Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

and some strong language.

CONTINUOUS GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

SILENCE

The tide was coming in.

GUNFIRE

The bullets were hitting the water and...hitting men.

I went down the ramp.

And I went under.

Completely under? Completely under.

Reel One.

Can you tell me about D-Day itself?

IN GERMAN:

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?

GUNFIRE Your task will not be an easy one.

Your enemy is well trained,

well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

I tried to get up, but I couldn't get up.

I know there's no help coming.

I, er, said goodbye to my mother, my wife.

As I struggled,

somebody pulled me out.

After months, years, really, of planning,

the Allies finally launched their surprise attack

on the German forces guarding the Normandy coast of occupied France.

The stakes for those troops on that morning were incredibly high.

And in many respects, it was very much a now-or-never moment.

The Allies identified five beach landing areas.

Those codenamed Utah and Omaha were the American beaches.

And it was always known that it was necessary to take Omaha

because it sat between the other beaches.

For soldiers like Harry,

arriving on the beaches in these landing craft,

it's the reality of war very much in their faces, really,

for the first time that they've encountered something like this.

There'd have been a sense of shock. What they were faced with

was far greater than they had been prepared for.

At the shoreline there was a lot of wounded, dead floating.

Had to crawl in. I was exhausted, crawling over them,

I didn't know who was wounded, who was dead.

I could hear the bullets

going into the sand.

Made a little sucking sound - tsst, tsst, tsst!

Tsst, tsst, tsst!

It appeared that the beach was sucking something up.

Now I'm up there, half-drowned,

full of water, with 80lbs

of shit on my back.

GUNFIRE

And I'm alone.

The landings were planned to be based on waves of troops

hitting the beaches.

The first wave understood that they would take the highest casualties.

But they hadn't expected the volume of fire that they were experiencing,

with full force of the German fire power raining down on them.

Omaha, from the perspective of the Allied invaders,

was the most formidable beach.

Because it was surrounded by gun positions on high ground.

The Americans were incredibly vulnerable.

The Germans could just pick off these Americans

stepping off the boats, almost at will.

EXPLOSIONS

I got up to the first layer of shingles, of shale, rock,

and laid there trying to get my wind,

under fire, there was mortars hitting along the shore.

You could see the sand going straight up.

Machinegun fire and artillery shells were hitting us.

GUNFIRE

EXPLOSION

HIGH-PITCHED WHINE

I lay on my side and I open my fly and urinate.

I guess I was being neat.

Anyhow, I was soaking wet anyway, it didn't matter.

Under fire, it was sort of crazy, I guess.

Eventually I climbed up to the next layer of shale

and there was a bunch of GIs there getting hit and wounded.

We came under an intense fire

and they covered the beach

with automatic weapons fire.

It seemed like an inferno.

Did you expect that?

No, we didn't. We didn't expect it.

This was our first taste of combat.

Must have been a bit like hell?

Well, I've never been there

But if it's like that, I certainly don't want to go there.

And it's worse, I'm certain.

You could see your friends, people you'd served with for years,

floating face down or face up.

A lot of them wounded, drowned.

I think I was in shock at the time.

At times I was frightened.

There wasn't much to think about actually, except the...

..soldier, the German soldier, on the machinegun.

SOUNDS OF BATTLE

SOUNDS OF BATTLE FADE

IN GERMAN:

SHOUTING IN GERMAN

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

At Omaha, the earlier Allied naval bombardment was quite ineffective

so the German resistance nests were still intact.

Franz Gockel, his mission was to sit in his bunker

and kill as many Allied soldiers as possible.

As Franz Gockel looked down on to the beach, he'd have seen

these heavily laden soldiers, sometimes drenched from having

just got out of the water

so they're not moving particularly fast.

There was basically no natural cover at all.

There was nothing between them and these guns.

Almost nothing to stop the bullets.

At the time, our objective was to get to the cliff

across the beach, then proceed from there.

I was wounded just as I came off the boat,

and I crossed the beach on my stomach. I crawled.

