Original subtitles

- This structure is a fortress.

- These weren't temporary defensive fortifications.

This stuff was built, and it was built to last.

- This isn't a battery.

It's an entire complex.

- [Narrator] 1944, one mile from Omaha Beach in Normandy,

the Nazis built a massive 42-acre complex

known as the Maisy Batteries.

Positioned near the French village of Grandcamp-Maisy,

the base's construction is shrouded in such secrecy

the Resistance isn't even privy to its existence.

- This base was built under extreme secrecy.

- [Narrator] Once the Maisy complex is conquered

by the Allies, it sinks back into mystery.

- A battery the size of four football fields would have

only vanished if there was some sort of conspiracy.

- [Narrator] Then, one man, chancing

upon a D-Day map, begins to unravel mysteries.

- This story is still alive.

There is still a mystery to unfold.

- [Narrator] Why did the Germans go to such great lengths

to build Maisy in complete secrecy?

Why was it buried?

How did a crucial piece of D-Day history completely vanish?

Was it perhaps meant to be forgotten?

[dramatic instrumental music]

[metal doors slamming]

The Allied assault on Omaha, Utah, and Pointe du Hoc

on D-Day are some of the most iconic

battles in the history of warfare.

For hours, a hailstorm of artillery and gunfire

rained down on wave after wave of Americans

who seemed doomed to fail in the early hours of D-Day.

For decades, historians have debated all facets of that day.

The secrets of one base in Normandy may yield new answers.

- People think that we know all

there is to know about history.

We don't the half of it.

We're still uncovering secrets about the war.

- [Narrator] Historian Gary Sterne

is an avid collector of war artifacts and uniforms.

He's followed the trail of an unusual old map

found in the pocket of a Ranger's uniform,

and it led him here.

[dramatic instrumental music]

The map describes an area of high resistance.

- I wasn't looking for a map when I found the uniform.

I was at a show in Ohio actually, and the map was

in a pair of trousers under a table for sale.

On it was marked a small area

which said area of high resistance.

It was one of those eureka moments,

where you think, hang on, this might have some significance.

- Think about it for a second.

60 years after the fact, this little tiny map

is pulled out of a uniform that Gary's bought,

and suddenly it unfurls not just accepted fact

but a completely new story in D-Day.

- The problem was when I went in history books,

there's nothing on Maisy.

Maisy doesn't exist historically.

So, I decided next time I came over to France,

I would investigate this piece of land.

I was looking for this area, this field,

that was marked high resistance place.

So, I drove down a country road

looking with the map on my knee,

and I found a field with tall grass

and I literally tripped up over a chimney pot.

And from that I deduced that I stood

on the roof of a building and not on the floor

of building that had been destroyed during the battle.

- When Gary literally trips over and finds

this complex network of structures,

it's mind boggling that this was buried,

that we didn't know about this

until pretty recently, only 10, 15 years ago.

- Now, at the time of findin' the site,

I was just getting blank looks from people

when I said, there's something in the fields over there.

I approached many of the landowners in the area,

and I managed to buy 32 parcels of land.

After that, we spent 10, 11, 12 weeks

with a 20-ton digger, and we found a tunnel and a trench.

And we advanced for weeks and weeks around the site,

and we would follow the blackened earth of the trench.

The digger would hit the concrete, cling.

We would find another building.

We'd have to go and dig the building out by hand.

Eventually, we got to the point where we are now,

where we have 2.5 miles of trenches,

completed, dug, restored.

This story is part of D-Day history,

and it has been lost and buried.

And the rest of the village grew up

not knowing that there was anything on the fields here.

- What I find absolutely astounding is that

in the months and the years after the invasion,

the farmers and the local folk had absolutely

no idea what was buried right underneath their feet.

Happily just gettin' on about their everyday business

with not a clue that something that played

such a huge role in D-Day was right there.

- Until Gary uncovers this treasure trail

of unaccepted facts, most historians

have moved past Maisy, just like the locals have.

Nobody understands the severity and the enormity

of the complex there and its importance to D-Day.

- [Narrator] The mysterious base has the potential

to challenge a decades old history.

June 1943, the fortifications at Maisy are built

by forced Czechoslovakian, Russian, and Polish labor.

The base is built under such secrecy that none of the

neighboring townspeople surrounding the fortifications

are allowed into the secret base, and none of the

forced laborers inside are allowed out.

- Despite information from air reconnaissance

and intel from the like Resistance,

the Germans were still able to build secret bases.

- At this point the Germans have become masters

at one of the key ingredients in winning a war, secrecy.

- There was obviously a reason to keep this a secret.

This was a German occupied area,

and they didn't want the locals to know

anything about what was happening.

How they achieved that was by bringing in forced labor.

There was no locals allowed to work on this.

