Episode 1 D-Day: The Last Heroes

On the 6th June 1944, British and Allied forces put a top-secret plan into action.

D-Day.

There was smoke, there was fire,

there were explosions.

I thought nobody could survive in that. Nobody.

It looked like dead bodies all over the place to me.

In a single day, 14,000 men would be captured,

wounded or lose their lives.

You can't give more than your life, can you?

I ran so fast, I would have beat Jesse Owens on that day.

I was fighting for the country and I was fighting for me.

Their sacrifice gave the Allies

their best chance of defeating Nazi Germany.

But there's another untold story that begins years before D-Day.

It's a story of how the invasion was minutely planned

in the most incredible detail.

D-Day was a victory, not just of bombs, bullets and bayonets,

but of things like aerial reconnaissance,

espionage and state-of-the-art technology.

In this film, we reveal how the Allies planned D-Day

and created a three-dimensional picture

of the entire German war machine

that faced them in Northern France.

No doubt about that, those pictures did save lives.

Didn't save all, naturally, but at that type of thing...

..somebody dies.

This is the story of that heroism and self-sacrifice.

This is the story of a day that helped save the world

from the greatest menace of the 20th century.

EXPLOSIONS AND SHOUTING

They get off the craft and the fellas are dropping

left and right of me.

I didn't even know what our objective was.

All I was supposed to do was shoot a German if I saw him.

We had very little information.

All we were told to do - follow my leader.

You did as you were told.

You were a soldier, or tried to be.

Normandy, France.

Just after dawn,

British and Canadian troops storm a beach in enemy territory.

I was as scared as hell but I knew I had to keep moving,

keep moving, keep moving.

The Germans had time to zero in wherever they wanted.

They really rattled our boat.

My mate got one right through the back, yeah.

A heavily fortified German stronghold fires deadly salvos

into the advancing Allied soldiers.

Tanks flounder on the pebbles.

The result is a killing field.

But that terrible day on the beaches of Normandy

wasn't 6th June 1944.

It wasn't D-Day.

It was Dieppe,

here on 19th August 1942,

two years earlier.

It was here that the Allies made their first major attempt

at a landing on French soil, and the result was a disaster.

I came across a sergeant I knew.

His whole front was laying right out...just laying there,

and he said, "Howard, Howard. Oh," he says, "I'm in so much pain."

He says, "Please shoot me," you know?

I said, "No, I'm not going to."

So he didn't have a weapon, so I... I just handed him a weapon.

GUNSHOT

Yeah... Yeah.

Why I wasn't hit there, I haven't the vaguest idea.

Maybe the Germans just got tired of shooting at us.

We took a good hiding there.

They were ready for us when we went in.

Allied leaders wanted to test German fortifications

and see if they could seize a well-defended port.

They got the answer they feared.

More than half of the 6,000-strong force were killed,

wounded or captured.

70 years on, some of the few survivors from Dieppe

remember those who died that day.

BUGLES PLAY "Last Post"

A lot of people lost their lives at Dieppe...unnecessarily, I think.

But I can never understand

why they tried to take a port.

You know, it was a mistake,

and it shouldn't have happened.

You don't attack a well-defended port.

For a long while, I refused to think about it,

because every time I thought about it, I would get nightmares.

I sort of blanked Dieppe out,

just blanked it out,

didn't talk about it.

Dieppe was the defining moment in the Second World War.

It taught the Allies a bitter but a timely lesson

and that was, if they wanted to invade Nazi-occupied Western Europe,

if they wanted to punch through these massive fortifications,

they would have to get the preparation right,

the intelligence right, and execute it far better,

and if they didn't do those things,

then as that corpse-covered beach down there showed,

the consequences would be unthinkable.

1934.

Adolf Hitler became Fuhrer of Nazi Germany.

HITLER SPEAKS IN GERMAN

-CROWD:

-Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

Didn't like old Mr Adolf Hitler, did we?

Bit of a rascal, you know?

The Nazis swept through Czechoslovakia and Poland.

-NEWSREEL:

-Poland and the world learn

the meaning of a grim new word - Blitzkrieg.

There's no doubt they were brutal oppressors

and believed they were a master race.

France followed.

The German onslaught forced Britain into a humiliating retreat.

-NEWSREEL:

-From the hell that is Dunkirk...

We were fighting for self-preservation,

to make sure that we came through this, one way or the other.

By 1941, it had become a world war.

The United States entered the conflict.