It seemed like an eternity, almost.

Omaha was unusual because there was a huge expanse of sand

to cover in order to get to the cliffs, or bluffs.

But there's five gaps,

natural gaps in that elevated ground.

The Americans' key objective is to secure these natural exits

and overpower the German strong points.

This was all supposed to happen within a couple of hours.

We were supposed to land on the beach where the bluffs separated.

We came in approximately 500 to 1,000 yards east

of where we were supposed to. We didn't know what to do.

What was ahead of us was the bluffs.

The bluffs ranged anywhere from two to three storeys in height,

quite steep.

You thought everything was lost

because there were tanks coming off and trucks coming off

far out in the water and sinking, and were being hit now.

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

GUNFIRE

One guy next to me got a slug through his helmet,

missed his head cos he had socks in his helmet.

Another guy had part of his buttocks blown open.

We put sulfa powder on it,

he was numb from shock, he was laughing.

Couldn't feel it, I guess.

The Germans were pinning down the Americans to the sea line.

Which from their perspective is what they were trying to do

to ensure that these men couldn't even get as far as the cliffs.

Casualty rates were incredibly high,

and the Americans, they were starting to get really bogged down.

In some cases,

all of the men stepping off their boats were killed.

There was a very real prospect that they might actually lose the beach.

How many did you lose, do you know?

There were 17 on my boat to start with,

and only five of us came off alive.

It did horrify me to lose these men that we'd trained with,

some of them I'd grown up with from childhood.

I witnessed so many of our people getting killed.

I mean this... this is kind of difficult.

I just want to know what you saw.

I don't know whether I can do this or not.

Cut it off. Yes. OK, cut.

IN GERMAN:

Pockets of men advance across the beach

and make it to the base of the bluffs

where there are German defences, mines and obstacles.

The bluffs would be the toughest nut to crack.

Some were trying to dig in with their bare hands.

There were mortar and artillery shells landing all over the place.

So, by 8:00 you're just there?

Just there, trying to stay alive. Yeah.

While soldiers like Harry were trapped at the base of the bluffs,

pinned down and unable to move forward,

another wave of British were about to land

on the Eastern boundary of the D-Day beaches,

known as Sword Beach.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

When we got there it was just, er, a shambles.

I was one of the first three men out.

And you had to crouch on the deck then.

When I saw a thing going on on the beach,

how the hell are we going to get through that?

Unknown to James, the first wave at Sword Beach

had already suffered terrible casualties,

and this is what would have confronted him

as he approached the beach.

when the Commandos came on behind them, some of them describe it

as being like "a sea of khaki" that was laid out in front of them

due to the sheer number of casualties lying in the sand.

Our job was to, "Get off the beach as fast as you can."

That were the instructions that we're given.

So the initial mission for some of those invading on Sword Beach

was to make their way directly to Benouville Bridge -

later known as Pegasus Bridge -

in order to relieve John Howard and his men,

who'd of course seized control

of that bridge at the very, very start of the operation on D-Day.

This bridge was a really important means

of either Germany moving troops

towards the D-Day beaches,

or the Allies moving troops

off the beaches and onwards to gain

a foothold in Northern France.

Had they told you help would be coming up from the beach

in the form of the Commandos? Yes.

We must expect a counterattack any time.

And it was vital that the crossing places be held.

It was rather frightening to realise exactly what was happening

and keeping our fingers crossed for those poor buggers coming in by sea.

The German fortifications at Sword Beach were quite strong.

You had minefields, you had heavy weapons.

You had concealed machinegun positions in the houses.

So the British Forces, they had to overcome a lot of challenges

to break through the Atlantic Wall.

As far as we were concerned, to us young lads it was an adventure.

This was it, you know.

GUNFIRE

There was another chap, a fella named Charlie Hall, who, er,

came with me. I was a Bren gunner then

and Charlie was my number two.

Charlie Hall.

They liked you to have your mates.

Because two of you would work much better, you know.

You'd fight better. You know, we had the company

and the friendship of another person with you.