- Folks are taken from labor camps,

prisoners of war, concentration camps,

the worst, most inhumane of conditions and told to work.

If you do talk, that's the end.

- I met the local milkman.

He told me that he couldn't deliver milk to the site.

He had to stand outside and deliver it to the entrance.

- The Allies were incredibly reliant on the

French Resistance folks that knew the language,

knew the culture, saw the Nazis,

knew their movements, were providing maps.

And the Allies had spies on the ground

communicating with them.

- By this stage in the war, a German officer

can't even buy his French girlfriend

a new fur without the Resistance knowing about it.

So, the fact that the Resistance

have no clue about a military complex

as important and as large as Maisy is phenomenal.

- Most armies, and even in modern times,

if you build a bunker, you build a bunker

or a battery, and you put a gun or two in it,

and you have a couple of men deployed.

The Nazis built them with ventilation,

septic systems, water systems, food, field hospitals.

It's remarkable.

- It would have required a significant amount

of steel and cement in order to construct a battery

that was the size of four football fields.

It would have been very, very difficult for the Germans

to keep something like that quiet.

- The Germans have at this late stage in the war

become complete experts at understanding

how to withstand almost direct hits

onto concrete emplacements and deep bunkers.

They know what's coming so they prepare for it.

- By using a substantial mass of concrete,

sometimes, you know, two meters thick of concrete,

we've created a static barrier, one that doesn't move

and is going to resist the impact from a projectile.

And so, you need mass to dissipate that energy,

and they did that by using concrete.

Concrete also has an interesting property.

It can be brittle, and if it's struck

by a projectile, it will shatter.

The Germans knew of this, and they

plated the ceilings with steel.

And they would put tiles on the walls

or barricade the walls with wood

so that any shattering of the concrete would be contained.

- Also, after all this battle,

after all this fighting, after all this shelling,

it's a testament of the fortitude of these buildings,

that they're still standing today in near perfect condition.

- [Narrator] The base design includes

three heavily fortified batteries emplacements

that will house an arsenal of deadly weapons.

World War I French field Howitzers,

Russian Howitzers, 105 millimeter guns,

anti-tank cannons, and 12 anti-aircraft guns.

It is to become one of the deadliest bases the Nazis built.

But why would the Nazi army go to such great lengths

to construct and fortify Maisy with such

immense weaponry in absolute secret?

What was its ultimate purpose?

For seven decades, a Nazi base has been secretly

buried under fields, yet the Maisy Batteries

may be so strategic that it could have

guaranteed Nazi victory on the Omaha and Utah beaches.

But despite its importance, this base has been lost to time.

Gary Sterne, an avid military collector and historian,

stumbles across its existence

setting in motion a series of discoveries

that will challenge D-Day history.

- This is isn't just a small defensive position.

This is an entire base the size of a town.

- If you decided to attack Maisy,

you would have been walking into a hail of fire.

Every position supported another position.

The Germans had become masters of this by now.

They know exactly how to combine mortars,

light machine guns, heavy machine guns,

rifle fire, mine fields, barbed wire.

You name it, they've got it at Maisy.

- This thing was a terrifying defense.

Surely Maisy inflicted massive casualties on the Allies.

The size and power of the guns that were there

and the ability to hit both Utah and Omaha,

the ability to hit ships and landing craft,

the ability to continue to hit 'em on the beach,

and as you're coming inland the

ability to continue to fight.

This is an important and impressive defensive system.

- It had numerous machine gun positions.

It had mine fields, anti-aircraft guns.

It even had its own hospital.

And let's not forget, being manned by hundreds

of well-trained German soldiers.

- So, what we see today when we look at Maisy is

an exposed structure, but at the time it would have

been camouflaged with netting, with leaves, with dirt.

If you look at the roof structures of the bunkers,

they're curved, which doesn't create a sharp corner

and can't cast shadows from sun.

- What's fascinating about Maisy is the fact

that the Germans built it in complete and utter secrecy.

Unlike most of the other parts of the wall

that they're building to keep the Allies out,

they don't let the French in.

The Resistance can't get close.

They don't understand what's going on there.

And every time the Germans need to get any kind of support,

they leave the fortifications.

- There must have been some covert purpose to this battery

that was completely different from some

of the other batteries that were constructed

along the coast not too far away.

- This was the perfect German secret.

- [Narrator] Maisy is a crucial

component of the Atlantic Wall,

a network of batteries built to repulse an Allied invasion.

Between 1942 and 1944, the building project is vast,

and most of it is done along the French coastline,

where the Nazis assume an Allied landing will come.

- The Atlantic Wall was a series of defensive positions

that were built all the way along the Atlantic coast

from Norway right the way down through Belgium,

France, up to the Spanish border.

In total it covers 1,670 miles,

and the construction of all of this

came directly from Hitler, himself.

