, Omaha,

Gold, Juno and Sword.

So, Utah and Omaha were identified as being the American beaches.

Juno was going to be the Canadian beach

and then Gold and Sword were Britian's beaches.

It's really important to be clear about the fact that

nothing of this scale had ever been attempted in human history.

This is an event without precedent.

The undertaking that was D-Day was absolutely vast.

It's almost impossible to imagine.

It's an incredible test of logistics,

to have the right amount of aircraft, ships, landing craft,

everybody ready at the same moment when they could launch this attack.

It was going to need a massive amount of training

for the troops involved,

and a massive amount of new technology to be refined.

Because, of course, the means of achieving this

had never been done before.

It's all very well to talk about secrecy,

to hope that all this is private,

but you would have to have been blind and deaf, really,

certainly in the south of England,

not to notice that something was going on.

Every little lane had tanks.

Er, well, the term "bumper to bumper" could...

..if I use that, yeah, track to track.

They were parked right down one side of the road,

underneath the overhanging trees,

wherever they could get.

But even so they weren't camouflaged,

you couldn't camouflage them properly,

and they were there for everybody to see.

You've got hundreds of thousands of troops - all of them need to

be trained and prepared.

And these aren't just troops from Britain either.

They're from Canada and America.

OK, you're Harry NMI Parley?

That's right.

My serial number was 32973006.

I recall that.

When did you go into the army?

I went into the army, er, in 1943.

I got married before.

I knew I was going to be drafted.

You were 23 years old?

Yes.

American troops had been arriving in record numbers to Great Britain

since 1943.

In fact, by the end of May 1944,

there were more than 1.5 million US personnel on British soil.

And they were there to support or participate in D-Day

and the Battle of Normandy that was to follow.

My name is Thomas William Porcella.

I was born at New York City on October 4th 1923.

Men like Tom Porcella were brought over in huge troop ships,

and they would land in places like Belfast or Liverpool.

And then they would attend training camps -

these were mostly in southern England -

to prepare for the invasion.

I was thinking to myself, this is it.

Just a matter of time now and I will be in combat.

I wonder what the hell my folks are doing back home.

I wonder if they're thinking about the invasion like...

..like we are.

I wonder what they would think if they knew at this moment,

their son Tom was preparing himself for this big invasion.

All sorts of thoughts went through my mind.

I was told that all the new arrivals were to beef up

the company from about 250 to 300,

that they expected about 30%, um,

casualties in the invasion and that we were it.

One of the really difficult things about military planning is

that you have to plan

for a number of... of your own men getting killed.

The strategists and the commanders

knew that they were sending a percentage

of these young men to their deaths.

Cos that's the only way that the invasion could have happened.

They just hoped that they'd done whatever they could

to mitigate the numbers.

We wanted to go, most of us, anyway, wanted to go.

It was something that had to be done.

It might sound a bit...

..gung ho, for want of a better phrase, but that's how we felt.

We had to go and do it.

And I don't ever remember talking to anybody who was frightened,

or feart.

I don't think frightening is... is the...the word for a young man.

Er, it's excitement, really.

If you stand back from it and watch it,

I suppose that it is frightening.

And, you know, you do get the... this tingle and, er, you know...

But I don't think I can honestly say that I was actually frightened.

As well as a seaborne invasion, there was another aspect to D-Day

which was absolutely crucial.

And this was the airborne assault.

In the middle of the night before D-Day,

hours before the troops would land on the Normandy beaches,

thousands of men would be dropped behind enemy lines.

And leading one of these units was Major John Howard.

Well, I'd like to begin...

..at the beginning...with you.

Well, I had a very, er, poor childhood.

My father, when he married my mother,

who was slightly older than him...

..was a baker's roundsman with a horse and cart in London,

in the, er, Tottenham Court Road area.

As the eldest of a very poor family...

..um, I had to become a breadwinner as soon as possible.

So I joined the army.

I was promoted to Major.

John Howard?

Er, he was an officer slightly different

than the normal officer type,

if you can use that expression.

He was a dedicated man.

He was a fanatic.

He was determined to make that company, D Company,

not only the best company in the outfit, in the regiment,

but in the division.

The next, erm, thing I heard was that the 52nd,

that's the 2nd Battalion, who'd come home from India,

erm, was going to be airborne...

..and there'd be glider troops.

And I was interested in this.

The plan on D-Day was for some of the airborne troops

to fly in on gliders.