-NEWSREEL:

-Japan, like its infamous Axis partners,

struck first and declared war afterwards.

Britain and her North American allies

acknowledged the only way to defeat Hitler

was a full-scale invasion of mainland Europe,

to match Russian efforts on the Eastern Front.

WINSTON CHURCHILL: ..That with proper weapons and proper organisation

we are able to beat the life out of the savage Nazis.

The plan for D-Day was born.

The area where the invasion would eventually take place

was never seriously in doubt.

It would be the coastline of northwest Europe,

but it was heavily defended.

The Nazis dominated the area

and they were turning Europe into a fortress.

Haunted by the memory of Dieppe, the Allies would need to scrutinise

every inch of the German fortifications from the air.

They turned to a trusted friend, the Spitfire.

But this was a Spitfire with a difference.

Instead of guns, it was armed with cameras...

..to photograph Nazi Europe.

The whole point was to get the photographs and get home.

Don't mix it up with any other aircraft.

That was the key.

In the hands of a skilled pilot, these aircraft could capture

detail from 30,000 feet with astonishing clarity.

The cameras would pick up far more detail

than you could by a visual inspection.

These top-secret photographs and the intelligence they provided

underpinned the planning for D-Day

and set the Allies on the path to victory.

The aerial photos were brought here to RAF Medmenham,

just west of London.

This was home to the Photo Interpreters, PIs.

The heroes of D-Day weren't just those men

who fought their way ashore in landing craft

and attacked the beaches,

but also the men and women who worked tirelessly behind the scenes

in this warren of dusty rooms.

The head of the US Army Air Force estimated

that 80% of his intelligence was generated here.

Really, nothing was happening in Europe

that we didn't know about to some degree.

Industry, defences, anti-aircraft provisions.

Oh, heaven knows what! Such a multitude.

I really was very lucky indeed

in that it was a fascinating thing to be doing

and you got hooked on it,

in the way you get hooked by a cryptic crossword puzzle.

Of course, there was nothing new about aerial photography,

but what made the PIs here at Medmenham unique

was their use of an additional intelligence-gathering tool -

the stereoscope.

Basically a Victorian invention, but it was one that allowed them

to enter enemy territory as never before, in three dimensions.

A flat photo will hardly give you an idea of the lie of the land.

If you look down at a chimney, all you see is a circle,

so you can get exactly the wrong impression.

If you put it through a stereoscope,

it comes up and you can tell that it's a chimney, and so on,

so it gives you another dimension

and that often is the clue to what you're looking at.

It's wonderfully simple.

You get a pair of aerial photographs of the same object,

you place them side by side,

making sure that the object is under either lens of the stereoscope.

If you look through it, you get this magical optical illusion.

Your brain fuses the two images

to allow you to see the object in three dimensions.

It's almost like you can reach out and touch it.

These are some fantastic original images

of one of the German dams that was breached

by the bouncing bombs during the famous Dambusters raid in 1943.

We've been able to enhance them digitally.

The raw intelligence that could be unlocked from photos like this

was invaluable.

The Allies realised that 3D was a powerful weapon that could

make the difference between success and failure on D-Day.

The technique proved itself in early 1942,

with this seemingly innocuous aerial photograph.

Using the stereoscope, a PI noticed a small blob

next to a cliff-top chateau at Bruneval in Normandy.

They had no idea what it was.

It wasn't until a brave pilot went in

and took a low-level photograph sideways on

that you could see a great deal more of what was going on.

The photo was a revelation.

Medmenham had uncovered one of the enemy's best-kept secrets...

..radar.

We knew that the Germans were using it for directing their bombers in,

but we didn't know how it might be used to detect

early warning of an attack, so it was important to find out.

Rather than destroy the radar, it was decided to steal it.

In one of the war's most audacious operations,

paratroopers were sent in at night, taking the Germans by surprise.

After a brief gun battle,

they captured the radar equipment and escaped.

Within hours, they were on the way home with a captive...

..the German radar technician.

It was a major coup for the PIs here at Medmenham.

They had uncovered a deadly part of Hitler's Fortress Europe.

For years, the Nazis had been preparing for an invasion

by fortifying the European coastline.

3,000 miles from Norway to Spain.

Thousands of concrete bunkers and heavy gun emplacements.

More than six million mines.

It was known as the Atlantic Wall.

As proven at Dieppe,

punching a hole through it from the sea was a high-risk strategy.