- The way the Atlantic Wall is built is really quite clever.

You've got forward emplacements that are there

to chew up the troops that land on the beach.

Behind them, you have heavy artillery pieces.

They're to take out the boats and rain artillery fire

down onto the beaches as well.

The Germans are hoping that this Atlantic Wall

will be a meat grinder into which

the Allies will feed their troops.

- Add to that all of the mines

and the barbed wire and machine gun nests

that are along the beach themselves, and you've got

yourself a pretty formidable defensive system.

This is not land they're gonna give up easily.

- [Narrator] Hitler appoints Erwin Rommel,

a respected and battle-tested general

to oversee the Atlantic Wall defenses and ensure

the coast is impenetrable ahead of an Allied landing.

- As Rommel always said, if the

Allies get the beach, it's over.

So, they would have done everything they can

to fortify that particular area.

Rommel was a soldier's general.

He was a tactician.

He was a strategist.

The fact that he was put in charge of the Atlantic Wall

shows you that Hitler and the senior command

knew that this was going to be the key to the entire war.

When Rommel takes over the Atlantic Wall,

he calls it cuckoo land because he looks at it,

and Hitler had been broadcasting and propagandizing,

this is indefensible, impregnable.

It'll never fall.

Rommel looks at it and says,

oh, they can overcome this easily.

Rommel starts preparing defenses.

The Atlantic Wall becomes a hardened,

formidable defense after Rommel takes charge.

- [Narrator] The Atlantic Wall defenses

are so extensive, it required the excavation

of over 120 square miles of dirt,

the equivalent of 120 modern large airports.

- I couldn't even conceptualize, quite frankly,

what it would take to construct

fortifications along the Atlantic Wall.

For the amount of concrete and steel

that would have been required to build

all of those structures, and the sheer amount of labor

that would have been required to create

and build those structures and the number

of lives lost is completely inconceivable.

- [Narrator] In 1944 General Rommel

is seen touring Pointe du Hoc,

one and a half miles from the secret Maisy base.

He discusses the position with senior Nazi officials

and takes great efforts to show it off to the press.

The cameras also capture images of large guns

installed on the cliffs and a daunting number

of German soldiers stationed at Pointe du Hoc.

In the midst of this media attention,

Rommel makes no mention of the terrifying

Maisy Batteries only a short distance away.

What secrets could be hidden away

in the massive, well defended Maisy complex?

- General Rommel understands the power

of propaganda and publicity, but he's not,

he's not a very camera hungry guy.

In fact, when you see him going around these defenses

that have been built along the Atlantic front,

it does kind of stand out for that reason,

that Rommel's actually in these pictures.

- We know that Rommel was sly, crafty,

and was a master of decoys and deception.

If I was a betting man, I would guess

that it was Rommel's call.

Let's promote Pointe du Hoc.

Whereas that being jutted out on the coast,

that's harder to defend, and it's probably

one of the first sites hit because they'd

been promoting it for so long.

- The focus of the Allied soldiers

on day one of D-Day is Pointe du Hoc.

The real story is at Maisy.

Nobody knows about that.

- [Narrator] Operation Overlord is the code name

for the western European invasion,

one of the most ambitious missions in military history

to combine Allied forces and breach the Atlantic Wall.

The target, the beaches of Normandy.

The Allies send surveillance missions to photograph

miles of the Normandy coast that they intend to attack.

Over 14,000 sorties are flown, 85,000 photos taken per week.

A picture begins to formulate

of what the Allies are up against,

and it is daunting.

One site draws great attention,

the unique fortification of Pointe du Hoc,

poised strategically on a cliff

above Omaha and Utah beaches.

But how is this spot connected to Maisy?

- If you're the Allies in the run up to D-Day,

through your reconnaissance flights

and the intel that you're gathering,

when you see guns that big and the fact

that Rommel's there showing them off,

you're gonna start to think that Pointe du Hoc

is a strategically very important base to hit.

- If I'm any Allied leader, I don't

wanna see Rommel in the news reels.

I'd rather face almost any other general than Rommel.

The fact that Rommel's there,

I know that I'm in for a fight.

I know this is going to be very, very difficult.

You're also seeing how high the cliffs are.

You're seeing some of the defenses put on the beach.

- Pointe du Hoc gives fantastic field of fire

for artillery onto Omaha and Utah beaches.

So, from the Allies point of view, it's really, really

important to make sure that they take this.

- [Narrator] A Nazi propaganda film

orchestrated by Rommel captured the attention of the Allies.

Eisenhower selects Pointe du Hoc

as a primary target on D-Day,

but was he playing into a game

of deception masterminded by Rommel?

A few miles away, the secret Maisy Battery

is fully operational and brimming with weapons.

