Original subtitles

It's the largest invasion fleet in history.

Defies belief.

Twelve hundred warships, over 4,000 landing craft.

More than 160,000 Allied troops cross the Channel

to Nazi occupied France.

Crossing water to launch a military operation

is a very hard thing to do, it's hard enough to cross a river

never mind 40, 50 miles of sea.

But landing on the beaches will be just the beginning.

Beyond the formidable sea defenses,

an army, battle hardened on the Eastern Front,

lies in wait.

The cost will be high.

He turned to me and he said, "I don't think I'll see England again."

And, you know, he didn't.

The D-Day invasion…

from the planning to deception,

landings and battles,

is one of the most audacious events of World War II.

Now, rare footage from around the world,

expertly restored in full color,

tells the story as you've never seen it before.

June 1940,

Dunkirk.

The German Blitzkrieg advance drives the British and French armies

into the sea.

The scars left by defeat on mainland Europe run deep.

From the moment that the British were thrown out

of France, they always knew that if the Germans were ever going

to be defeated by the Western Allies, that at some point,

a British Army and then, an American Army had got to go back to the continent.

Regaining a foothold in Nazi-occupied Europe…

now seems unthinkable.

From the end of 1941, Hitler orders the fortification

of the entire Atlantic coast,

from the Spanish/French border to the Arctic in Norway.

Hitler calls it his Atlantic Wall.

The Atlantic Wall was intended to seal off this vulnerable flank

of the Third Reich.

It was a system of interlocking bunkers with heavy naval guns, pillboxes,

and you've got all manner of beach obstacles.

It's not until two years later,

in a desperate bid to revive Allied morale,

that Churchill feels confident enough to attempt to regain control

of French territory in the port of Dieppe.

The Allies in '42 are saying, "Well, if we're gonna go in,

how are we gonna do this?

How are we gonna break in?"

So they say, "Let's raid Dieppe, let's see if we can land 6,000 troops,

if they can take and hold Dieppe and beat off any German counterattacks."

But the raid is a complete fiasco.

Over 900 Canadian troops are killed and almost 2,000 captured.

The Germans seem as invincible as ever.

The Dieppe Raid taught everybody exactly

how incredibly difficult it was to land an army on a hostile shore.

One of the big problems at Dieppe

was the problem getting armor ashore.

I mean, you could get troops ashore in small landing craft,

but getting armor ashore, particularly tanks,

was a problem, and at Dieppe, they're just kind of figuring this out.

And despite the utmost secrecy,

German intelligence seem to have known the Allied raid was coming.

It's clear that the British and Canadians can't break through the Atlantic Wall

on their own.

Meanwhile, in the Pacific,

the Americans are taking a fight to the Japanese at Midway and Guadalcanal.

Then, in 1943, in the East, Germany's forces suffered

a catastrophic loss in the Battle of Stalingrad.

For the first time, the German Army seems vulnerable.

At the Tehran conference of November 1943,

Joseph Stalin and President Roosevelt

put pressure on Winston Churchill.

Now is the time to commit to a second front along the Atlantic Wall.

There is a tension between the Americans and the British

from the very beginning. The question was when.

It's not clear that Churchill would ever have agreed

to an invasion on Northern France.

He needed the Americans, their money, their support, their manpower.

Winston Churchill had been deeply traumatized

by all the experiences of British failure and defeat since 1940.

He knew, as the Americans didn't really understand,

that the Germans were man-for-man the most formidable fighting force

that the world had ever seen.

He was terrified of a blood bath in France.

That, once again, we could have the sort of scenes one had seen

in the First World War.

By 1944, he was reluctantly forced to face the facts that the Americans

were absolutely determined that this was gonna happen.

There is an American instinct

to strike for the jugular as soon as possible.

If we're at war with the Germans, and it's Germany first,

well, let's go, let's go right now.

The Americans think we have the capabilities to,

you know, mass an army in England and land on the Channel Coast

and attack Germany from this way.

But Churchill protests, look,

the German defenses of the Atlantic Wall are too tough.

They're gonna sniff this thing out, they're gonna beat us at the water's edge.

It'll be a great humiliation, it'll demoralize the US Army,

the British Army, the Allies in general, it'll make Stalin more likely

to sue for a separate peace.