But all 3,000 miles were impossible to defend.

There had to be a weakness.

The PIs began probing every inch of coastline

from the Netherlands to the Spanish border.

We covered the whole of the Channel coast,

with as much information as possible about all the defences.

Oh, yes, it looks as though there is something there.

Hmm, there's a central path

and then three that branch off to equal positions.

If there are a number of pits being dug in a particular pattern,

it's almost certainly that they're making sites

to establish a gun battery.

The most obvious invasion route was straight to Calais,

barely 20 miles,

but the aerial photographs revealed this could be suicidal.

The Pas-de-Calais was heavily defended,

not least by the Todt Battery -

four vast 380-millimetre guns.

The PIs focused their search on less well-defended beaches further west.

There's only a very few beaches that could be used for landing

and that was the key to the whole thing,

to pick out the spot where we were going to land.

Now, no-one, including me, knew where this was,

but we had the pictures.

Eventually, the Allies found what they thought might be

a chink in the Nazi armour -

a 60-mile stretch of the Normandy coastline

where they hoped to take the enemy by surprise.

The advantage of that stretch of coast was that there were less

of these German defences, and there were no major ports,

so no huge concentrations of German military power,

as there had been at Dieppe.

The PIs had provided the Allied leadership

with a crucial piece in a vast jigsaw.

A plan for the D-Day invasion took shape.

It was to attack five beaches.

British and Canadian forces would seize three beaches in the east,

code-named Sword...

..Juno...

..and Gold.

The Americans would take two western beaches -

Omaha...

..and Utah.

The date - 5th June 1944.

But landing 150,000 troops on enemy territory was no mean feat.

Amphibious assault is one of warfare's toughest challenges

and that's why today's Royal Marine Commandos

practise it again and again and again.

I'm heading out now to a naval vessel, to join 45 Commando,

who are about to launch a beach assault on Cornwall.

..Recce. We'll secure the beach.

We'll move in.

The Marines are fully briefed using satellite intelligence,

the modern-day equivalent of the aerial photos used at Medmenham.

..This area, where we actually exit the boats...

The guys have just been called to their assault stations,

and already the atmosphere onboard has completely changed.

There's less laughing and joking, and now people are quite serious.

They're thinking about the night that lies ahead.

There's a lot of last-minute checking of kit,

adjusting body armour, running through their drills.

There's a tension. It really does just make you wonder

what the atmosphere onboard those ships crossing the Channel

must have been like in 1944.

Weather's picked up a bit. Got quite strong easterly winds now.

2.2-metre surf. But be prepared to get a bit damp.

You see these are the vulnerabilities

of amphibious warfare, when the weather can turn on us.

This must be a real problem with amphibious landings,

you are very vulnerable to bad weather.

Yes, it can swing either way. Sometimes it helps you,

sometimes it can stop the operation completely.

Sadly, on this occasion, the powers that be decide

the waves are too high for a conventional beach assault.

They adapt their tactics to a more covert operation.

The Commandos were formed in World War II,

specialising in amphibious assaults and stealth raids.

New warfare required a new type of warrior,

and the Commandos and their American counterparts, the Rangers,

trained hard.

By the time we got into England,

we finally developed a feeling that our mission would be

landing on a hostile shore.

Everybody knew that.

First, though, we were taught to transition from boats

to the attacking of fortresses or beach defences.

We exercised day and night

until we got it absolutely right,

and the Rangers were very good troops,

trained by our Commandos, and first-class soldiers,

and they got it right.

The British Commandos, in my opinion,

were the best troops in the world.

We were abseiling off those cliffs,

going across that river on the death slide.

It was a case of we wanted to kill Germans.

We had some very, very good people

in Achnacarry to teach us how to do just that.

We got a taste of what war was like.

And kill him!

We were experts on all the weapons in the battalion

and we were introduced to night operations.

-In those days, we were ready for anything, really.

-Yeah.

Whatever they slung at us, we'd do.

-Yeah.

-And that was it.

-That's right, that's right. Yeah.

We've been on the landing craft for about 40 or 50 minutes.

Everyone's getting a bit colder, rain's started to come down,

and you get that sense that all the veterans talk about,

which is that the waiting seems absolutely interminable,

and by the time they actually cross the Channel

on these landing craft, they were just desperate to get off,

no matter what they faced on the beach ahead.

(So it's going to be a fight for the top. Just break in as far as...)