- One example of Rommel's ability to outmaneuver

and misdirect the Allied forces

is the number of dummy artillery positions

and dummy units that he places all along the coast.

And, of course, the Allies don't know

which ones are real and which ones are false.

- It's almost as though he's waving one hand

and saying, look at Pointe du Hoc, look at me, look at this.

Whereas in the other hand, he's got

the coastal defense covered by a huge complex,

which he's gone to a lot of trouble to keep secret.

- Maisy was constructed in a way that was different

than some of the other structures on the Atlantic Wall.

The locals might have had access to the other structures.

It wasn't shrouded in secrecy.

There wasn't a deliberate cloak

that was put around the construction.

- The Germans don't know where the Allies will come,

but they do know that when they come

they're gonna bring a hell of a lot of planes

and a lot of artillery into the fight.

So, a secret base like Maisy is gonna

give the Germans a big advantage.

- Were the Allies indeed fooled by Rommel

in thinking that Pointe du Hoc

was something it simply wasn't?

- The Maisy Battery set the stage

for what would be the most important part of the war.

- Maisy was a remarkable and intriguing secret in 1944.

Ironically, it still is somewhat of one today.

- [Narrator] As Project Overlord is set into motion,

the largest amphibious assault in military history launches

while the mysterious Maisy Batteries lie in wait.

Although much of the Atlantic Wall is built in plain sight,

the Nazis take great care to build

the Maisy Batteries in complete secrecy.

The Allies are focused on the formidable-looking

Pointe du Hoc seen in the publicity

films released by General Rommel.

Was Maisy the surprise hiding in the shadows?

- The Germans don't really see Pointe du Hoc

as being vulnerable from a sea invasion.

The Allies are banking on this very idea

that the Germans perceive Pointe du Hoc

as being virtually impossible to assault.

- Just imagine the bravery of climbing

the sheer vertical cliff with grenades

and rifle fire raining down on you.

Meanwhile your own side are firing artillery on.

If one round falls short, the explosion's

gonna blow you completely out of the air.

- Depending on the materials of the rock,

it can have fractures that go throughout it,

if there is a grenade or a bomb impact over here,

it can affect the rock over here.

It's all interlinked.

And that rock face will change dramatically

over the time of you just climbing a couple meters.

It's very dangerous.

- There's a quote attributed to an American

intelligence officer that said that we couldn't do it.

It couldn't be taken.

He said that three old women with brooms

could keep the Allies from taking the cliff.

- Pointe du Hoc became such a huge focus

for the Allied invasion on D-Day.

Not only did they bomb the hell out of it,

they also planned one of the most daring,

famous, and horrific assaults to scale the cliffs,

to put men up there, and to take it back.

- You know, up until this day you can see

the battle scars still there in the ground.

Thousands and thousands of shells raining down

have left this deep imprint in the ground.

- When you look at the craters on top of Pointe du Hoc,

it's an incredibly visceral feeling

of translating that force into destruction.

You can see that they have forever altered the landscape.

- [Narrator] After two years of preparation

and thousands of reconnaissance missions,

why weren't the Allies paying more attention

to the massive fortifications at the Maisy Batteries?

- For the Allies invading the coastline on D-Day,

Battery Maisy was a terrifying concentration of firepower

that awaited them just over the ridge.

- Now, Maisy's been hit, but because nobody

knows it's there, they're not really hitting it

with the kind of firepower that they want.

- [Narrator] On D-Day the Maisy Batteries

were left largely unscathed during the initial bombing runs,

threatening the success of the most daring mission

one and a half miles back at Pointe du Hoc.

- By taking Pointe du Hoc, if they fail,

they know that it's not just their lives.

It's all their comrades.

It's the entire invasion.

- The Allies believe that at the top of the

Point du Hoc cliffs are four 155 millimeter Howitzer guns

able to bring down incredible rain of fire

on the troops that are advancing onto the beaches.

So, they assign a special Ranger unit

to use grappling hooks and ladders

to climb up these sheer vertical cliffs and take the guns.

It's almost like a battle in the First World War.

The Allies begin a huge bombardment,

thousands and thousands of missiles

raining down on the German positions.

The Allied soldiers on the boats,

they're kind of happy about it

because they can see that the ground is getting chewed up.

But what they don't realize is

that much of the artillery fire is misdirected,

falls short or goes too long.

The German positions are quite safe,

and now they know the Allies are coming.

- The Nazi army is one of the most

terrifying and formidable armies in world history.

- They were at the peak of their technological

and their warfare capability.

- These are absolutely battle-hardened troops.

They've been fighting for years in the east against Russia.

Now, the Allies are coming.

- [Narrator] But a shocking discovery

awaits the Rangers as they top Pointe du Hoc.

- When the Rangers finally scale the cliffs,

get into the emplacements, they're completely

shocked to find the guns aren't even there.