Let's fight in areas we know we can win, like North Africa, like Italy.

The problem is the Germans trap the Allies in Italy,

there's no progress being made there,

so this then strengthens the American hand.

Churchill finally concedes, and Operation Overlord,

the Allied invasion of France, is given the green light.

Working in utter secrecy,

the British and American planners start to search for the weakest points

in the Atlantic Wall.

As they learnt at Dieppe,

if an invading army has any chance of success,

it must be a complete surprise.

Spring 1944,

the Nazis have lost vast swathes of territory to the Soviets in the East.

They now suspect an Allied offensive, conducted from Britain,

somewhere along the 3,000 miles of the Atlantic Wall.

Critically, German intelligence is reporting a build-up of Allied troops

opposite the Pas-de-Calais.

It's the most obvious point for an invasion,

as it offers the shortest crossing.

For that reason, German defenses are strongest at Calais.

However, Hitler has taken no chances and has already assigned his best general,

Erwin Rommel, to take charge of the Atlantic Wall.

Rommel is the most popular German general.

So sending him to the West sends a strong message

to the soldiers and the German public alike.

It gives them confidence, it tells them, look, our best general

is now in the West, and he will throw the Allies

back into the sea.

But when Rommel sees the coastal defenses for the first time,

he realizes they are far from impenetrable.

He orders more fortifications.

Beaches are laid with millions of mines,

thousands of miles of barbed wire,

and new obstacles capable of withstanding an invading army.

But the Allied planning goes ahead.

Allied spy planes take aerial photos of Rommel's new defenses.

And the French Resistance sends back precise information

on the troops manning each fortified position.

Meanwhile, British commandos swim from midget submarines

to take samples of the sand on the French beaches.

Back in Britain, engineers invent elaborate vehicles and weapons

capable of overcoming Rommel's obstacles.

There's a particular eccentric British designer called Percy Hobart,

and he had ideas for different kinds of tanks.

One of them was a flame thrower.

One was a swimming tank.

On the face of it, if you see photos of these

modified tanks, they're ridiculous.

I mean, they look silly,

to the point that they were nicknamed "Hobart's Funnies."

But every single one of them had a purpose.

The Americans believe you've just got to get in there

and fight the enemy, and they're always rather suspicious

of British dodges and wheezes, as they see it.

The only bits the Americans took were the least successful bits,

which were amphibious tanks.

And the British were right, that if you were gonna overcome

one of the most difficult challenges in the history of war,

then you needed completely new toys and tools with which to do it.

There is a tendency, I think, to say, "Oh, how clever we were

to come up with these devices,"

and a few of them did prove to be quite clever.

Among them were flail tanks,

the sort of tank with arms out in front of it

with chains attached to a rotating drum

that would flail the ground in front of it,

detonate the mines.

There was even a tank built in the shape of a doorstop,

with a ramp that would run itself up against a sea wall

so that other thanks could drive over the top of it.

On a grander scale, engineers are making sure

that an Allied invasion will be properly supported.

They secretly install an oil pipeline under the Channel

to provide fuel for the invasion vehicles.

They construct gigantic floating ports, or Mulberry harbors.

These ready-made ports will be towed across the Channel,

to allow the planned armada of supply vessels to unload.

If you haven't got a port then, build two ports

the size of Dover and float them across the Channel.

I mean, it's absolutely extraordinary.

The scale of D-Day defies belief.

You're talking about 1,200 warships,

over 4,000 landing craft, 12,000 aircraft.

I mean, it is absolutely huge.

The D-Day invasion brings together the Allied Navy,

Army, and Air Forces in a centralized command structure.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower is made Supreme Allied Commander

of the operation.

In charge of the land forces

and masterminding much of the invasion planning

is British General Bernard Montgomery.

The Allies believe they have kept the invasion site

a tightly guarded secret,

but there's no hiding the date.

The French tides dictate the invasion will be on the fifth of June,

when they will be at their lowest.

Now they have to hope for good weather.

Rough seas would make landings difficult,

if not impossible.

And Churchill knows that no matter how well planned,

an invasion launched across the unpredictable English Channel,

in the face of formidable shoreline defenses could so easily end

in a blood bath.