(We've been walking a couple of hundred metres from the beach

(and it's an important reminder of what they had to do on D-Day -

(not just land on the beach,

(but penetrate the German defensive line,

(and that's what we're doing now.)

(The scout has just come back to report the enemy is 50 metres ahead.

(We're now going to wait here until H-hour

(which is the pre-agreed time that the assault is going to go in.)

GUNFIRE

-Go! Go! Go!

-Get some fire in that door!

-Go! Go! Go!

-Door!

It's absolutely remarkable watching these guys firing

and manoeuvring with expert skill.

Start moving!

EXPLOSIONS AND SHOUTING

Charging into this fortress really demonstrates why the Atlantic Wall

was such a formidable defensive position,

complex networks, tunnels, corridors.

It takes elite troops to be able to clear a place like this

without doing themselves huge damage in the process.

The way they're communicating to each other

and putting down suppressing fire,

they HAVE to have done the preparation.

GUNFIRE

45 Commando are coming to the end of clearing this fortress now.

It's been an absolute privilege watching them work

but it's also given me a bit of an insight

into the massive challenges

for those who planned and executed the Normandy invasion,

the largest and most complex amphibious operation of all time.

If the Allied planners got D-Day wrong,

there'd be a bloodbath on an unimaginable scale.

Every German defensive position that posed a threat

to the troops landing in Normandy had to be identified.

The role of the spies in the sky was critical.

And pilots had to fly the entire length of the French coastline

to keep the Nazis from guessing that Normandy was the target.

It's always wise to err on the side of caution.

Other people's lives may be at stake.

When you think of that, you don't rush your judgment.

The Atlantic Wall that the Germans built along this coast

isn't really a wall at all, of course.

It's actually a whole series of different elements,

things like minefields and barbed-wire obstacles,

a machine-gun nest down on the beaches,

but, of course, a far more efficient way of dealing with the invasion

is to knock out the Allies

before they ever set foot on French soil,

and that's why, for me, the most important, the most powerful element

of the Atlantic Wall are these huge naval guns.

These things can fire a huge shell 12 miles out to sea.

It sounds a bit strange to say this,

but this bunker is so powerfully constructed,

so perfectly designed to do the job required of it.

It just speaks to me of this German determination

to fight for every inch of this coast.

One of the most lethal gun batteries was on a cliff-top promontory,

close to the American landing zones.

Pointe du Hoc.

In 3D, the PIs could measure that the cliffs were 30 metres high

and work out that the six guns were 155-millimetre calibre.

And that is why they treated Pointe du Hoc as a target

of the utmost importance, as this aerial photo shows.

Chilling photograph.

Pointe de Hoc was particularly dangerous

because both the Utah landing zone and Omaha were both within range.

If these guns were operational on D-Day, it could be disastrous.

The unenviable task of silencing these guns

was given to the American Rangers.

It would be one of the most dangerous missions of D-Day.

After penetrating whatever defences there were in front of us,

We would then have to attack a fortification.

It made sense to go up the cliffs.

The cliff assault demanded rigorous training

and some imaginative new ways of waging war.

Someone thought of the idea of putting fire ladders onto DUKWs.

The ladder would then be extended with a man

sitting at the top and as he reached the top of the cliff,

he would just hold the trigger

and these four-calibre fifties

would be pouring out rounds at a magnificent rate.

Even if the Allies smashed through this line of artillery,

there were still dangers beyond.

Within 100 miles of the invasion zone,

six Panzer divisions were capable of driving them back into the sea.

To prevent a counter-attack, Medmenham's PIs needed to

identify and target every bridge in Normandy of strategic importance.

One stood out.

Four miles inland from Sword Beach, a bridge crossed the Caen Canal.

If the Germans held it or destroyed it,

British forces would be dangerously exposed.

The bridge, code-named Pegasus, had to be secured.

There was only one way to get troops in.

Horsa Gliders.

The Horsa was an excellent glider.

Plywood tube, a couple of high wings.

A very primitive design,

but it carried 30 troops and it was quite a weapon.

180 men of the British 6th Airborne

and six glider pilots were hand-picked for what would be

the opening assault of D-Day.

Jim Wallwork remembers the selection process.

You fly the glider and deliver the troops,

and then you're one of the troops then, aren't you?

"You mean I fly the bloody thing in, get it to the right place,

"and then take part in the, er..?"

"Yes."

"Oh, well, it can't be helped, I suppose."

So I became a glider pilot and I became very good at it.