- [Narrator] Only once they scaled the cliffs

did the Rangers realize that the all important guns,

their objective, had been removed

at some point prior to D-Day.

The emplacement scene in the propaganda film

orchestrated by Rommel were replaced with wooden poles.

Meanwhile, the Maisy Battery, hidden in secrecy,

springs to action with devastating effect.

- Maisy was put into action immediately

on the morning of D-Day.

It started firing at any of the targets

that it had designated by its forward observation system.

Guns like this were capable of firing

two, three, four rounds per minute.

If you've got command and control center

being given targets from the beach from the observers,

from troops visually spotting the

American troops coming off the beach,

that target coordinate would be telephoned in.

And within seconds this could deliver devastating fire.

- Whilst the Rangers are bravely taking Pointe du Hoc,

Maisy's guns are still firing,

a phenomenal rapid fire rate.

And what they're doing is chewing

the American units up on Omaha beach to pieces.

One of the soldiers who fought in that

beach that day called it pure murder.

For days after the initial raid of D-Day,

shells were raining down on them.

- Those shells were coming from none

other than Battery Maisy.

- [Narrator] By June 9th, 1944,

the Maisy Battery was finally captured,

a full three days after D-Day.

But shockingly, in a world obsessed with this moment,

the base is completely lost to history.

Even the townspeople have no idea

what lies beneath their fields

until Gary Sterne stumbles upon a forgotten map.

- I phoned a number of leading museums,

some in the States, and I was laughed at.

People would say, no, there's nothing there.

In one particular instance, the guy said,

"Oh, you found Pointe du Hoc."

And he put the phone down on me.

I knew because of my own research,

physical research and physical exploration and discovery,

I knew there was something here.

- You only have to take one look at what

Gary's uncovered to see that this is a

complex of immense importance and immense potential.

The sheer number of different buildings,

the size of this particular area,

you know, it's extraordinary.

- Everything is a progression really

from finding a map in a pair of trousers.

The map led me on to the field.

The field led me on to the chimney.

The chimney led me on to a bunker.

And then, that led me on to buying the lands.

It was secret really until the day I uncovered it,

and the press found out about it.

So, we're talking 60 odd years afterwards,

and then that's when a lot of people said,

it can't be important.

It can't possibly be of any interest

because we would know about it, wouldn't we?

- What has been discovered could not have been

anything else but a vital part of the German defenses.

- You can't study Pointe du Hoc and the defense

of this area without coming to see Maisy,

without understanding the role that Maisy

played in the defense of this area

and the assault on Pointe du Hoc.

Everything in this area is interlinked

and Maisy was an integral part of that.

In my view, over the years it's a jigsaw piece

which has been missing, and now that jigsaw is in place.

You can see the full picture,

and until now you couldn't do that.

- [Narrator] The heroic acts during the Rangers

assault on Pointe du Hoc resulted in 70% casualties.

Meanwhile the secret Maisy Battery

may have been producing the barrage of artillery

that threatened the very outcome of D-Day.

But how could such a devastating complex

disappear from history until Gary Sterne's discovery?

- Battery Maisy is an extensive Nazi defensive position.

It's the size of four football fields.

- The scale of these fortifications is baffling.

The pillboxes, the encasements, the bunkers,

the walls, the landmines, the effort

that has gone into fortifying this is, it's astronomical.

- It's got machine gun positions.

It's got huge cannons.

It's got miles of bunkers and tunnels.

It's got buildings.

It's got a field hospital.

It's surrounded by marshland with mines.

This is the ultimate defensive position.

So, how could something like this be completely lost?

- [Narrator] On D-Day, the critical target

Point du Hoc provides a shocking surprise.

No guns were present on the cliff top.

Meanwhile the Maisy Batteries

may have been the source of devastating

artillery on the Rangers position

threatening the very outcome of D-Day.

Erwin Rommel, Hitler's most respected general

and the mastermind behind the Maisy Batteries,

plans more than just the fortifications.

He also designs the layers of deception surrounding it.

- The Nazis are masters of propaganda.

It's frankly how they came to power.

And, of course, in a battle as big as the

Second World War, public opinion still counts.

The Nazis bring the best they've got.

- Rommel was one of the best the Nazis had in misdirection,

thus his nickname the Desert Fox.

He was sly, crafty like a fox.

Why the large wooden poles where Pointe du Hoc would be?

The Nazis knew we were looking at it.

They were broadcasting it.

They knew we had intel.

They knew an invasion was coming.

So, maybe it was put there as a decoy.

Maybe it was put there to make people

think it was still armed to teeth and ready to go.

That's what I think it was probably Rommel's idea

to put Maisy behind Pointe du Hoc.

That's a play out of his playbook.

- Could that have been Rommel's intention

through his propaganda?