Most important thing about an amphibious invasion

is that it doesn't get kicked back into the sea, that it doesn't fail.

There's still quite a lot of jeopardy involved.

Will the Germans know? Will they be prepared?

Even when the Allies completely control the waters,

even when they completely control the skies,

and even when they've mastered the intelligent picture,

there's still lots of doubt and concerns and anxieties.

The groundwork for the D-Day landings

begins when Allied bombers attack German radar stations

along the entire northern French coast.

The bombers also target German supply routes further inland.

The transport plan sees these massive heavy bomber fleets

destroying railways, canals, resupply centers,

supply depots, oil storage.

The aim is to cripple the ability of the German Army

to move forces around quickly

and keep them supplied.

Behind the scenes, the decision to bomb infrastructure

is hotly contested.

There was a big debate within Allied circles

about how to employ Allied air power.

It was Eisenhower who insisted on a transportation strategy.

And that is to hit the bridges, the railroad hubs,

the transportation networks that would allow the Germans

to bring their reinforcements to the targeted beaches.

The push-back came from the British,

who said it would cause an unacceptable number

of French casualties.

But Eisenhower insisted it was essential.

There is now no hiding that an invasion is imminent.

And when the Germans intercept Allied radio,

it confirms the landing site will be Calais.

In Britain, over two million Allied troops,

3,000 tanks,

and 12,000 aircraft are primed for the biggest invasion in history.

June the fifth, 1944, on the eve of D-Day,

an armada of 6,500 vessels set sail.

But they don't get very far.

Bad weather halts the invasion.

The weather and the phases of the moon and the tides

is vitally important to this operation.

It was absolutely critical that the weather had to be clear

so they could take advantage of the air superiority.

The naval vessels would come in and fire these accurate short bombardments

and, most importantly, that they could launch these landing craft,

which aren't very seaworthy.

Thousands of infantry troops are trapped on rough seas

off the English coast, getting seasick.

Twenty-one-year-old driver and mechanic, Joe Cattini,

is on one of the landing craft,

stuck off the coast of the Isle of Wight.

A lot of the infantry lads, they were only young lads, most of them,

they were seasick as a dog.

They were really, really crying for their moms.

They wanted to go back home.

When the green light eventually comes,

the soldiers receive a morale-boosting speech from Eisenhower.

You are about to embark upon the great crusade,

toward which we have striven these many months.

The eyes of the world are upon you.

Your task will not be an easy one.

Then many of the troops are completely taken by surprise.

We thought the landing was going to be at the Pas-de-Calais.

When we left The Needles, instead of turning left,

we carried more to the right,

towards Cherbourg.

Unbeknown to many on board,

the Allies are not heading for Calais at all,

but for Normandy.

Hitler and Rommel have been played for fools

in the greatest military deception since the Trojan Horse.

They have been duped into believing the Allies

have assembled a massive invading army in the southeast of England,

directly opposite the Pas-de-Calais.

A phantom army headed by US General, George Patton.

Germans fear Patton more than any other general.

And they build barracks, they build out all the facilities for an army,

they have dummy artillery, dummy tanks, dummy vehicles of all sorts.

Inflatable jeeps, planes, and tanks

deceived German reconnaissance that General Patton's

fictitious first army was real.

Even Hitler's trusted spy network were not what they seemed.

The Germans had no spies in Britain.

They thought they had spies in Britain, but every spy they had

had actually been turned and was working as a double agent.

The best thing they could be used for is strategic deception.

Build up a story over time,

through this double agent,

pretend that it's building up

in southeast England where it's threatening the Pas-de-Calais.

While the Germans prepared for the phantom army

in southeastern England,

over a million flesh and blood American, Canadian, and British soldiers

were amassing further along the coast,

opposite the wide open beaches of Normandy.

The best break that the Allies had before D-Day

was their overwhelming air superiority meant they were able to keep

German air reconnaissance away from the south coast.

If the Germans had been able to see aerial photographs

of what was going on in the south coast,

they would have had to see this must be Normandy,

it can't be the Pas-de-Calais.

It is remarkable that it remained a secret.

The Germans clearly knew an invasion was in the offing.