When we hit the beach there was only one thing in my mind,

it was to get up.

Captain Powell was in charge.

He was leading, followed by me, followed by Charlie Hall.

GUNFIRE

All I remember is a blinding flash and...

..my friend, Charlie Hall, was down on the deck.

And he was bleeding.

The blood was pumping out of his neck,

and right out of his Combined Ops badge that was on his shoulder.

And the blood was pouring out, it was pumping out, out of both places.

And I'd only just knelt down and it was only a matter of saying to him,

"Come on, Charlie, come on."

And this voice said, "Get going! You're not supposed to stop!

"Get going!" So I went.

GUNFIRE

Get up! Get up! Come on, move!

I just left.

For those men landing at Sword,

the first challenge is to get off the beach itself.

Young men like James and Warwick, they were totally vulnerable.

Behind them is the English Channel so they can't go backwards.

The only way to survive here

is to do what must have seemed to be the most counter-intuitive thing,

which is to run towards the fire

coming from the gun positions above the beach.

GUNFIRE

I had two young Marines as a signal unit.

GUNFIRE

We got ashore. One lad got killed, incidentally. Erm...

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

tanks and smoke.

Once we got into the smoke,

the whole thing seemed so unreal.

I got my, erm, camera

and, uh, I started taking pictures of the troops coming ashore.

And we started coming across bodies, British bodies,

and I remember the first one I saw was an infantryman

and what fascinated me was he had no head.

He was just lying there with no head, there was no sign of his head.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS AND SHOUTING

Get up there!

What happened next?

We grouped for about ten minutes on the beach,

until the beachmaster came along.

The most calm man

I've ever met in my life.

Came along swinging a cane.

You! Over here!

And he was just standing there shouting,

"Over here. Keep over there." Like a traffic copper.

Over here!

How long he lasted, I don't know.

I didn't stop.

GUNFIRE AND SHOUTING

People are falling and being killed and wounded

and this guy's walking through it.

And we were off the beach.

I suddenly spotted two very tiny infantrymen

marching along a very tall German soldier,

who was absolutely terrified.

He had a bandage round his face.

And these two rather cheerful Cockneys on either side of him.

I said, "Just a minute."

And they posed as though they might be posing in Piccadilly Circus

for their picture with this German in between them.

And, erm, took the classic picture.

Which we'd always been told to look out for, captured prisoners -

very good for the morale and all the rest of it.

You were saying there were lots of dead British soldiers

lying around? There's lots of dead bodies lying in the, uh,

little sand hills just below the promenade.

Did you not think that these were worth filming?

No. They would not use pictures of dead bodies.

Use pictures of dead Germans. But not pictures of dead British.

The objective of Royal Marine Commandos such as James Kelly

was to attack and take the village of Lion-Sur-Mer.

One of the interesting things about D-Day

was, I guess, the disorientation for the troops.

They're coming off these packed beaches

and finding themselves in the countryside,

trying to get their bearings. And, perhaps more importantly,

to find their rendezvous points with the rest of their troops.

I'd got off and I found the road.

And the curious thing about that, was, er,

you could have stood around and, er, you know, had a conversation

without any danger, on the corner, by the church,

and, er, it's like Sunday afternoon. Nothing... Nothing happening.

And, er, there's fellas getting, you know, murdered, er, like,

a couple of hundred yards further back down on the beach.

The invading British go from fighting on a beach

to fighting in an urban environment, in a street fight.

At any point there could be hidden German forces

training their guns upon them.

They don't know where the threat is,

so it's a completely different proposition.

The success of the landings was still in the balance.

For people on the shores, there's a sentiment of disbelief.

Families peering out of widows wondering what is happening.

They see these shadows coming up and on to the shores.

And here you start to realise,

"This is actually it."

The sense of disbelief was transforming

into a growing fear that maybe they were going to die

if they were in that line of fire.

IN FRENCH:

For Jacqueline and family, D-Day was like being in a trance.