Says he with his usual modesty(!)

To take Pegasus,

the pilots would crash-land in a narrow field between the Caen Canal

and the River Orne. The men would leap out and storm the bridge.

Success depended on detailed planning.

I've just got a few of the photographs here,

which the men would have pored over for days and weeks

and months before taking part in this operation.

You can see the landing zone here on the east bank,

you can even see the body of water which is still there,

the waterway here is still running

like a ribbon right across the landscape

and without that preparation, landing in the dead of night

in the heart of enemy territory would have been absolute suicide.

Detailed measurements were taken from 3D aerial photos

using a hi-tech survey machine called the Wild.

And a scale model of the bridge and surrounding area was created.

But Medmenham's ingenuity did not end there.

A state-of-the-art fly-through training film of the landing

was used to brief the glider pilots.

It was almost from the same height we would be making the approach,

you could see the dangerous bits, the fences,

the canals, the rivers, the ditches to avoid.

And one of the pilots said,

"You know, someone's taking this thing rather seriously."

So from then on we agreed to take it seriously. And we did.

The Americans were also training their elite soldiers

to go behind enemy lines.

Ed Shames was in the 506th Regiment of the Screaming Eagles,

the 101st Airborne.

The 506 was an experimental unit

and it became the finest fighting force

in the history of the United States military.

I'm very proud to have been part of it.

We were on top of Currahee Mountain.

We used to run this thing at least two or three times per week,

sweat like hell. Up and down ropes, ladders,

jumped off of platforms 30 feet high. Tough, tough, very tough.

Made men out of all of us.

101st Airborne faced a daunting task - a night-drop

to capture another important bridge over the River Douve.

Without the bridge in American hands,

the men landing at Utah and Omaha

would struggle to join forces and would be at the mercy of the enemy.

The Germans were across this area of Carentan.

They had to penetrate across the bridges

to go to the beach here,

Utah Beach, where the landings were taking place.

To compound the problem,

3D photography of the area revealed a flat, marshy terrain.

American troops advancing into this would be an easy target.

It's not until you come here

and actually look at this landscape for yourself, that you realise just

how difficult it would have been to move forces through this area.

Not only do you have the river here joining Carentan to the sea,

but you've also got these incredible low-lying fields

that would have been boggy,

effectively impassable for troops

and certainly heavy vehicles and tanks. And that's why

the planners placed so much emphasis on seizing the roads,

the bridges here on this high ground,

dykes like this one, because this is the area

that basically linked Omaha over there and Utah there.

It was vitally important for the two bridgeheads to meet up

and this is where it was going to happen.

By early 1944, the Allies were fully committed to D-Day.

Then the latest aerial photographs

revealed intense enemy activity on the landing beaches.

The photo reconnaissance pilots were sent in

to find out what the Germans were up to.

These daredevil so-called dicing missions

involved flying just ten metres off the ground.

A daisy cutter...

..scraped the ground.

We were so low that a machine gun on top of the cliffs

couldn't shoot at us.

Quick in, cameras on and out.

We were going so fast that the men working on the beach

didn't know we were coming.

No second run.

Second run is death.

Their extraordinary photos revealed the beaches now covered

in an array of deadly obstacles, dubbed the Devil's Garden.

They're all embedded in the sand at low tide,

which means that our landing ship coming in

would have to hit these things before they even reached the beach.

The architect of these German defences was one of Hitler's

most brilliant military commanders, Erwin Rommel.

But what was the Desert Fox doing in Normandy?

For months, the Allies had been attempting to convince Hitler

that the invasion site was further east, in the Pas-de-Calais.

In a top-secret game of deception,

they assembled an invasion force of dummy tanks,

inflatable landing craft and aeroplanes

in the southeast of England.

It was known as Operation Fortitude.

But had Fortitude failed?

Were the Allied forces about to enter a killing field?

To tackle beach obstacles

like those identified in the aerial photographs,

the British Royal Engineers had been developing

a new generation of tanks Hobart's Funnies.

The Funnies were extraordinary

and they could be deployed anywhere and everywhere,

and certainly those that laid bridges... Extraordinary!

Yes, yes.

But that was the use of imagination, again, you see.

What problems would you meet and how would you overcome them?

They all had specialised equipment. For instance,

the flail tank had the flail on the front for dealing with minefields.

So this would fly around and it would churn up the earth?

These chains would take you down about

nine inches into the ground and strike any buried mines.