They knew something was coming.

What they didn't know was when and they didn't know where.

On the night before the invasion fleet lands,

an airborne operation begins.

Eight thousand British and 13,000 US paratroopers

are transported in planes

to be airdropped behind the Nazi coastal defenses,

ahead of the seaborne landings.

Suddenly, there was this roar in the air, and we looked up

and there were all these aircraft going over.

You couldn't see the sky, it was so black.

But the operation starts badly.

Heavy cloud cover means paratroopers miss designated landing sites.

And the Germans have deliberately flooded fields

to bog down Allied parachutists.

One of the key features of D-Day as it unfolded

was that the weather was extremely marginal for this sort of operation.

The vast majority of the troop drops,

particularly the American airborne divisions,

were scattered over a very wide area.

Large number of them parachuted into the flooded fields and drowned.

The paratroopers' mission is to regroup,

stall any Germany counterattack and then join the naval landing forces.

And create chaos among the only German Panzer division near Normandy.

Sixth Airborne Division jumped into the assembly area

of German 21st Armored Division.

So, 21st Armored Division was supposed to launch

a counter offensive against the beaches,

but with the Airborne Division sitting in the middle of their assembly area,

the Germans didn't know who to attack first.

So, in the end, the Germans split up their forces.

And this created confusion.

Artillery and small armored vehicles

are brought in by gliders to support the paratroopers.

They, too, suffer heavy casualties.

A third of all the D-Day Glider troops are killed,

wounded or taken prisoner.

The losses were horrific.

The Germans had put bollards in some of the fields

that wrecked some of them on landing. Others crash landed.

But enough land safely and prove instrumental

in seizing key hubs behind the German front line.

British airborne and Glider Divisions

were able to land incredibly close to the bridges

that they needed to capture across the canals,

particularly around Pegasus Bridge.

This was a crucial factor in actually delaying the German reinforcements

coming in.

But it is the German Panzer divisions

that pose the most immediate threat.

Yet the Germans aren't sure whether the Allied troop drop

in Normandy is real or just a diversion.

For the Germans, everything hinges on the speed

with which they can get reserves in there,

and they've got many Panzer divisions clustered near the beaches,

but they're waiting to find out will the main thrust

be in the Pas-de-Calais or will it be in Normandy?

To compound the confusion, four Panzer divisions can't move

without Hitler's direct orders

and the Führer is still asleep.

Even though alarms of the attack are coming in,

nobody wants to wake the Führer.

So those four Panzer divisions that are under his exclusive control

can't be deployed swiftly to the scene.

Worse still, in these critical hours,

not even Rommel is there to take control.

Two key personalities are missing or unable to react;

Rommel and Hitler.

Hitler is asleep.

Rommel always considered the first 24 or 48 hours crucial

for this battle,

and where was he?

He was away in Germany celebrating his wife's birthday.

He had believed too much in the German weather forecast,

which had said on the sixth of June, it will be poor weather.

And then, the weather shifts in the Allies' favor.

In the early hours of the sixth of June,

a window of opportunity opens for Eisenhower.

And the invasion fleet poised off the French coast.

As dawn breaks, it's the German soldiers in Normandy,

not Calais, who witness the enormity of the Allied invasion fleet

for the first time.

For the Germans sitting in their bunkers in Normandy,

the sight of the Allied armada must have been terrifying.

A sea full of metal.

Witnesses recall just absolute stunned disbelief.

This was the greatest armada assembled in world history,

and this thing suddenly appears out of the darkness

off the coast of Normandy.

The massed armada of 6,500 vessels

prepare for five beach landings in Normandy.

Each one is given a different code name.

The Americans are landing at Utah and Omaha beaches,

securing the western flank,

and attempt to seize the major port of Cherbourg

to facilitate further Allied landings.

The British are landing at Gold and Sword beaches further east,

with the Canadians between them at Juno.

Once ashore, they will attempt to drive on

and seize the key city of Caen on the same day.

Two miles off Gold beach,

20-year-old operations post assistant, Denys Hunter,

is about to glimpse first light

of what Rommel will call, "the longest day."

When it got daylight, we were surrounded by ships,

absolutely surrounded by ships, hundreds of them.