- [Narrator] Hundreds of casualties were taken

in an attempt to capture what turned out to

be a possible dummy site put in place

by the Nazi propaganda machine.

Could Maisy have been the true

Nazi strong point and not Pointe du Hoc?

- The positioning of the battery covers

the southern end of Utah beach

and the western end of Omaha beach where the Rangers landed.

This site was bristling with weapons on D-Day.

It's very difficult to know what effect

numerically Maisy had on the landings.

We know for sure it was killing troops

walking up the street towards Pointe du Hoc.

We know it was shelling Pointe du Hoc.

We know it was shelling Utah beach.

So, you have to consider

that these are professional gunners.

We would be very naive to suggest

that they didn't incur a large number

of casualties at those locations.

- If I'm an Allied commander,

I want Maisy's Battery neutralized

before we even hit the beaches.

I want it destroyed in the initial bombing runs

because I know that kind of havoc it can create

on the beach, on the beaches plural, and to the

landing craft, and all the way fighting to the battery.

And Maisy's not hit and liberated or overwhelmed

until D+3, until three days after the D-Day landing.

So, this battery inflicts, surely,

some devastating damage on Allied troops,

not only on D-Day but in the next three days.

- I think you probably have to question

what might have been different on the outcome of D-Day

had the energy, and the effort, and the intensity

of the attack of Pointe du Hoc

been refocused onto the Battery Maisy.

- [Narrator] Gary Sterne has an alternative theory

of what happened that fateful day,

and it challenges accepted history.

- As D-Day approached, the intelligence that we have

states that there's five guns.

Then, there's four guns.

A few weeks later there's three guns.

There's potentially two guns.

Our intelligence by D-Day really knew

there were not six guns there anymore.

The whole complex of Pointe du Hoc had been dumbed down.

We can't talk about history as being what could have been.

History is what happened on the day.

And on the day Pointe du Hoc was empty.

And on the day and on the days that followed,

Maisy was fully operational and firing.

- Just imagine the damage and the casualties that it caused.

- [Narrator] This base is part of General Rommel's

larger plan to repel the Allies back into the channel.

- In the after action reports

of the First Infantry Division,

we found a report of troops and tanks advancing

to try and relieve the troops at Pointe du Hoc,

and they were beaten back by gunfire.

And it says in the report, Maisy was firing at us.

We lost 35 to 40 men on the seventh of June.

And that's a day after D-Day.

- Let's remember that the battery at Maisy

is firing for three whole days through some of the

most critical moments of D-Day when the actual

battle hangs in the balance.

It was those hours that would decide

whether the Allies were successful.

- [Narrator] As Sterne continues his excavation,

he comes across the most extraordinary

discovery yet, documents detailing

the presence of 4.2 million French francs.

Why would this exceptionally

large sum of money be at Maisy?

Was this space much more than just

a complex of gun batteries?

- We met Ranger veterans who said

that there'd been a huge cash of money found here.

The regional payroll for the German army

had been stored here and was still stored here

on the ninth of June.

The Rangers found so much money

they were throwing it about.

They were pushing it into their shirts,

filling bags with it.

One of them found out that at the beach

they could exchange it for U.S. dollars in checks.

To distribute that volume with such a value in those days,

especially in a poor country, that says to me that the

Germans had ultimate confidence that it would be safe here.

- It appears as though the Maisy Battery was special

and different because it did have a store of money.

This leads me to believe that the battery

was much more than just an armed station.

Perhaps it was meant to survive in the event

that they were taken over by the Allies.

This is a place where the German soldiers

could have survived conceivably underground

for a very long period of time.

- [Narrator] So, why did Maisy,

this all important puzzle piece, vanish from history?

Declassified documents reveal on June 9th, 1944,

three full days after D-Day, the Rangers

finally launched an assault on the Maisy Batteries.

- Colonel Rudder put his force from Pointe du Hoc

into rest on the evening of the eighth of June,

allowing the rest of the Ranger force to be gathered up.

And on the morning of the ninth of June,

they were ordered to attack and take the Maisy complex.

- [Narrator] After the assault, the Allies

clear the site of explosives and ordinance,

cover it with earth, and return it to the local farmers.

Then, amazingly the site is completely forgotten,

lost for decades beneath the fields the farmers work.

- It's not like people don't live

around this part of France.

It's not like people haven't lived

here for the last 75 years.

This is a place known about.

The Allies knew about it.

The Allies attacked it.

The Allies won it back.

So, how could something like that get completely lost?

- The idea that the most iconic event

of World War II, the most important day,

maybe in human history, D-Day,

one of the keys if not the single main key

to Nazi defenses is something that has been forgotten?

Is something that has been lost.

It doesn't make history books.

How could this happen?

How could we have missed something this central?

