Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

The morning of June 7th,

you've got to imagine the two of us waking up in this field.

It's quiet, and...

..and we don't know which way we want to go.

Where is the enemy?

Where is the line?

And you have to guess.

And, boy, that's what you call being scared shitless.

Reel One.

Can you tell me about D-Day itself?

Testing, testing. One, two, three.

Testing, testing. One, two, three. All right, we're on.

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?

ARCHIVE: Your task will not be an easy one.

Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped and battle-hardened.

He will fight savagely.

TAPE REEL SPINS UP

Normandy, 7th of June, 1944.

Daylight was coming upon us fast.

So I give the trooper alongside of me a poke and I says,

"You'd better get your stuff together, it's almost daylight."

And I'm looking at the sky,

and I said, "By God, I welcome the daylight.

"Now we can get on the move and maybe can warm up a bit."

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

fear began to grip us.

I know I was scared as hell.

I couldn't imagine what was going on.

Those men who'd survived the beaches on D-Day

would have woken up the next morning -

if they'd been asleep at all - completely exhausted.

Some of them had seen their friends killed on those beaches,

or they'd lost their commanders.

They have no idea how close the enemy is.

So there's this air of fear and uncertainty

as they go into the next day.

They quite literally had no idea what was to come.

The battle ahead would last a gruelling three months,

and it would be a turning point in the entire war.

What D-Day had done was... was to create a foothold.

But that foothold would be completely meaningless

if further progress through France wasn't achieved.

The key strategic objective for the British

and the Canadians in the Battle of Normandy was to capture Caen.

It was this hub of communication, of roads, of railways.

There was an airfield just nearby.

So controlling Caen would allow the Allies

to advance, and ultimately push the Nazis out of France

and back to Germany.

But with an inevitable counterattack coming from the Germans,

the Allies had no time to waste.

Tell me about the events following D-Day.

We moved off soon after dawn.

We had to move down and occupy Escoville.

This had been planned in the UK...

..and we'd studied maps and photographs.

John's next objective would be advancing towards Escoville.

Escoville is a crucial element in the taking of Caen.

It was on a ridge overlooking Caen to the north-east,

and taking it would be important for the Allies

to keep an eye on what the Germans were doing.

I think we got a couple of hours' sleep, no more than that.

I still can't remember when we ate.

I think we had some grub in our packs or something,

I can't quite remember.

And then it was up, and we're moving to Escoville.

Forces that were protecting Escoville were of a very

different order to the ones like John and Wally

would have been met by on D-Day itself.

PHONE RINGS

Werner Kortenhaus is a young corporal

in the 21st Panzer Division.

They were an elite division, they are better equipped,

better trained than the average German division.

On the morning of the 7th of June,

they prepare for a big counteroffensive.

At this point, tens of thousands of German soldiers are on their way

to the Normandy front. Tank formations, heavily armed.

The German soldiers have been told again and again,

"This is a decisive battle of the war, so you don't give up.

"This is a battle we WILL win."

GUNFIRE

We suddenly came under very heavy fire.

Whether or not it was a tank or what, I don't know.

But it was certainly a propelled vehicle.

John Howard and his men

were met by German tanks waiting to unleash a horrifying counterattack.

We lost communication with our HQ.

I thought I'd go round and find out what damage had been done

to the other platoons.

I went forward,

put my binoculars to my eyes...

..and then there was a "zip",

and I was knocked out.

ZIP, BANG

HIGH-PITCHED TONE

When I came round, there was blood on my head and face,

and I had a hell of a headache.

Somebody was looking at me, had taken my helmet off to see

what was wrong, and told me that I got a bullet through my helmet.

And there it was, dead centre.

Whether I passed out again or not, I don't know.

But the whole of that half hour or hour is very hazy.

They all thought you were dead.

Yes, I believe some did.

People have told me that afterwards.

During that time we were...

..strafed by air...

..and counterattacked very heavily by 21 Panzer.

DISTANT GUNFIRE

Eventually, John and the men alongside him were forced

to withdraw, when it became clear that their assault

on Escoville wasn't going to be successful -

that it was just going to lead to catastrophic losses.

I went in with 121 men

and came out with 52.

As Johnny may have told you, we took a hell of a beating there.

Um...

..it took me a long time to get over those casualties at Escoville.

So much so, that...

..I became very, very depressed.

Escoville was a direct confrontation

with the reality of what the Battle of Normandy would really be like.

It was clearly going to be brutal

and it was going to take a huge toll -

not just on the health and wellbeing - and lives - of the people who

were being asked to wage it - but also on their minds, too.

This was going to be a victory that, if it was going to be secured,

would have to be ground out.