A massive naval bombardment of the German defensive positions begins.

The noise was absolutely horrendous.

We didn't have any ear protectors or anything like that in those days,

so we just had to do the best we could.

After all the years of planning and deception,

now came the hard part.

Landing on beaches where the troops are most vulnerable.

Crossing water to launch a military operation

is a very hard thing to do.

It's hard enough to cross a river, never mind 40, 50 miles of sea.

At Utah beach, the sea is calm.

6.30 a.m. is H-hour on D-Day.

The first American troops land.

Only 100 Germans man the beach defenses.

The US reports 197 casualties,

far less than expected.

But it's a very different story for the Americans on Omaha Beach.

The preparations for D-Day were overwhelming.

The operational plans were feet thick of paper,

and detailed down to almost every imaginable scenario.

But there's an old saying among military practitioners,

and that is that no plan survives contact with the enemy.

Unknown to Allied Intelligence, a thousand battle hardened

Wehrmacht soldiers await the Americans.

Allied landing craft snag on sandbanks.

And most of the submersible tanks are launched too early, and sink.

American troops caught between the sea

and experienced Wehrmacht fighters

are sitting ducks.

Omaha Beach is a disaster.

Everything that could go wrong for the Americans on Omaha did.

I mean, the plan failed miserably.

You just ended up with thousands of men trapped

under German machine gun fire on the beach.

Many US troops die in the first hail of bullets,

with over 3,000 casualties throughout the day.

The British land an hour later, at 7:25 a.m. on Sword Beach.

Sappers and flail tanks clear beach mines,

and it's a successful landing.

In calmer seas, the submersible tanks are able

to swim to the shoreline.

But there are major fortified positions in this section of the Atlantic Wall.

One of these strong points, code named Hillman,

which is an absolute labyrinth of gun positions,

and just bogs down the British advance.

At Juno, the first Canadian landing craft

hit the beach at 7:49 a.m.

The Canadians are keen to avenge the loss of their comrades at Dieppe

two years earlier.

But they also suffer heavy losses.

Twenty of twenty-four landing craft are sunk,

as a fast-incoming tide

pushes them towards Nazi mines and beach obstacles.

At Gold Beach, the first British landing craft have arrived.

When I landed, water came up above my knees

as I was sitting in the craft.

All we wanted to do was get off that boat,

get off that beach and go up to hard ground.

One or two other trucks hit bomb holes, they just sank.

One silly fool in front decided that he wasn't gonna wait in the queue.

He blew up, and that put the wind up the lot of us.

When I got within sight of the beach,

we could see explosions, a lot of smoke, a lot of machine gun fire

and then we were down the ramp and into the water.

And the water came up to my waist.

I was carrying a lot of equipment and I thought,

"If I go down here, I'll never get up."

Hunter's commanding officer is Major Kenneth Swan.

Major Swan said, "That wall by the track, make for there now,

don't look, don't stop for anything."

He said, "If you stop, you're dead."

When we got past the wall onto the open field,

there was a sniper shooting at us.

Major Swan, he turned to me and he said,

"I don't think I'll see England again."

And, you know, he didn't.

It isn't until nine o'clock in the morning,

far away in the Alps,

that Hitler finally wakes and assesses the news.

He is briefed that there are two massive fleets

bearing down on Calais.

Normandy is no more than an elaborate diversion.

Calais is the real target.

Hitler is being duped by another elaborate British deception.

Window is tin foil that's dropped from an airplane

and then is reflected by the enemy's radar.

So it looked, to German radar,

as though this was a fleet approaching very slowly,

and that clearly was coming in the Pas-de-Calais.

Inland, more chaos ensues.

As German troops rush to intercept Allied paratroopers,

they discover many are miniature decoys known as Ruperts.

Ruperts are dropped further inland in order

to create a bigger chaos amongst the German defenders.

If these come down, they go and rush,

they find one of these Ruperts on the ground.

Then, when the real parachute troops come down later,

they'll think it's going to be the same thing.

Despite around 10,000 casualties in total,

the sheer weight of numbers of Allied men and machinery landing on D-Day,

eventually overwhelm most of the German defensive positions.

In total, almost 160,000 Allied troops

cross the Channel on D-Day.