Essentially, a new concept in warfare,

they were really lightweight wooden gliders.

They were to be towed across on D-Day on bombers,

and then they would be released.

Of course, one of the most useful things about the gliders,

quite apart from the fact they could put these people all together into

one place at one time, is that as soon as they've been released,

they were completely silent.

They were a really useful means of a surprise attack.

What was the appeal?

I suppose there was a bit of glamour about it, as well.

Everything was a bit hush-hush as it happened, you know.

In the final weeks before D-Day,

soldiers were moved to sealed camps where they learnt their missions.

The soldiers inside these camps

were effectively sealed off,

they weren't allowed in or out of the camp boundaries.

No telephone calls home, for example.

Any correspondence would be censored.

Secrecy was paramount.

And I imagine that the tension started to build

in these sealed camps as well.

There was a sort of fever.

And we knew that there was definitely something going on.

A rumour started from nowhere.

We had to attack some places,

take some bridges.

My company was lucky to be selected for what turned out to be

a wonderful operation.

Glider-borne, to capture two bridges in Normandy.

John Howard's objective on D-Day was to secure the Benouville Bridge,

later became known as Pegasus Bridge.

This bridge was really critical.

It's really close to the landing beach at Sword.

So securing this bridge should allow the troops coming in from Sword

and those further along to come across

and move on towards their objectives.

If it's not secured, it allows the Germans to do the opposite

and move tanks and troops towards them,

and potentially to wreak havoc upon them on the beach.

This was an incredibly bold plan by an elite unit

that will become the start of D-Day.

It's only a few days before D-Day itself that they're shown

this scale model.

So that when they stepped off the plane,

the idea was that nothing would come as a surprise.

We all had to go into a big tent, and there,

laying on the table, was this thing.

We just looked at it.

There it was.

The bridge, rivers.

We knew there was something to do with the river,

we knew there was something to do with the bridge.

There was all sorts of guesses as to where it could be,

but nobody had a clue.

And even when we were shown it, and everything else,

we weren't told where it was.

In the briefing, did you give them

a pretty good run-down on not only the immediate objectives,

but did you also then say, "Now, the big picture is"?

Oh, yes, everybody had that quite clear in their mind

and knew where we fit in to the picture.

The first people to land that night,

and it really did hit them between the eyes.

The night before D-Day, over 7,000 boats set off

laden with troops, weapons, tanks and explosives,

from different points all along the south coast of Britain.

They would travel through the night and wait off the French coast,

ready to launch the assault the next morning.

Well, on the night of the 5th, we went.

And it's an amazing, amazing sight.

Everywhere you looked, there were... there were ships

of all shapes and sizes.

The sky always seemed to be full of our planes

with the black and white stripes on them.

And everything seemed to stand out in Technicolor.

It seemed to be...

..a psychedelic picture.

But it was a lovely feeling cos it were all ours.

Everything was ours.

And then we went off to Normandy through the night.

Everything seemed to be...

..accenuate...ex...ex... What's the word I'm looking for?

Exaggerated.

Exaggerated, yes.

Everything in colour, Technicolor.

We went aboard these, erm, Landing Craft Infantry.

They were very, very cramped.

And you, you know, you have memories of, er,

of just things that may happen to you, you know, and, er...

And what I associate with those craft were self-heating soup.

I know it sounds outlandish, but, er, self-heating soup

because that was the only way we were going to get a hot meal.

That's what I remember about the Land Craft,

self-heating soup and a desire to be sick.

It was a terrible rough crossing.

From the Allies' perspective, D-Day was a massive gamble.

Because if those men were to be lost,

and that equipment was to be destroyed,

then how do you start again?

But not only that,

they would then know that the Germans knew

what their plan was.

So they would have to completely reconceive

how any sort of future invasion could have worked.

The stakes are extraordinarily high,

and it's really impossible to overstate that point.

You must have been apprehensive about, erm, the possibility

of being killed or maimed?

No. Erm, as a matter of fact,

looking back to the fellas I spoke to, when we did,

they were so keen but at the same time

so ignorant of true warfare.

This is one of the things that keeps a man going in battle.

He can always imagine his mate being killed.

He can always imagine himself get the nice tidy wound

across the head or through the leg or the shoulder.

But the thing that keeps most men going in battle is,

despite seeing men die left, right and centre,

they always seem to get this idea that it's not going to be them.

The risks with the gliders were incredibly high

because they had no engines.