Ultimately, the force that could provide the greatest firepower

would win this battle.

This was going to be a battle of machines, of ammunition,

supplies and reinforcements.

So on the beaches the activity, if anything, is increasing.

So the first question, if you would just tell me your name

and what unit you were in.

My name is Allen Price,

I was with the 3275th Quartermaster Service Company.

And a Quartermaster Service Company was an outfit that serviced

all the other units.

Everything to make the front line clear.

What had they told you beforehand to expect?

Expect hell.

And it was the truth.

They didn't lie to us about that.

Everybody started going inland, but we stayed on the beach

another two or three days cleaning the beach up.

Whatever they asked us to do, we did it.

Picking up the dead.

Now that's a stinking job.

A leg here, and an arm there, and a head here.

Bodies in the water, blood all over the place.

It was horrible.

I had nightmares when I first came home, I had nightmares.

And, er, I still don't like to talk about it.

The beaches would have been littered with corpses, broken machines,

ruined German defences,

and it had to be cleared.

Because the follow-on forces and follow-on supplies

had to be landed on the beaches.

If we didn't break our butts to get the gas, the ammo and the food

up to them, they'd have been up shit creek without a paddle.

While the British front line was pushing towards Caen,

the Americans were trying to get to Cherbourg.

Cherbourg was critical to the Germans AND the Allies

because it was a deep water port,

and that meant a faster route to bring in supplies.

But getting to Cherbourg would be tough for the Americans.

They were about to face a steep learning curve in the battle ahead.

Combat in Europe...

..was actually a simple, stupid procedure.

You dig in for the night,

get up early in the morning...

..walk until you started to get killed,

then you have a battle during the day.

Sundown would come, you dig in.

Germans would move back, start all over again.

This would go day after day, after day, after day.

As the Allies advance inland towards Caen and Cherbourg,

they were forced to progress through this landscape in Normandy.

And this landscape was interlaced with these really dense hedgerows.

Very thick, very tall, very well established.

And that represents a real problem for an invading force,

because they can't see over them, they can't see through them

and they can't move through them.

And that really, really favours the defender.

I want to tell you something about the hedgerows.

You've heard about the hedgerows? Mm-hm.

The hedgerows were...boundaries...

..and these became barriers, or emplacements,

where we fought one another.

We would sometimes fight all day, with the Germans firing down on us.

If we came over one of the hedgerows and dropped into the field

with the hedgerow toward our back, we were dead. Mm-hm.

Cos they would be mounting their machine guns.

And so it was guesswork, running parallel trying to flank 'em.

They were like mazes.

The Allies could not play their biggest trump -

their artillery - there, because it was difficult to observe

where the Germans actually are.

They had to pull through from field to field, and each time they had

just conquered a field, the Germans were waiting in the next field.

There were about six of us, about two feet apart, heads down,

squatting walk along a hedgerow.

And suddenly there was this pop...and...

..the sergeant's head was blown apart, through the helmet,

and left his skull like a saucer

and he fell over into my arms.

We had not been trained for hedgerow fighting.

And I think I've carried that grudge for years.

I had terrific training...

..for the assault and self-preservation,

killing the enemy...

..but they never told me about the hedgerows.

The ongoing campaign through Normandy became a real slog

as they were confronted with this landscape.

It really slowed the Americans' advance on Cherbourg.

As the Americans were pushing toward Cherbourg,

British commandos were tasked with taking

German strongpoints as the British advanced towards Caen.

We were detailed for a job a mile and a half inland.

There was an underground radar station

which had about 300 or 400 German troops in it.

The Douvres radar station

was an incredibly important position to take.

It was a communications hub.

It was a vast network of underground bunkers which had been

sending vital intelligence back to German headquarters in Caen.

The station was close to the landing beaches,

and Warwick and James' commando unit was sent to take it.

They had hoped to capture this on the first day.

But in actual fact they didn't.

We only mustered about 30 men,

where we should have had something like about 100 and odd.

So we were well below strength.

The radar station was becoming a thorn in the side of the Allies,

that the Allies had to smash

to move beyond and advance into France.

When we arrived there, there must have been about 600 yards

of dead flat open field.

And you could see the wire, and the bunkers, and the gun emplacements

on top of these concrete bunkers that they had.

It was a minefield surrounding it.

And we had to clear the mines before we could actually go in.

It'd be a very dangerous situation.

And entrenched underneath the radar station,

there were hundreds of German soldiers,

so it was imperative that the Allies took it as quickly as they could.

The German defences were so strong

that the commandos needed to call in specialist units.

And we did many, many little patrols against it

from different angles.

It was very well booby-trapped.

