Episode 2 D-Day: The Last Heroes

This programme contains some violent scenes and some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

June 6th, 1944 - D-Day. Thousands of Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy, in France.

There was smoke, there was fire,

there were explosions.

Looked like dead bodies all over the place to me.

Real chaos.

I thought, "Nobody could survive in that.

"Nobody."

Every man in my boat was killed.

Awful...waste.

Two years of espionage, state-of-the-art technology

and millions of three-dimensional reconnaissance photographs

had gone into planning the invasion.

Without the photo intelligence, we'd have been lost.

Details of German gun batteries, communication links

and strategic bridges had been pieced together.

That was the key to the whole thing - to pick out the spot where we were going to land.

Now armed with this vital intelligence,

half a million men unleashed in a single day the full fury...

..of Operation Overlord.

You could get killed, you could get wounded,

or the war would end.

And the war didn't look like it was going to end any time soon.

In this film, we hear from some of the last surviving heroes of D-Day

and how the sacrifices of thousands gave the Allies their best chance

of defeating Nazi Germany.

We didn't like Mr Adolf Hitler, did we?

Like, you know, a bit of a rascal, you know.

There was no question in our mind what we were fighting for -

we were fighting for our country.

We were fighting for mankind.

Someone had to say, "Enough."

There aren't many days that can be said to have changed the course of history.

There aren't many days like the 6th of June 1944.

I think D-Day was the single greatest military operation the world had ever seen -

and at stake was nothing less than the freedom of the western world.

On the evening of the 5th of June, a vast armada set sail

on one of the most decisive missions of World War II.

A full-scale invasion of occupied France.

6,000 vessels were now heading out from these British coastal waters,

out towards Normandy.

It was typical June, much like this one.

One storm had just blown through, there was another one in the offing,

but the meteorologists thought they'd spotted a gap in the weather,

a window that would allow this vast armada to get to Normandy safely.

British intelligence had been planning this invasion

down to the most minute detail for years,

including a vast deception campaign to try and convince the Germans

that the target of the attack was not Normandy at all.

The fact is, though, as these ships left these waters they were heading into the unknown.

All the boats started tooting their hooters - "Whoop, whoop, whoop."

We stood up there and watched all this

and heard all the cheering and the shouting,

and tears were running down our faces.

It was an impressive sight. I mean, as far as the eye could see,

nothing but ships.

On airfields across England, airborne troops prepared themselves

for covert missions behind enemy lines.

We did realise that...

we'd better be super-audacious

about the whole bloody affair, because it's the only way to be.

My thoughts - that I was scared to death.

That's what I was talking about.

Thought you would get killed.

Two years of meticulous planning had gone into D-Day...

..from the reconnaissance pilots, who had taken millions of aerial photos of the German defences...

..to the highly trained interpreters at RAF Medmenham,

who had analysed them in three dimensions

and identified the location of almost every gun battery, minefield and bridge in Normandy.

This top-secret detail would mean the difference between success and failure

for the troops on the ground.

See this place here?

It's called Carentan.

It's the last place in hell you want to be.

'We had aerial photographs, we had regular maps.'

We had anything we could... At our disposal that we needed.

As you can see from the aerial photos, this is a heavily defended area.

We used the photos and therefore you can locate yourself

and that is the biggest problem that you have in warfare -

is knowing where you are and where the enemy is.

D-Day was hugely ambitious.

A vast 150,000-strong amphibious invasion of five Normandy beaches.

In the east, British and Canadian troops would storm three beaches...

..Sword, Juno and Gold.

On the western flank, American soldiers would attack two...

..Omaha and Utah.

Inland, 20,000 airborne troops would capture or destroy key targets -

bridges, railroads, communication links.

We went into battle with so much knowledge that we were going to attack,

that we went there with every confidence.

The opening salvo of D-Day would come soon after midnight.

It's your last chance to get off.

Horsa gliders carrying 180 men headed for a bridge over the Caen Canal,

four miles inland from Sword Beach.