It remains a shocking mystery.

- This story is still alive.

There is still a mystery to unfold.

- [Narrator] And this is where

Gary's theory begins to take a darker turn.

- I've uncovered a series, multiples of Rangers orders,

which were issued to Colonel Rudder

for his men to undertake.

And they differ from the conventional norm.

The convention says that they were to land

at Pointe du Hoc and guard the road.

But we find that they were to land at Pointe du Hoc,

destroy whatever they found there,

and then advance along the coast

to the village of Grandcamp,

attack the Maisy Batteries on D-Day.

The strange thing is, and this is the bit

that we can't understand, Colonel Rudder

kept his men at Pointe du Hoc.

By not advancing through Grandcamp

and coming to Maisy and going to his objective,

that allowed the gun batteries here

to continue to fire for three days.

- So, ask yourself the question,

why is it that Colonel Rudder doesn't move

on this fortification, that's continually

firing on the Allied troops earlier?

Why does it take him three days to get there?

- Maisy was firing for three days after D-Day.

So, sixth, seventh, eighth, and it was

still firing on the morning of the ninth of June

when it was finally attacked by ground troops.

And we know that because we've got after action reports

from units advancing with the Rangers

and the naval shore fire control personnel

who were commanding the ships

and giving them the coordinates on behalf of the Rangers.

So, they were coordinating the gunfire from the ships.

And they were asking for gunfire

on Maisy the village and on the batteries here

to try and silence the guns and stop them firing

on the morning of the ninth of June.

- [Narrator] During Sterne's excavation,

he also finds concrete mounts for a large

155 millimeter gun, and he immediately

makes the link to the guns seen

in Rommel's press footage at Pointe du Hoc.

- The guns found at Maisy match those

that were originally seen on the footage

with Rommel at Pointe du Hoc.

In fact, when the Rangers got to Pointe du Hoc,

all they found in the gun positions were big wooden logs.

So, what actually happened here?

Were those guns moved after they'd been filmed there?

Was that the plan all along?

- They were going to bring in new guns, deck-mounted guns,

the guns that would have been sitting on a ship.

What they were doing was building casemented positions,

bomb-proof bunkers above ground.

They were in the process of being constructed

when D-Day interrupted that construction.

Two or three or four months after D-Day,

it would've been a tremendously powerful battery.

- [Narrator] Perhaps a clue to the mystery

lies with the fact that when Gary excavates

the bunkers, he discovers that they weren't just covered.

They were backfilled with earth and rock.

- I can't for the life of me imagine

people taking the time to backfill those bunkers.

This is a massive bunker.

It would be a herculean task.

- It would have to be done by hand.

People would have to move soil and debris

from outside inside because they would only use

the doorways and the windows.

They wouldn't be creating any new openings

to easily use machinery to infill.

The bunkers were designed to withstand bombing.

That is a huge force.

It is very safe to say that if the functionality

of these bunkers was to be converted

into just a buried structure, it's fine

to have agricultural activities

occurring on top of this structure.

Bombs are not equivalent to that.

It is significantly over-designed for that use.

Infilling a structure is something

that sometimes we do in tunneling.

In mining operations, we will excavate the earth

and take out the material that we want from the earth.

And we will backfill it.

We will fill it with concrete to reinstate structure.

Reinstating structure and filling in the rooms

of these bunkers doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

- So, the fact that they decided

that it was important to conceal the information

in the bunkers further by backfilling them

brings into question what secrets they hold.

- [Narrator] With an invasion still ongoing,

why would the Allies expend unnecessary

amounts of energy to fill in the structures

of the Maisy Battery with earth manually?

- After the battle, the site is almost immediately

cleared of ammunitions.

It's filled in with sand

and given back to the local farmers.

Since then, the location and even the very existence

of this base has been completely forgotten from history.

Did the Allies cover it up after the war was over?

- [Narrator] The mystery surrounding the Maisy Battery

only deepens when Sterne discovers

a strange radio complex in the center,

an unusual find that proves Maisy

was an important link in the chain

of communication for the Nazi army.

- During the course of our digging

in various areas, we were led to a large building

with sloping sides, a very unusual building.

It's function was to evaluate radar information

that was coming in about incoming ships

or incoming aircraft to the coast.

It would then transmit that information

to anti-aircraft units in the areas

where those incursions were coming.

And it would be able to give them

height, distance, and speed of incoming craft,

whether that be ships or whether it be aircraft.

- Gary's uncovered the fact that the Germans

had the radar communications technology systems

built with inside the Maisy Batteries.

That shows how important this complex was.

You know, the Second World War

was a battle where radar became more and more important.

These aren't the kind of technologies

that you put into every single base.

You only place them at critical points

in the Nazi infrastructure.

That raises the question, was something more

going on at this particular place?