So we mounted this big fighting patrol.

And we had Bangalore torpedoes, which the engineers brought.

They were like scaffolding tubes, filled with high explosives.

You could link them all together, you see.

You'd have one big, long scaffolding pole eventually.

The idea was that we'd blast all the wire out the way

and detonate any mines that were underneath it.

The Germans did open up straight away.

As soon as the explosion had gone,

we started to run, and they started to fire.

It was flashing all over the place.

After several days of patrolling the station,

they were finally able to mount an attack strong enough

to reach the bunkers.

Eventually, the time come when the powers that be say,

"Right, enough's enough, take them out."

So we were given a couple of Churchill tanks,

and they trundled up over the wire

and blew up any anti-personnel mines, and we followed behind.

BULLETS RICOCHET

CRY OF PAIN

And that was most curious attack I've ever known in my life.

We all wandered in, at the back of these tanks, spread out,

and occupied the...

..various positions that the Germans had built there.

And we did that in broad daylight.

The Germans were all underground.

Eventually, they all came out.

So there were about 300 of them.

They surrendered then.

Packed it up altogether.

So we had a little relaxez-vous day after that.

We were allowed to wash and clean up

and generally relax completely, you know.

I remember the officer in charge of this underground radar station.

I don't know whether he was SS or not, but he was tall,

he was arrogant, and he had a lovely leather raincoat, overcoat...

..which I liked.

So I asked my... I asked my Sergeant Major if I could have it.

And he went over to this bloke and said, "Take it off."

Which he did.

And the Sergeant Major gave it to me,

and I used it for months as a ground sheet in my foxholes.

Various places.

Lovely coat.

All the edges of the Allied invasion zone,

pockets of German strongholds had resisted capture.

One of the largest was the Merville Gun Battery,

and it was repeatedly attacked by the Allied troops.

Raimund was an interesting character

because he was politically

an opponent to the Nazis, but still he's an officer

serving for the Germans, knowing that this is probably not the right

cause he's fighting for, but still felt loyalty towards his men.

MAN SINGS IN DISTANCE

PHONE RINGS

After struggling, trying to progress towards Caen,

it became really clear to British forces

that actually capturing Caen was not going to be straightforward at all,

as any route towards it

was increasingly well reinforced by Germans in the area.

Getting to the city itself became nigh on impossible.

And, for that very reason, the Allies turned to increasingly

applying air power - bombing Caen -

in order to break the German defence.

Nobody quite expected that

extent of bombing over Caen

and over Normandy in those days.

Bombing is, you know, inaccurate at the best of times.

All around are the homes, the neighbourhoods

and the workplaces of French civilians.

The city was subject to this bombardment,

with huge consequences for the civilian population.

But it was considered to be so necessary

to target the German tanks, servicemen,

resources in the area,

that it was a price worth paying.

Andre had been working secretly with the Resistance for a very long time.

And when the bombing started to come

he went with his sister to the hospital, you know,

helping anyone he could.

The Germans threw as many of their forces as they could into

defending Caen, because they knew that was the gateway into France.

They had to hold it.

But it came at the expense of the defence of Cherbourg.

The advantage of that for the Allies

was that the American forces could advance with greater ease.

We were marching to a village.

Everywhere you looked, you could see homes were damaged,

destroyed, blown up.

It was a horrible sight to see.

And I thought to myself,

"What the hell have we done to these people over here in their houses?

"My God!"

Don't forget, the French were supposed to be our friends

and all that.

And I thought to myself,

"This is the price that they have to pay for their freedom.

"They have to sacrifice their lives, their homes.

"It's a horrible thing."

After a grinding and bloody four-day battle,

the Americans finally manage to take the port of Cherbourg.

But they discovered that the German garrison, who'd been in retreat,

had destroyed the port instillations.

Now this meant that they couldn't use it

for those all-important supplies.

They turn south towards the town of Saint-Lo...

..and relied more than ever on supplies

being brought up to them from the landing beaches by road.

We were up at Saint-Lo.

23rd Regiment of the 2nd Infantry Division...

..got annihilated up there,

and we had to go up there and clean all them bodies up.

And we had a few fellas killed.

Some wounded.

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

Every time you go on a detail, somebody's not coming back.

Allen was running supplies up to the front line,

part of the quartermaster battalion,

which was a predominantly black unit.

The Army was segregated.

Blacks served in separate units

and were subjected to the exact same kind of racism

they experienced in the United States.

Allen was coming from a country where blacks, in the South,

couldn't drink out of the same water fountain as white people.

You couldn't share the same bathrooms.

You couldn't go to the same schools.