People would have been so excited, thrilled,

that this could actually be the moment where we see

the beginning of the end of the Nazi grip on Europe.

But it's also a day where no-one knows what's going to happen next,

and you're seeing dead bodies all around you.

As the morning progresses, things weren't going anywhere near as well

on Omaha as they were on the other beaches.

Progress was really slow.

As the tide moved in,

the amount of ground that was available for the troops there

was diminishing and diminishing and diminishing.

And that represented a huge threat.

Four hours after they landed, the battle was still raging.

Omaha Beach was still in German hands.

Some of the resistance nests had already been taken by the Americans,

but largely, the Germans still held their positions.

Originally, all resistance nests had enough ammunition

to fight a prolonged fight for about 48 hours.

There was wounded and dead and chopped-up guys.

Nobody could move. They were terrorised.

We didn't know where we were. We had no officers.

My captain was killed on the beach.

Given the chaos at Omaha, much came down to individual initiative

and courage of soldiers like Chuck and Harry.

The Germans had placed wire entanglements, mines, tank traps,

and, of course, these had to be knocked out with demolition teams.

About 9:00, 10:00,

word was passed back they were going to blow the wire.

There was about four or five guys going up the bluff ahead of me.

What's remarkable about Omaha Beach is that despite the fact that many

of these specialist teams were disrupted or dead,

that soldiers like Chuck managed to assemble demolitions,

Bangalore torpedoes, to blow up wire entanglements.

We got Bangalore torpedoes.

That's, er, long tubes of TNT, screwed together,

and we put that under the wire.

Finally blew the wire. It just collapsed.

We started one at a time in between machinegun fire,

jumping over the wire.

I ran for it, tripped, fell in it, but crawled through all right.

GUNFIRE

And I could hear the explosion of the Bangalore torpedo. Yeah.

I crawled part of the way, then I found other wounded

and all that shit.

Where they had blown the...? Yeah, yeah. And another guy,

I'll never forget it, both legs were gone,

and they had torniquets around his legs.

And, uh...I had to keep going.

After we got to the top of the hill,

I looked down on the beach and it was a real mess.

There we were up there, maybe 30 guys in our area,

and we could have been swept off there with brooms

if the Germans knew there were so few of us.

GUNFIRE

We just about get up the hill when they started screaming back from me,

back down at the beach - "Come on down!

"We're going to shell the hill."

So I just came down.

Say the bluff was like, er, let's assume the bluff was

two and a half storeys high,

I came down to about one storey off sea level.

That was a stupid thing to do. And the USS Arkansas opened fire.

HEAVY ARTILLERY

By late morning, the situation at Omaha seemed quite desperate.

At one point the Allied commanders thought they would have to pull out

and end the attempt to take Omaha Beach.

The Allies brought up naval gunfire

to try and knock out the German defences,

to pave the way for the American infantry to get off the beach.

I could see that these giant shells were blowing the hill apart.

They were coming over my head.

You ever sit in the front row of a movie, looking up at the screen?

That's the way it looked.

The number of German soldiers deployed at Omaha Beach

in these resistance nests was astonishingly low.

So we're only talking about several hundred soldiers.

Even though they killed hundreds of enemy soldiers,

it was still no end to it

because the Americans and the British

were pumping men and material into the beachheads,

and the German soldiers didn't get the expected reinforcements.

So whilst at first it might have felt like

they had this huge advantage,

by sheer weight of numbers and effort and tenacity,

the Americans start to turn the tide of battle in their favour.

One by one, they overran resistance nests

and the German soldiers above Omaha were either killed,

captured or, like Franz Gockel, they retreated.

The Allies had succeeded in securing the other four beaches.

For the infantry, having advanced,

what they might have thought was the worst experience was behind them,

but the real battles and the real slugging matches

were about to begin.

The Germans were mobilising thousands of troops

from across occupied France.

But the full force of the German Tank Divisions

hadn't yet been unleashed.

The Panzer Lehr Division is a German elite division.

So it is one of the big trump cards in the German defence.