- It adds a degree of importance

which a lot of gun batteries didn't have.

The Allies obviously didn't know the radar center was here.

Because I think that would have

even more further amplified what they

needed to achieve on D-Day.

- Given what we now know about Maisy

with communication systems, this was

obviously a command and control center

for all of the Nazi resistance.

- [Narrator] What secrets do the

classified archives hold about Maisy

and the role of the base on D-Day?

Did senior officers decide to cover up the base

because it wasn't neutralized for days

after the invasion and the damage it inflicted?

By June 9th of 1944, the Maisy Battery

is finally captured, but not before

many Allied casualties are inflicted.

Decades later, the discovery of this forgotten base

may challenge the D-Day story that's become legend.

Was the Maisy Battery the true Nazi strong point

of D-Day and not Pointe du Hoc?

And if so, how?

And why was the base covered up

and forgotten for all this time?

- Colonel Rudder and the Rangers

who were at Pointe du Hoc have been written about in books.

They are celebrated, and they occupy

an iconic part of not just D-Day

but of American history as heroes.

- So, ask yourself the question,

why is it that Colonel Rudder doesn't

move on this fortification that's

continually firing on the Allied troops earlier?

Why does it take him three days to get there?

- Did the Maisy Battery continue to operate after D-Day?

Yes, for three days.

Did it inflict enormous casualties on the Allies?

Almost certainly it did.

Did people die from June 6th to June 9th

because of what Maisy was doing?

Almost certainly, yes.

So, if Gary's right, it opens up

a really, really painful topic

that probably should be further explored.

- With something this big, with so much firepower,

that the Allies knew something about,

why wasn't more attention paid towards it

and how they were going to defeat it?

- The research I've uncovered recently

proves beyond a shadow of a doubt

that Colonel Rudder was ordered to attack Maisy.

It was part of his D-Day missions list.

He was not ordered to guard the

road behind Pointe du Hoc.

He was ordered to come through Grandcamp and attack Maisy.

- The Allies knew about Battery Maisy,

but it seems like it never made it

anywhere near the top of the priority list.

Why was that?

- Every single target at Normandy has been preplanned,

but for some reason the Allies, who knew about this site,

it wasn't a surprise that it was there.

They'd been bombing it for days before the campaign.

Didn't put it on the priority list.

As a result, Allied soldiers died.

Why don't we know about Maisy

until Gary Sterne stumbles on the site?

- It took the Rangers to come back here

and talk to the press and talk to the local people

and say, yes, he's actually telling the truth.

We fought here.

This was a big battle for us.

- [Narrator] This may be one of the greatest

examples of the success of the Nazi propaganda machine.

While the aerial reconnaissance indicated

that Maisy was a threat, the Allies chose

to pour resources into Pointe du Hoc.

- It's most likely that the site was buried

in an attempt to just draw a line under the whole subject,

to stop people talking about Maisy.

If Maisy didn't exist anymore,

people wouldn't be asking questions about Maisy.

- Was this successful communications

and propaganda from Rommel?

Was it a mistake by the Allies,

maybe caught up in the confusion of the battle on D-Day?

But the real question is, is there something that happened,

something at stake, something in history here

that's been covered up by the Allied authorities?

- Could it be that the Allies were so embarrassed

by the sheer loss of manpower at the Maisy battery

that they just did not want this story to get out?

- It's very difficult to know why it was buried,

but when you take all the evidence into account,

that Colonel Rudder stayed at Pointe du Hoc

instead of advancing inland.

The generals who had ordered Rudder to advance inland

and take Maisy didn't on D-Day

question why he wasn't advancing.

Are they at fault?

Did Eisenhower know that his generals

hadn't allowed his troops to advance?

All of these factors come together

to bring out the question, who buried it?

Who ordered the burial at Maisy?

And why was it then almost written out

of historical documentation post-war?

- Something the size of four football fields

behind Pointe du Hoc that inflicted

most likely horrendous casualties,

I don't know how that's been forgotten.

- When I think about the Maisy base,

it started in secrecy, and it's morphed

into a different kind of secrecy now

and one that we only have pieces of the puzzle.

But from an engineering point of view,

that base was originally constructed

to provide a very, very destructive offensive point

that had a critical role in progressing the war.

That is very evident from the construction itself.

- And if it hadn't been for Gary finding that complex,

well, it's not impossible to assume

that the whole story would remain buried forever.

- [Narrator] The Maisy Batteries played

a crucial part in the events of D-Day.

The German army managed to build the base in total secrecy,

all while diverting attention to the nearby

battery at Pointe du Hoc, that might have been a decoy.

As the excavations of the rediscovered base at Maisy

expose more details, and secrets are unlocked

in declassified war documents, the

truth will eventually be revealed.

[dramatic instrumental music]