The target was codenamed Pegasus.

Onboard, Major John Howard went over details

with Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, his second in command.

Howard had done a tremendous job.

They could cope with almost any situation,

provided I could put them down in one piece.

The team had rehearsed the operation for months -

but each man knew it was potentially a suicide mission.

Just days before, photo interpreters at Medmenham

had discovered the Germans were preparing for an airborne attack.

These photos show that the Germans were digging a huge number of holes

right where the gliders were planning to land.

Now, those holes were designed to have wooden stakes put in them,

which would prove catastrophic for an airborne landing.

Each stake would be connected to an intricate network of explosive charges.

If a glider hit one, the entire field would detonate -

killing everybody onboard.

I remember saying, "Well, you know, that's not playing the game at all, you know.

"It's just like the Germans not to play fair, like, er...

"But we'll have to show them they can't put us off with a few poles."

That's how daft you are at that age, I suppose.

At the French coast, the gliders were released.

The men were now fully committed.

As soon as I cast off, there's no sound from the glider,

there's no sound from the troops.

Everything went quiet

and I started then to take my course -

you had the speed right

and the glider went "ssh" through the sky.

At 16 minutes past midnight on June 6th,

they braced for a 90-mile-an-hour crash landing.

Their lives now depended upon the skill of their pilot.

I had to land fast, because it was a fairly small field

and I'd two other loads coming behind me.

And so they said, "For God's sake, Jim, you know, get well up.

"You know, I don't want you halfway down the bloody field."

They'd survived.

The meticulous planning and training had paid off.

There were no exploding stakes.

The Germans were due to put them in the following day.

This was the most remarkably challenging landing zone.

Jim Wallwork's glider and two others were expected to land here,

on a strip of land that's no more than about 30 or 40 yards -

this lake on one side and the canal on the other.

The bridge of course, the target, right there.

What's remarkable about the flying in the dead of night

is that the pilots managed to put it down right here -

in fact, these mark the spot where Jim Wallwork's glider landed,

perhaps 50 yards away from their target.

It was subsequently described as one of the most remarkable bits of flying of World War II.

I could have been 50 yards away, which is close enough -

pretty close as a glider.

I was content, anyhow.

If the glider pilot's content, it's a bloody good flight.

As soon as we landed, all hell broke loose.

SHOUTING AND GUNFIRE

Lieutenant Brotheridge and his men immediately charged into battle.

Details of the bridge from the 3D aerial photos

helped them manoeuvre in the dark with deadly efficiency.

As troops checked for explosives, Brotheridge spearheaded an attack

on the enemy machine gun positioned across the canal.

EXPLOSION

He never made it that far.

He was hit about three quarters of the way across the bridge.

But though he fell, the troops carried on.

They knew they had to take that end of the bridge -

otherwise the whole thing would have been a wash out.

D-Day had claimed its first Allied soldier killed in combat.

29-year-old Den Brotheridge wouldn't be the last.

It was very fierce fighting and it was very frightening.

I can still hear it, I can still smell it.

And the noise...was horrific.

SHOUTING AND INTENSE GUNFIRE

At 26 minutes past midnight,

just ten minutes after the first glider landed,

Major Howard ordered the codewords to be transmitted.

Ham and jam. Pegasus Bridge had been secured.

The D-Day plan was beginning to deliver.

The local cafe owner's daughter, Arlette Gondree,

was one of the first to witness the liberation of her country.

Down below in this dark cellar,

we were shivering.

Suddenly, Daddy brought down two monsters, as we called them.

They were covered in black with helmets and nets and clothes.

And so I started hiding behind the saddle bale.

But what made me come forward

was that one of them put his hand in his jacket

and he brought a piece of chocolate out with some biscuits.

Up to 12 miles off the Normandy coast,

thousands of troops clambered into landing craft in preparation for the beach assaults.

-ROBERT SALES:

-We had to go down rope ladders.

And, you know, the landing craft was a small affair.