But for a young soldier like Herbert Meier, the problem is

many of the tanks can only be activated

on Hitler's personal order.

And as he is not convinced that this is the big landing,

they are released only in the afternoon of the 6th of June.

So, crucial hours are lost for the Germans.

Nazi propaganda had told these young men,

"Your task is to throw the Allies back into the sea

"and then we have still a chance to win the war."

So now for the Americans and for the Germans

there are only two options - kill or be killed.

By early afternoon,

Commando troops had got past the Germans on Sword Beach,

and James Kelly and his unit were on the outskirts of Lion-sur-Mer.

So they were just there, this pocket of men

not knowing where the enemy was.

And, of course, that renders you very vulnerable

because it means that the threat can come from any direction.

And what happened? Can you take me through a step-by-step?

We were running,

and I didn't think the Germans were really shooting at us.

GUNFIRE

Until I turned round and I found myself by myself.

Um, you know, panic crept in.

I couldn't see Captain Powell.

And then I spotted him but he was lying on the ground,

er, groaning, you know. So I said, "Come on, let's get out of here!"

He had multiple wounds on him.

I was just trying to help him.

I was sort of, er, giggling and laughing and crying,

like...like a... I don't know, like a frightened child, I suppose.

They're the things that amazed me, you know, about war,

you know, they can be so dramatic and tense,

and then you can have these very, very strange things happening in it.

Within seconds - where it came from, I don't know -

they had jeeps which were converted

into a sort of very fragile type of ambulance,

and that was the last I saw of Captain Powell.

When that jeep drove away,

er, the loneliness that I felt...

..standing there by myself, bereft.

And I realised just how... how immature that I must be,

you know, young, green, whatever, call it what you like.

I just cried my eyes out.

Oh... Yeah.

Yeah, I just stood there and cried, I did.

British Commandos like James were tasked with the objective

of advancing and taking and seizing German strategic positions.

And one key objective for some of them

was to get to Benouville Bridge where Major John Howard

and his glider troops had landed the night before.

From 12:00 onwards we'd been expecting to see

and hear the Commandos.

It went on very...very, very wearing. Very wearing indeed.

And all the time you can...

You can feel movement out there and closer contact coming.

We were to blow a bugle call

once we saw them coming down from the beaches.

We heard a bugle playing.

We heard this bugle.

It was, "Quiet, listen."

And everybody cheered.

That's what we was waiting for.

It was the Commandos,

complete with what we really needed - a squadron of tanks.

I'll never forget the sight. Of course we went potty, didn't we?

Er, a lot of joking went on between our troops and theirs,

asking where the bloody hell they'd been, you know,

and all that sort of business.

We opened up the Cafe Gondree alongside the bridge.

The patron was George Gondree.

And the first thing George Gondree did, bless him,

went down into his garden and dug up nearly 100 bottles of champagne

that he'd buried away in the garden, away from the Germans.

And all of a sudden Monsieur Gondree

came out with a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses.

I looked at Gondree, I said, "Yes, Oui, oui, oui!" Oh, dear!

Oh, was that good! I don't know...

Well, it was champagne, I know it was champagne.

It could have been cider, it could have been anything,

but, oh, boy, did it go down well! It really went down well.

And of course, that's what you want to do in battle, is to,

to give vent to your feelings that were pent up,

you're subjected to all this pressure,

and to have a good shout,

releases it all.

For John Howard and the whole of D Company

it was a moment of really kind of... qualified happiness.

Because they knew that this was really just the beginning.

There was so much more to do.

And the scale of the task that was ahead of them

and they must have known that not all of them

would live to see the end of all the days ahead.

Getting across the beaches and taking the costal towns

was just the beginning of the invasion.

The key objective for the British commanders on D-Day

was to take Caen.

The idea had been that the troops would get across the beaches

and get inland and take the city.

But trying to get eight miles to Caen on the first day is...

Is hugely ambitious.

Taking Caen was crucial because, of course,

they understand that they are in a race with the Germans.