When we was in England, seven of us went over,

tried to get in the Paratroopers.

Sergeant asked us, he said, "What do you want?"

I said, "We understand you're looking for Paratroopers."

He said, "You see anybody in this room your colour?"

We said, "No." He said, "Get the hell out!"

They wouldn't accept us.

So what are you going to do? It's a hell of a thing.

You wanted to fight?

Yeah, we wanted to fight.

What the hell we go into service for? To fight.

It was very, very hard to be a black soldier in the US Army.

You were almost always put in roles

that were subservient to white people.

They weren't allowed to fight with dignity on the front lines.

And they liked to keep you far away from anything where glory

could happen, where you could be a hero,

where you were doing something honourable.

We was in the Black Army, and they were the White Army.

We were second-class citizens.

We did all the dirty work.

And I admired the fellas up there who were being popped,

and we supplied - and we got popped at

going up to take supplies to them.

See, that's what hurt me.

And when you go up there at chow time,

some of them didn't want to feed you.

And after you've brought them food, and ammo, and gas and water

and all that other stuff you bring up to 'em,

and they don't want to feed you.

That's what I got ticked off at.

Still makes you angry when you talk about it?

That's the way they was taught to think.

They were superior to anything other than white.

They were superior. So, that's the way they was taught.

As collective Allied forces attempt to press German defences

out of Caen, the war became one of attacks and counterattacks.

Progress was very slow, and casualty rates were incredibly high.

RAPID GUNFIRE

James and the commandos were stuck,

trying to hold the eastern edge of the Allied territory

whilst losing men at an appalling rate.

It was very hard going,

cos they never stopped firing at us.

Somebody was always shooting at us.

And you've got to lie concealed all through the day.

You can't drink or eat properly

if your movement is the thing that's going to give you away.

DISTANT GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

Yeah, I was promoted to a corporal.

When I said I didn't want to be a corporal, and I didn't want

any responsibility... I said, "I don't want to do that."

So they said, "Well, you're already doing it."

Looking after other people became the thing with me,

more than looking after myself.

It was always the feeling there that the more of these things we do,

the more of the troop will disappear.

And, you know, your turn will come - you know, eventually.

My men were in a...

..pretty poor state.

Some of the men actually were on the breaking point.

They were ready to refuse, without they got some rest.

It's a very hard thing to tell men...you know,

to ask a man to go over there and do this and do that,

knowing that he's likely to be killed.

And, really, you know, you're sending him to his death.

We had been joined by some of these British commandos

and our own Rangers and Paratroopers.

I thought I was crazy - They were absolutely crazy.

I...was witness to a number of what I would call instances of butchery,

where we did capture a German or two and, er...

..I was witness to throat-cutting and disembowelment.

We were crazy.

It was kind of creepy, because...

..I considered myself a good soldier

and those few hours I was involved...

..with what I would say was madness.

One of the things which really marks out the Normandy campaign

from D-Day onwards is the level of brutality.

Both sides have been told that these people are

a kind of an existential threat to them.

So there's two sides that are like coiled springs.

And when they come face to face, they absolutely go at each other.

This is extraordinarily bloody and brutal.

It becomes particularly brutal when you've got formations

fighting against each other which consider themselves to be elite.

So particularly when you see SS troops fighting against US

Paratroopers, you see quite a lot of atrocities happening on both sides.

I asked, "What about my Corporal of our company?"

And somebody related a story that they found his body.

The Germans - they bayoneted, they mutilated his body and they cut...

They cut his testicles and his penis off

and they stuffed them in his mouth.

We found GI corpses hung from trees and burnt.

Burnt alive.

The danger for the Allies is that

the longer that this campaign

was going on, and the more attritional it was becoming,

morale was starting to drift

lower and lower and lower.

But one thing that the Allies did have very much

going in their favour was ongoing air superiority.

If the Allies could cut off the German supply chains,

they'd have a much better chance of winning the battle.

So they destroyed railways, they destroyed roads...

..ammunitions dumps, tanks...

..convoys that they saw moving.

Anything to hold the Germans up.

Well, over time, that started to really take a toll on the Germans,

because they weren't able to reinforce as quickly

as they otherwise would have been.

And so aerial bombardment really helped the Allies.

We were marching through a village that was heavily damaged.

It was like a nightmare. It was really horrible.

There were dead Germans lying all over the place.

The front part of a house was still standing.

All that remained was a window and a door.

I saw a rose vine clinging to the wall.

And I said to myself, "This rose is alive.

"Among all this death and destruction over here, it's alive."

And, to me, it seemed like it was a direct defiance

to all the horrors that man can create...

..and there it stood.

I went over to the wall and I picked about three of them off of the vine.