When you saw them in training, did you think,

"Actually, these are going to really help win us the war,

"these are going to help us get ashore on the D-day beaches?"

No, we didn't think that at all. We thought, "We want to go shooting!"

One of the greatest challenges was getting tanks off the landing craft

and onto the beaches.

This is a DD tank, known by the troops as a Donald Duck.

In fact, it stands for Duplex Drive.

That means that this tank is the single most extraordinary innovation

that the Allies made in the build-up to D-Day

because this tank swims.

Complete with waterproof canvas hull and propeller, the DD tank,

it was hoped, would spearhead the beach assault,

providing covering fire for the troops.

We were so excited about the project of going into a new secret weapon

which was going to actually lead the assault.

When we knew we were going to swim from the sea for up to 5,000 yards,

we wondered how we were going to do it, but we became quite confident.

As D-Day approached, the intelligence flooded in to Medmenham

and another threat was revealed by an observant PI.

We could see where they were digging pits and putting stakes in them

and, er, just exactly where we were planning to land the gliders.

Just inland from the beaches,

the Germans were burying wooden stakes in the ground.

For the plywood gliders landing at Pegasus Bridge,

these medieval defences could prove disastrous.

They were going to put wire between the tops of the posts

and explosive charges and if a parachutist or a glider

struck the wire, this explosive would go off and likely damage them.

I remember saying,

"Well, do you know, that's not playing the game at all."

It wasn't a game Commanding Officer Major John Howard

wanted to play, either.

Howard was concerned, of course, so, "Oh," we said, "Not to worry,

"the Germans think it's going to put us off, but the most difficult thing

"with a loaded glider is to stop the thing and I can easily go between

"a couple of poles, shed the wings, it might be a good thing at the end."

"Oh, really?" he said.

I said, "Oh, yes," and, er, look the other way quick!

Then another last-minute set-back.

The gun battery at Pointe du Hoc, the target for the US Rangers,

had been "softened up" by Allied bombardment.

The latest photos revealed a cratered moonscape.

But additional intelligence suggested that

the guns had been moved.

It was decided that the Rangers

should carry out their cliff assault regardless.

The commander due to lead the attack didn't agree.

Major Lytle unfortunately got very drunk.

He slugged the battalion doctor and he told everybody that

the mission was hopeless, we're all going to die.

Lytle was relieved of his duties

and the location of the guns remained a mystery.

The Allies needed to be more prepared than ever.

Two months before D-Day, British forces gathered

for a full dress rehearsal at Studland Bay, Dorset.

This is where the Prime Minister Winston Churchill,

the Supreme Allied Commander General Eisenhower and King George VI

all came to watch one of the days of Exercise Smash.

It would be the largest live-fire exercise of World War II,

a huge, simulated beach attack here on the Dorset coast

and these beaches were chosen because they closely resembled

the Normandy beaches that would be used on D-Day.

Part of the attack involved putting the DD swimming tanks to the test.

They failed to live up to expectations.

I could see a wave coming which was

three or four feet higher than the top of our canvas screen

and the next moment I knew, the water poured over the top

and we sank down to the bottom.

So we were entombed.

We lost six all together.

We'd all become part of a crew

and I knew them all very well.

Very sad.

In total, four tanks were lost and six men died.

The tragedy was repeated on a larger scale in Exercise Tiger

the American rehearsal at Slapton Sands in Devon.

To harden the men to the sight and sound of battle,

live artillery rounds were to be fired over their heads

before they hit the beach.

But on the morning of April 27th, the warships were delayed.

H-hour was postponed till 8.30am.

The message didn't get through to the landing craft.

And with terrifying consequences, the men stormed Slapton Sands,

at the same time as their artillery opened fire.

We got about halfway to the beach when we were straddled

by a salvo from the United States' Battleship Texas.

And we were swamped, almost, by this "friendly fire",

so called, on the way in.

Tracer bullets were firing all over the place.

So it was a complete shambles.

Later that day, torpedo-armed German E-boats

attacked American troop carriers taking part in the exercise.

In total, 947 men were needlessly killed.

It didn't bode well.

Despite the disaster, D-Day was still set for June 5th.

Conditions were ideal.

There was a full moon,

and the Normandy tides were perfect for a beach landing.

Before D-Day, this room

was one of the most important places in the world.

This was the beating heart of the naval operation,

the thousands of ships that were going to

gather in the middle of the Channel

and take the amphibious force across to land them on the French coast.