The waves were kicking it up and down.

And I turned to loose the rope and I didn't think I'd ever stop falling

and it, er... I took a pretty good fall. It didn't hurt me or nothing.

As we sailed out, we were running into seas

that were running somewhere between six and maybe eight feet.

Everybody was drenched, everybody was miserable.

-HE SIGHS

-"It's finally here."

That's really, I think, what everybody felt.

We'd been training for... I guess it was nine months by that point.

And, er, it was finally here.

But the lives of these men

would depend upon the operations already under way

behind enemy lines.

Using aerial spy photographs,

D-Day strategists had identified two vital targets over the River Douve,

just inland from Omaha and Utah.

Without control of the bridges,

the American troops landing on the beaches

would struggle to join forces and risk being cut off and slaughtered by the enemy.

In the early hours of June 6th,

the 101st Airborne were sent in to take control of it.

Among them, Ed Shames.

Things were very silent.

Very sombre.

Everybody's thoughts...

were into themselves.

A lot of smoking going on.

In fact, there was so much smoke

you could hardly see your hand in front of you.

As the Dakotas crossed the French coastline,

they came under intense enemy fire.

EXPLOSIONS

HE RETCHES

The campaign was sweeping every which way when I said...

I said to my Sergeant, "Is this for real?" He said, "It's for real."

When the green light went on, we all shuffled out to the front.

The guy in front of me, he slipped on the floor.

By the time I got him up, we must've gone four or five extra miles.

They'd now overshot their designated landing zone

and were dropped miles from their objectives.

It looked like the 4th of July,

because everything was going off all at one time

and they were all aiming at me.

And when I got down on the ground, I landed in a bunch of cows.

I'm not into cattle but I'm sure that, er,

they weren't very happy either!

Aerial photos reveal paratroopers scattered across enemy territory.

Each man now isolated and vulnerable,

including the commanding officer Colonel Wolverton.

The Germans were there waiting for him.

He'd landed in a tree and instead of letting him surrender,

they used him as target practice.

He had 162 bullet holes and bayonet wounds when they cut him down...

..which made us only more determined...

..and a little bit more fierce.

Ed Shames eventually met up with a handful of men -

but they were lost, with no commanding officer.

If they failed to take the bridges over the Douve,

it would risk the lives of those men landing on the beaches.

The plan was unravelling.

I had no idea where I was.

We'd passed a couple of these farmhouses,

so I stopped and I said,

"Boys, OK, this is where we're going to knock on the door

"and we're going to get this farmer to tell us where we are."

SHE SQUEALS

And the farmer's wife, she started to scream.

I slapped my hand on her face.

-Sainte-Mere-Eglise?

-La.

-Saint-Come-du-Mont?

-La, la.

Carentan?

Oui. Oui.

And he says, "Oui," and he knocked on the floor.

"Carentan, oui."

Ici. Ici.

Then I really became nervous,

because it was a core headquarters of the German division.

Hey, boys, let's get out of here right now.

As dawn began to break, the vast armada approached the French coastline...

..and the Allies started to soften up the German defences.

We passed the Texas just about the time they let fire the initial round.

The sound was so loud that it rocked the boat.

These battleships - they were firing on the beach 18-inch guns.

It was spectacular.

Maybe we forgot what we were doing otherwise,

because we were in awe with the sight that we were seeing.

All that fire of the Texas and all the ships around us firing,

planes going overhead...

I began to get nervous.

D-Day was now truly under way.

With the element of surprise gone, the enemy were fighting back.

Inland, the British troops who had captured Pegasus Bridge

had already come under attack.

We didn't really have time to congratulate ourselves.

The other side was not going to lie down and say,

"Well, bloody hard lines - they've taken it now."

The thought immediately is, "Be prepared for a counter-attack."

Alerted by the earlier fighting, an enemy tank approached the bridge.

The only armour-piercing weapon the men carried was a PIAT mortar.

It was the most easily made thing.