With their uniforms still wet, the British and Canadian infantry

begin moving towards their next strategic target,

the city of Caen.

And Caen is absolutely vital for the Allied landings

'cause it's this big road hub that radiates out in all directions

from Normandy to the north, to the east, to the south.

So they have to take it in order to expand out of the beach head.

Only at 3:00 p.m., when most of the Allied beaches

have been secured, does Hitler realize

he has been completely fooled.

Finally, he releases the 12th SS Panzer Division,

manned by fanatical members of Hitler Youth,

to join the 21st Panzer Division at Caen.

Their combined forces can still push the Allies back into the sea.

The commander of 12th SS Division

is SS Standartenführer, Kurt Meyer,

a skillful Panzer commander but also a ruthless Nazi,

and he makes his men believe

fighting in France is the same as fighting at home.

The Hitler Youth division fought ferociously

and very often fought to the last cartridge.

Some of the British troops have fighting experience

in Italy and North Africa,

but most have never come across a foe as deadly as an SS Panzer Division.

But, critically, some of the 12th Division

are sent to respond to another Allied paratrooper landing near Lisieux.

In reality, they are heading to intercept

yet more Ruperts.

The Allied deception gains them crucial time.

But the remaining half of the battle-hardened

SS Panzer Division do reach Caen,

and they are prepared to defend it to the death.

The Germans built up a stiff defense line around Caen.

After the landing, Allied troops are physically exhausted.

And this allows the Germans to regroup their defenses.

So instead of a quick walk through Normandy,

the ensuing battle is a war of attrition.

In overall command of the Allied ground forces

attempting to seize Caen…

is controversial Field Marshal, Bernard Montgomery.

Montgomery is a very self-centered character.

He might well be mildly autistic.

He didn't seem to have a great deal of empathy.

He started to think of himself not so much as just a leader of troops,

but as actually a figurehead,

and there was a hell of a fight on here.

This wasn't about Montgomery, this was about trying to get,

ultimately, to Germany.

And Monty doesn't exactly endear himself

to his American counterparts.

Whereas some other British Generals understood

the vital importance of getting along with the Americans

and being civil to them,

Montgomery was absolutely consistent throughout the war

in insulting the Americans at every turn.

Despite the strength and ferocity of the Panzer defenses,

if Monty can break through at Caen,

the Allies can make swift progress into France

and, ultimately, Germany itself.

Monty's mission is critical.

The terrain beyond Caen is perfect tank country.

If he can take Caen and its vital roads, he can then facilitate the break-up.

A week after D-Day, in the town of Villers-Bocage,

German tank commander, Michael Wittmann,

ambushes and destroys more than ten British tanks

in an audacious 15-minute attack.

Even though it's only quite a minor tactical victory

for the Germans,

German propaganda portrays this as a huge victory over the Allies.

Michael Wittmann himself becomes a hero of Nazi propaganda.

We came to Villers-Bocage.

The Germans had placed Tiger tanks

in some of the houses.

We had the order to shell these houses.

There wasn't a single house standing in that village.

We'd not only killed Germans, we killed civilians.

We were quite cut up about it. We were really, really distraught.

While Monty is making little progress in Caen,

the Americans in the west are also finding that breaking out

from their beach heads is no easy matter.

From the American side of the beaches you're crossing bocage country.

These famous French hedgerows, which were built to divide the fields.

And they were perfect to shelter crops from the wind.

They also provide perfect cover for the Germans,

and the Germans use them.

So they've got men behind and even inside the hedgerows

under perfect concealment, fire at these Allies

trying to break out of the beach heads.

The tall hedgerows of the Normandy bocage

are insurmountable for some of the Allies' Sherman tanks.

Some are fitted with hedge cutting teeth at the front,

to be able to get through them.

But these Allied tanks are a poor match for the heavy German Panther tank.

Sherman tanks quickly catch fire.

The Germans call them Tommy cookers.

And the Germans have turned an anti-aircraft gun

into an anti-tank gun,

for which the Allies have little answer.

Our artillery was far superior to the Germans',

except for one gun that the Germans had.

That was the 88 millimeter.

It was a very deadly gun.

They could fire on our tanks before our tanks were near enough

to use their ammunition.