Caen is a hub of communications, of roads, rail, canals.

And it's how you access the rest of France beyond.

So they are going to pound Caen

in order to disrupt and destroy the German defenders.

IN FRENCH:

The city became engulfed in flames.

Nobody would have anticipated

that they would have caused so much death,

dust, flames and terror.

French civilians hadn't had time to evacuate.

And all of a sudden they were trapped.

The bombing of Caen was one of those moments

where warfare came to the city, it came to the people.

There's hundreds of civilian casualties

and they destroy some of the targets,

but the Allies still have a huge way to go.

We didn't know where we were. We had no ordnances.

We were hungry and tired and...

And scared.

I worked my way to go inland...

..to a house, bombed-out house, just the walls were up.

There I located some of my buddies from my company.

A lot of them didn't even have rifles, they were

just walking around in a daze.

The Sergeant from my company ran up the path,

yelling down that it was full of mines.

My best buddy from Chicago, named David...

..put on his glasses and said, "Now I can see them."

Ten minutes later he was killed.

I felt sick about it.

Once the Allies get further inland,

they are dragged into street fighting in some of the villages.

And the Germans in this part of Normandy have got also

some fortified positions inland.

The German soldiers had been told again and again,

"This is a battle we have to win. This is a battle we WILL win."

The rest of the day was spent like a bunch of guerrilla fighters.

Just a jumble of...

Of fright and running and firing and, er...

..disappearing and hiding and, er, panic, and coolness.

And guys were so trigger happy

that if we were suspicious of a farmhouse or something,

we threw the hand grenade.

I think we killed...

..French farmers.

They were Resistance people, or innocent people,

or they worked for the Germans, but we had no time.

By early evening on D-Day they had taken the five beaches.

The front line has moved to a few miles inland.

Not particularly far at this stage.

And the Germans respond.

They're in no doubt now that this is the big Allied invasion

and they've got to pull out all the stops.

Herbert Meier's unit didn't get on their way

until early evening from their base 100 miles south of the coast.

When they are ordered to march through the Normandy front,

they want to be as quickly as possible on the beaches.

So they planned to travel through the night.

You need to bear in mind, from the Germans' perspective,

everything is on the line as well for them.

There was this sense that it should still have been possible

to drive the Allies back, back into the water.

The Allies had got this foothold,

but the battle for Normandy has barely begun.

The Allies didn't waste any time bringing in more ships

with supplies for their troops. Without enough food, ammunition

and replacements of weapons and equipment,

they would be vulnerable to German counterattacks.

On the evening of D-Day, the troops are exhausted.

I mean physically, they had not slept, they have not eaten,

they have not had anything to drink.

They are, I think, mentally and physically at the end.

I got in a ditch near a road, it was getting dark.

I had my apple that was left over from breakfast.

Tried to get some sleep, though it was in a ditch.

That night a few German planes come over and started bombing us,

so we didn't get

a heck of a lot of sleep.

Now lay ahead the long, hard slog to liberate France.

And maybe you wouldn't survive the next few days, let alone weeks.

From then on things, got significantly harder,

because it stopped being about speed of attack

based on surprise.

Both sides, from this point onwards,

would become locked in this brutal battle of wills and barbarity.

We decided to get into the middle of this field

so we could see that someone was creeping up on us.

And we decided to dig a foxhole.

We were exhausted, dead tired and

blank of thoughts.

We tried to dig and the sergeant said to me after a while,

"Ah, fuck it, Parley, let's just sit down here,

"and if they come for us we take as many as we can."

And that's the way I spent the night. We sat back-to-back...

..waiting for someone to come and get us.

With all this uncertainty of not knowing where we were going,

fear began to grip us.

I was scared as hell.

I couldn't imagine what was going on ahead.

I was witness to a number of what I would call

instances of butchery, where we did capture a German or two.

We were well below strength. It were a very dangerous situation.

And we had a few fellas killed.

Every time somebody go up a hill, somebody's not coming back.

And you just hope that you make it.

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.