And we marched through the village.

No-one spoke.

Everything was quiet.

You could smell the death of the day.

You could smell it. You felt it.

You felt all the death that... that had happened that day.

I don't why I told you this, I just want you to know -

I wanted you to know that it wasn't... It wasn't too easy.

There was a body in this road.

And it's not the first body we've seen.

I noticed that the head was gone, and it was just a torso left

and there was a big hole, er...

..in their ribcage.

I couldn't believe it was a human being.

What got me all upset,

that some of the GIs, as they marched,

they were eating their K-rations,

they were throwing the wrappers and cans inside this body.

My decency was stunned.

I couldn't believe - even if we were out in war -

that we'd have such disrespect

for...for the remains of a human body.

I just couldn't believe it.

I was wondering, why? Why did they... Why did they do this?

And, er... Well, the only reason I could think of was...

..that they felt that a soldier's life is...

..is something to be wasted, to be discarded like...trash.

The body means nothing after you're dead, only when you're alive.

I took the roses that I had, and I dropped them in...

..in the cavity of the body, and I...just kept going.

But it's something I'll never forget.

By July, the Allies had been battling in Normandy for weeks.

They needed a final push.

It was decided that the only way to really free Caen of the Germans

was to absolutely obliterate the city.

Carpet bombing was a strategy during the war.

And here you see, in Caen, that strategy happening.

BOMBS WHISTLE

But no-one in Normandy had experienced

anything on this scale before.

Thousands of tons of bombs hit the city.

It's horrifying.

The sound is deafening, people are running.

Time would have stopped for Andre.

He was drawn into a moment of urgency,

responding to immediate needs of those around him.

The imprint after this bombing campaign would be so heavy

on the civilians in Caen and on the town as a whole.

It would last for not years, but decades.

It would traumatise generations of families who would live with

this memory of greyness, of rubble, of death

for years to come.

The attack on Caen was considered to be

one of the heaviest air attacks in the Second World War.

The Germans were overpowered, and when the Allies moved in,

the Germans were either killed, captured, or they fled.

The opening the door at Caen

opened the road towards Paris,

and ultimately towards victory.

It puts the Allies in a position to finally liberate France

and then to move on towards Germany

and the liberation of all of mainland Europe.

What was the attitude of civilians towards you in Normandy?

Oh, fantastic.

Absolutely...fantastic.

Well, you can imagine, can't they?

They've have had four... four-and-a-half years of captivity

and they're now, for want of a better term, they're free,

and now they're liberated

and they were...

..delighted.

Winning the Battle of Normandy was absolutely essential

in order to move onwards

and go on to win the Second World War.

But from the Allies' perspective, D-Day was a massive gamble,

it was a huge risk.

It was a calculated risk, but it was a risk nonetheless.

And had it not succeeded, it's impossible to know

what the consequences would have been.

This period is when you see the whole of humanity

and everything that humans are capable of -

from the most glorious aspects of it,

to its most horrendous aspects.

This kind of spectrum of... of humanity and inhumanity,

which live side-by-side.

Despite all the awful things that had happened to me and mine,

I'm proud, very proud indeed to be a Royal Marine.

ENGINE RUMBLES

I was very proud of the company.

I hope I showed it at the time.

We came back to Bulford

in the same rooms we were in before we, er, left.

I'm trying to remember how many chaps

of the original company I had then.

Less than half.

And none of my original officers.

What would you say to the guys who you lost?

How would you remember those guys?

One hell of an outfit.

That's how I remember.

I wouldn't want to serve with a better bunch of fellas.

Would you do it again? If you were called up?

Yeah.

This is my country.

Yep.

This is my country. The only home I ever known.

What am I do?

You talk to most Afro-Americans, they'll tell you -

I'd go back, if I was called up.

As we marched towards the boat,

I remembered the people of Normandy.

Their country was ravaged.

Their lives changed forever.

I remember the dead enemy soldiers who had once been alive

and young, as fearful as we.

My thoughts were of all the troopers who died

and we were leaving behind.

Suddenly it felt that I was all alone.

I realised I was returning to England without my buddies.

I was the only one of 17 men who jumped with me on D-Day to return.

Tears still running down my face,

I turned toward the fields of Normandy,

and I gave a farewell salute to all those we left

in the swamps and the fields and the hedgerows.

We had come with so many...

..and we are now leaving with so few.

I think the one thing that comes out of it all,

looking back over the years, was the sheer bloody waste.

You know, it's a waste.

Let's face it, you could put it down to any war that ever was.

A small one, big one, or what have you.

The sheer bloody waste.

God!

Experience should teach us something.

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.