When they were released,

the pilots had really limited means of controlling what was happening.

And what they were essentially doing

was kind of a controlled crash landing.

If they were to hit anything solid or miss their original

landing point, there was nothing that the pilot could do

but accept what was to come.

Up at the airfield, everybody went to their gliders to check

the equipment was all tied all right.

Before that glider went off,

I managed to get a large piece of chalk.

I put "Lady Irene" right along the side of it.

Lady what? Lady Irene.

It's my wife's name.

I put "Lady Irene" in great big white letters all along the side.

And I kept that bit of chalk and wouldn't let anybody else have it.

Nobody else was going to scrawl on it.

That was Lady Irene.

And then Jack Bailey, my old mate down there,

he's still down there with me, he said, "Lend us that bit of chalk."

We come from the same area, Lewisham.

I said, "I'll let you have it, Jack, and I want it back."

He put "Lewisham Special" on the other side.

Lewisham Special? Lewisham.

The borough we live in, south London.

My clearest memory was a somewhat sad one, of going round

and giving farewell.

It really was a tough time going round with a...

..a lump in your throat.

I got back to my glider and we shut the doors...

..and right on the dot of 22.56 I was airborne.

As soon as we, er, got up to 5 or 6,000 feet,

er, the men started loosening their tongues and...

..and a lot of singing went on.

We sang everything. Everything we could lay our tongues to.

Simple as that.

It was sheer nerves. Yeah?

But exhilarating nerves, if you know what I mean?

Yeah? Absolutely.

Going through my mind, apart from the plan and what

was going meet us the other end.

I mean, one couldn't help thinking of your family.

Den Brotheridge, who was the platoon commander I was closest with,

he was the oldest officer next to me.

Most of his platoon were cockneys,

and I was a Londoner myself,

and felt very much at home with cockneys.

My wife, Joy, and Margaret, Den's wife, were pregnant together,

and we discussed it quite often, Den and I.

And he, er, was obviously very worried

because the date that Margaret's child was due

was a fortnight after D-Day.

I think I heard Johnnie Howard shout out something about,

"We're over the coast."

Or words to that effect.

Now, you begin to get a little bit...

You're now over occupied Europe.

There's no way back.

The next thing, we cast off.

The singing stopped.

When we levelled out a bit at 1,000 feet,

we opened the doors of the gliders.

Now I could look forward at the fields of France,

and it had an amazing tranquillising effect on me.

And, er, it was so quiet,

it was like being on an exercise in England.

WIND GENTLY WHISTLES

The glider suddenly did a right-hand turn.

And we came to, er...

..what we knew was going to be the toughest moment of the lot -

the crash land.

I could see the glider pilot holding that bloody great machine

and driving it in at the last minute.

Those damn great footballs of sweat across his forehead

and all over his face.

Then I heard something bang.

CRASH!

More bang.

Through the top of the trees.

And then there was the most rounding splash imaginable.

RUMBLE

SILENCE

Wasn't prepared for that bump

and everything going all quiet.

You looked around. Blimey!

And for a moment, there wasn't a sound.

I felt, erm, my head had been knocked rather badly.

The first thing I saw was that the door had disappeared.

It had completely telescoped.

I could hear the glider pilots on my right,

moaning, in their cockpit,

which seemed to have been smashed.

Erm, but I was conscious that everybody in the glider was moving.

You could hear the click of the safety belts and, er, being undone.

And I knew that men were getting out of the glider

and people were pushing in front of me to get through the broken door.

As I stood there, I could see the tower of the bridge

about 50 yards from where I was standing.

I suppose that really was the most exhilarating moment of my life.

I saw the smoke bomb explode, phosphorus bomb.

I heard the thud, thud, thud in the pillbox as the grenades exploded.

And I knew we would get no more trouble from there.

And the leading platoon ran across the bridge.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE, MEN SHOUT

MACHINE-GUNS FIRE

EXPLOSION

MAN BREATHES HEAVILY

GUNFIRE

GUNFIRE CONTINUES

We were supposed to meet up with Den Brotheridge.

"Where's Den?" He said, "I don't know," he said, "I haven't seen him.

"I haven't seen anything. Only as far as here."

I started to run to go around the back end where he should have been.

I ran past a bloke lying on the floor, in the road.

Looked at him.

Went to run on. And I stopped dead.

I said, "Hang on."

Turned back, knelt down,

looked at him, it was Den Brotheridge.