Just look at the scale of it.

This here was called Piccadilly Circus.

This is where the ships were due to meet,

assemble from all over the British Isles

and then head through the German minefield here, this white barrier

and on to the D-Day beaches - Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah.

For me, this map represents the extraordinary effort

and preparation that went into D-Day.

Nothing was being left to chance, not even the assembling of this map.

Nothing like this had ever been made before

so they had to get it specially made by a toy company in Birmingham.

But this meant that the two guys from the toy company

knew where the invasion was going to take place

so they were interned here at Southwick House until September.

I'm sure they were paid though.

The secrecy extended to the troops.

A week before the invasion,

they were held in closed camps along the south coast.

Security was tight.

Two years of planning, based on Medmenham's top-secret work,

was finally unveiled to the men.

It's salutary to know that what you say or do can be

responsible for other people's lives...being saved, or lost.

It weighs with you.

Aerial photos, models and maps revealed in detail what the men

would encounter on the ground,

from the gradient of the beach and the number of obstacles,

to the position of minefields and machine guns.

They began to show us maps

and photographs of what was going to take place.

That's when we see those cliffs with those machine guns.

Where we were landing, there was going to be two machine guns.

It scared everybody pretty good.

I think the intelligence we received was excellent.

Every day, new intelligence would come through,

largely by reconnaissance photographs.

This is your best buddy, so get to know it.

Another vital briefing tool used by the Airborne troops

dropping behind enemy lines was the sand table.

See this place here?

Detailing every tree, farmyard and German position.

Nazis all over. You find yourself there,

you get the hell out of there.

You could mould it and make roads,

make mountains, hills, buildings.

You had little steeples for churches, anything you wanted.

It was a guide, a map that you could actually almost feel.

This is our opportunity to shine, gentlemen.

Finally on the 4th of June 1944, the eve of D-Day,

after months of physical training,

the men prepared themselves mentally for what lay ahead.

Couldn't sleep on the last night in the camp.

No, no.

-We were all sitting talking about it.

-Yeah.

And smoking and...

-All anxious, yeah.

-Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Sure

Even the Germans get like that, don't worry, yeah.

They were sharpening knives, blackening their face,

they were cutting their hair and they were doing

everything except probably worrying to death.

There was a lot of punching and pushing about,

throwing knives at pictures of Hitler.

It's the sort of thing soldiers get up to and I think it's a bravado

cos we knew that we were going on something quite big.

Then a very British delay.

THUNDER RUMBLES

Predicting the weather was, well,

pretty much the most important part of the build-up to D-Day.

There was no point taking this collection of ships

across the English channel

if the weather was going to be appalling,

in the teeth of a summer gale,

because the Armada would be scattered

and the landing craft would be bashed to bits

on that shore over there and so it became an incredibly fine art.

And as you can see, the days leading up to D-Day were not looking good.

On the 3rd of June it became clear

there were two deep low-pressure systems here.

These would make it absolutely impossible to go

and a 24-hour postponement was ordered

from the 5th to the 6th of June.

The fear was, if the weather got any worse,

it could be weeks before conditions were right again.

164,000 troops waited for a decision.

At the eleventh hour,

the weather offered a small window of opportunity.

Conditions weren't ideal, but Eisenhower,

the Allied Supreme Commander, gave the green light.

He walked into this room and said, "OK, let's go."

On the evening of June the 5th 1944, 6,000 vessels

left harbours and ports along the British coastline.

For the troops leaving Portsmouth Harbour here, they'd have known

that they were walking in the footsteps

of countless invasions that had gone before,

but now it was their turn to write a chapter in military history.

The next 48 hours would be decisive.

It would be the last time

many of the soldiers would see British shores.

-What a sight, what a sight.

-It was...

It was like playing for England and all the crowd cheering like mad

and we got to the stage where I think, if my grandmother

had come past me with a German tin hat on, I think I'd have killed her.

We recognised that we would probably have about 50% casualties

and that of those, one in five would be killed

and, ever the optimist, the American soldier goes into battle,

no matter what, expecting that HE will be the one to survive.

I was scared to death, everybody's thoughts were to themselves.

God Almighty, in a few short hours we will be in battle with the enemy.

We ask this, that if we die, we must, that we die as men would die,

without complaining, without pleading

and safe in the feeling we have done our best for what we believed in.

Next time, two years of intelligence gathering

is put to the ultimate test...

..in a single day of fighting.