We were advancing along a main road.

The roads were very dry, so the vehicles threw up a lot of dust.

What we didn't realize, that a German 88

had pinpointed this road.

Germans saw it,

sent over shell.

Bang, right in the middle of the truck it landed.

He was full of petrol and, well, there was nothing left.

And I couldn't move.

I was so shocked, I couldn't move.

On the 18th of July, in an effort to break

the deadlock around Caen,

Operation Goodwood sees heavy bombers

hit the German front-line with over 7,000 tons of bombs.

The tank battle that follows is one of the largest

the British Army ever fights.

A week later, American bombers hit the Germans

near Saint-Lô, with Operation Cobra.

After seven weeks, the battle for Caen, predicted by Monty to last one day,

reaches its end game.

The British and Canadians flush out German positions

in brutal house-to-house fighting.

A relentless Allied bombing campaign leaves Caen flattened.

Thousands of French are caught in the crossfire.

There was a lot of civilian casualties in Caen.

When we went through, it was a terrible sight really.

It was a ruined people, yeah, it was absolutely bad, very bad.

German resistance weakens as they run low on ammunition,

food, and equipment.

Allied aerial supremacy sees Nazi supply lines bombed mercilessly.

The Seventh Army tell Hitler they need 4,500 tons of supplies

every day to fight the Allies.

But little more than a quarter of this amount is getting through.

With no petrol or spare parts,

many German tanks are left abandoned.

The Germans are getting chewed up. They're being ground down.

When a Tiger tank fails mechanically,

it's gone forever, there's no repair network.

When a Sherman tank fails, there's a whole host of mobile workshops.

The Germans are forced to rely on horse drawn transport

to resupply their battered troops.

Thing at that point that really surprised me was

how many horses the Germans had been using.

There was dozens of horses lying about.

We were understood that it was a modern mechanized army.

Because everybody looks at all the news reels of Panzers,

they forget that the German Army was still overwhelmingly

a horse drawn army.

Americans and British were totally mechanized,

and the Germans still were not.

The Germans are bombed into submission

as their front line collapses throughout Normandy.

As the Americans approach from the south and west,

and British and Canadians from the north and east,

100,000 German soldiers find themselves trapped

in the Falaise Pocket.

With the Americans and us, we encircled the Falaise area

and gradually moved in, tightened the cordon all the way round.

The animals suffered most of all.

And the stench from dead animals and dead bodies was tremendous.

We had a job trying not to be sick ourselves

as we drove through there because of the stench of death.

Ten thousand soldiers are killed

and 40,000 taken prisoner.

This means the end of a German Army in France.

With the collapse of the Eastern Front, it meant that in the summer of 1944,

Germany had suffered two devastating defeats.

The Germans suffered on average about 6,000 to 6,500 casualties per day.

The German Army is beaten in France,

but not finished, far from it.

Fifty thousand escape Falaise,

including almost all the senior officers.

Two or three weeks later, that same wrecked army,

an amazing number of those formations were able to fight again

and to keep the war going until May 1945.

On the 25th of August 1944, Paris is finally liberated.

But losses on both sides make victory for the Allies bittersweet.

There are more than half-a-million Allied and German casualties in Normandy.

A further 20,000 French civilians are killed in the crossfire.

The overall casualty rate per day is higher in number,

proportionally, than it was at the Somme or Verdun

and Passchendaele in the First World War.

The Germans kept on fighting

when we thought that they shouldn't do.

We just wanted to get in and get it over with, finish it.

I must have had a good guardian angel for that day,

Same as I had for several other occasions that I can remember.

A corner in the battle for Europe has been turned.

The Normandy landings, there's no question

they're a resounding success.

They are a real feat of arms, a real feat of technology,

a real feat of American, British, Canadian courage.

To have the Americans in place to defend Europe

against Soviet domination was absolutely critical,

and that's facilitated by the landings in Normandy.

Dunkirk and the defeat of France has been avenged.

Churchill said he'd fight them on the beaches,

and with help from the Allies, has been true to his word.

The war is not yet over,

but D-Day and the battle for Normandy

mark the beginning of the end.

Re-sync & redact: BLU DUAINE blu.duaine@protonmail.com