HE STRAINS

COUGHING

I just knelt down beside him.

His eyes were open and his lips were moving.

Just looked at him.

I put my hand under his head to lift him up,

took my hand away and...

..got him right at the back,

round here, hand was covered in it.

I just looked at him then

and I just see him go like that a couple of times.

His eyes sort of lolled back,

just choked and lay back.

I just looked at him, right in the middle of it,

I looked at him and thought, my God!

I don't want to say... Do you know what? It...

I don't know if it was the bloke himself

or all the years of training he'd put in to do a job,

it only lasted 20 seconds, 30 seconds.

The first news I got from Den's platoon

was the fact that he'd been, er...

..hit.

And that really shook me.

And I could see it was fatal.

And, erm, the fact that I knew that Margaret, his wife,

was expecting a baby almost any time.

In the event, it arrived a fortnight later...

..er, was the top of my mind

as I saw Den carried past on that...

..erm, stretcher.

A very sad moment for myself...

..and for everybody concerned.

John Howard and his airborne troops

had managed to capture Benouville Bridge in less than 20 minutes.

But now the airborne had to keep hold of it

whilst they waited for the troops to arrive from Sword Beach.

That was going to be a long night.

And in those early hours of D-Day,

it wasn't just the British airborne troops

who were landing behind enemy lines.

All of a sudden we heard, "Are you ready?"

All the troopers shouted all at once, "Yeah. Let's go!"

The Americans dropped six parachute regiments behind enemy lines

on the morning of the D-Day invasion. About 13,000 men.

As the 'chute popped open, my head snapped forward and my feet came up.

My helmet was pushed slightly over my face.

The jolt of the opening of the 'chute soon made everything

a reality.

I looked up at my 'chute to make sure it was OK,

then looked down and I couldn't see anything but blackness.

Tom Porcella's regiment's mission

was to secure two bridges beyond Utah Beach.

One thing that the Germans had done was flood fields

in order to turn them into quagmires to slow the Allied advance down.

Of course, the paratroopers dropped into these soaked fields

and found themselves, in some cases, shoulder or neck deep in cold,

freezing water and weighed down by their own equipment.

Many of them drowned.

I had the shock of my life.

I plunged into water.

My heart was pounding

and my thoughts were running a mile a minute.

How deep is this water? Can I get free of my 'chute?

Am I too heavy? Will the weight keep me on the bottom?

All the training I had received had not prepared me for such a landing.

My eyes strained to see the landmarks,

but I could see nothing in the darkness.

I was cold and I began to shiver.

We realised that time was running out,

that if we were going to do anything, we'd better do it fast.

So we moved as fast as we could.

We knew it was very important that we leave the water before daylight.

In the past weeks, German soldiers

had been put on alert again and again.

Many of them had become complacent.

And even in the night, from the 5th to the 6th June,

when the first information went in

that there was a Allied parachute drop,

the Germans did not fully believe that this is the big invasion.

The Allies were attacking German defences right across Normandy,

and one of their targets was the Merville Battery,

a battery commanded by Raimund Steiner.

The Merville Battery was a collection of guns

within reach of Sword Beach.

The battery was stormed by British glider-borne infantry.

But at the time, Raimund was a mile away at an observation post

and therefore he could only hear what was happening.

The Allies had now started the next phase of the operation.

And this was pounding the German coastal defences

with a massive aerial bombardment.

So the plan for D-Day was that before the landing troops

got to the beaches, the Atlantic Wall in Normandy

would be absolutely bombarded.

What they knew is that it would have dreadful consequences

for French civilians.

France had been occupied by the Nazis for almost

four years at that point, to the day.

People on those shores and a little bit inland,

they didn't see the landings.

They heard the landings.

They didn't know what it was. It was like these...these rumblings.

You know, they said a thunder, erm, is it some bombardment?

I mean, there had been bombardment throughout 1944

so it wasn't completely unfamiliar.

But there was something much more intense about it.

And as daylight starts to come, then they see

that this is probably the landings,

that something is happening, and all they're thinking is,

"Let them land elsewhere.

"Let them not land where we are."

Because that's the most dangerous.

IN FRENCH:

Andre Heintz was quite a typical resistor.

He was a young man.

His whole generation during the occupation

was targeted by the forced labour service imposed by the Germans

which involved young men his age going to Germany to work for...

..for the German military cause,

and he was infuriated.

He had been seeing the grip of the Germans,

of the occupation, on France for years now.

He had been waiting for this day for a long time.

But he couldn't have known what this would really be like

and how damaging it would be for the French people.

While the Allied air forces are pounding the Atlantic Wall,

the American troop ships are anchored

several miles off the French coast.

These troop ships would contain the main body of the landing forces

to hit the Normandy beaches.

I was down in the bowels of the ship.

There were thousands of guys on this ship.

And something about a ship that stinks.

Yeah? The-the-the smell of... The smell of the kitchen is there,

the grease and the smell of the coffee and, er...

It was very uncomfortable, very, very crowded.

We talked about, er, life and, erm...

..how we expected to take it if we were wounded

and what would happen to us.

We had breakfast about 4.30am,

and the planes bombed the beach and the warships shelled it.

We got in Higgins boats, on deck,

so we didn't have to climb down rope ladders like some other boats.

The American army used Higgins boats to carry

platoons of soldiers from ship to shore.

These boats were lowered from the troop ships,

but many of the soldiers of course

would have to scramble down netting to get into them.

The boats were rising five to six feet in the air

as they were waiting to take you down.

The nets would drop into the boat

and with all this equipment, these guys climbed down.

The first wave for all the beaches

were to get into the Channel and then there was a certain amount

of time where they had to actually circle, while all the boats were

lowered and loaded, until the entire first wave was ready and in line.

Everybody got sick...

..except me.

As the boats approached the beaches,

the Allies launched a massive naval bombardment.

So that by the time the landing forces stepped of their boats,

then the guns that would have been firing at them had been destroyed.

Bom-pum-pum...

HE HISSES

A Feuerwalze is a rolling barrage.

So this means the artillery fire is approaching you closer

and closer and closer,

and then going over you and then just like a...a steam roller

of fire from the beaches further into the hinterland.

It's not only that it is a terrifying sight, it's a huge noise.

You hear people screaming.

You might see, er, some of your colleagues dying, perishing,

bodies ripped apart.

So, erm, yeah, it is...

Psychologically, this is one of the most terrifying things

soldiers probably can ever experience.

Those naval, erm, bombardments

on top of the RAF was absolutely terrific.

And it's something everybody well remembered.

And then we thought of those poor devils

coming in by sea in those landing launches.

And, er, we were damn glad that we were where we were, relatively safe.

Erm, and we certainly wouldn't have wanted to be

anywhere near the coast.

IN FRENCH:

On D-Day, lots of things went really, really well

and a few of them didn't, particularly the naval bombardment

and airborne bombardment that preceded the invasion.

Poor visibility and lack of time meant that many German

defences weren't knocked out.

And French civilians living near the targets

found themselves caught up in the chaos.

All this time, they were, they were shelling the beaches... Yeah.

..and they were bombing them, the beaches.

And the roar of the guns and the roar of the diesels

and the throbbing of the big ship itself,

you had to shout just to be heard by the guy next to you.

I had a very gentle lieutenant in charge of my platoon.

He asked me what I thought about dying.

He seemed very sad.

I expected him to take me in his arms but nothing happened.

IN GERMAN:

For German defenders like Franz Gockel,

the sight of the approaching armada must have just been terrifying.

But despite the fact that the Allies had pounded the beaches

in advance of the landings,

many of the bunkers remained intact.

The German defenders were in place to rain fire down on the beaches.

On the way in, it was rough.

As we got near the shore,

while going in, we've seen the rocket ships firing away

the rockets.

We couldn't see much cos we were supposed to keep our heads down,

and you couldn't hear anything.

The diesel motors on the boats

always reminded me of a bus back home.

By this time, it was light. Boats were getting hit.

As we got closer, they were starting to fire.

Incoming enemy fire was starting to come out toward us.

I could smell the smoke and I can hear yelling

and carrying on and those guys.

And every once in a while, a guy would look up over the side

and say, "Oh, shit!" then duck down again.

So I knew it wasn't good news.

IN GERMAN:

We didn't know where we were.

We didn't know what to do.

The ramp went down...

..and, er...

..your asshole puckered up,

you took a deep breath,

and you started to pray.

When we got there, it was just a shambles.

My friend was down on the deck.

We got on the beach, which was covered in bodies.

There were tanks coming off

and trucks coming off and sinking.

And then you just turned away, you couldn't look.

The Open University has produced a free booklet

highlighting key moments of D-Day.

To order your free copy marking the 80th anniversary, call...

Or go to...

..and follow the links to The Open University.