It was a piece of... Like a piece of drainpipe.

It was David versus Goliath.

Sergeant Wagger Thornton volunteered for the role of David.

He waited until it was close enough so he couldn't miss -

he could not only not miss, he could hit it where he wanted.

And the bloody thing went up beautifully

and we were all delighted.

The bridge remained in British hands...

..but they needed reinforcements fast.

They were on the way.

Among them, medic David Tibbs.

We had agreed on an aerial photograph

where the pilot of our plane was hoping to place me.

And when I landed, I looked round and in the half moonlight

I could see an apple tree.

And I realised that I had landed exactly where this pilot had said it was,

at the corner of an orchard.

And I could hear in the distance the crackle and thump

of the Pegasus Bridge battle going on.

Which was encouraging - you realised you really were there.

It was my job to go over the dropping zone

and pick up any injured parachutists, because a drop of something like 2,000 men -

you will inevitably get men who injure themselves.

This chap, he said to me,

"Sorry, Doc. I'm damn sorry to be a nuisance."

Which is an extraordinary thing when you've sustained a near-mortal wound.

I've often thought about his amazing sort of...

tenacity and courage. He was apologetic because he...

was another wounded man.

Just after first light, it was time for the main event.

Here you can see the beaches on this wonderful map here.

You've got Sword Beach, in the very east of the area of operations.

You've got Juno, Gold

and then the two American beaches of Omaha and Utah.

Now was the moment of truth.

Now these landing craft are about to hit the shoreline.

Within the next couple of hours,

either tens of thousands of young men would be slaughtered in the shallows

or the Germans be driven back and Allies would have a foothold in occupied France.

As the men waited to storm the beaches,

an elite unit of American rangers was poised to carry out

one of the most daring missions of D-Day.

For months, Allied spy planes had been monitoring

a cliff-top gun battery at Pointe du Hoc

that threatened the invasion fleet heading for Omaha and Utah.

It absolutely had to be neutralised

or the whole operation would be in jeopardy.

But the first wave of Rangers was guided into the wrong headland.

John Raaen was part of the second wave.

They were supposed to have landed at 6.30.

They did not land at 6.30.

Nothing happened, we got no word.

We then circled and we circled and we circled.

Everything went wrong, that could possibly be wrong.

The delay upset the precisely timed planning and put lives at risk.

At 6.30am coxswain, Jimmy Green,

was due to take the first landing craft into Omaha beach.

The troops we took in were from Bedford, Virginia

and they hadn't seen action before.

They were quiet country lads.

Unfortunately, we landed in that terrible beach where the Germans were waiting.

In the skies above,

Allied planes monitored progress for commanders back in Britain.

It looked busy, all of the naval fleets firing at the beaches

and the people on the beaches firing back

and landing craft trying to get on through all that mess.

It was a place you didn't want to be.

SHOUTING

MACHINE GUN FIRE

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

There was oil, there was smoke, there were explosions,

there were troops blown apart -

anything you wanted unpleasant was there.

They had to cross 300 yards of open beach with no cover...

and they were mowed down.

HAIL OF BULLETS

HE GROANS

Every man in my boat was killed.

Awful waste.

It was, er, a very sad occasion...

Hmm.

I think if I'd been out here on June the 6th,

I'd have been pretty angry.

I'd have been pretty angry with the damned fool who made me attack this beach,

it looks more like a cliff than a beach.

And I think I'd have just been quite sad that me and my mates

were being sent on a mission that felt like a suicide mission.

If the massacre at Omaha was repeated elsewhere,

the years of planning would have been in vain.

30 miles further east,

over 10,000 British troops were now approaching Sword Beach.

The plan - to seize the beach, set up defences,

and then push on to Caen, a critical communication centre.

Sitting at a comfortable desk in RAF Medmenham,

it's easy to look at the neat aerial photos and the maps

and get some sense of what's going on on a strategic level,

understand the Normandy landings, but when you arrive here,

on Sword Beach, the easternmost beach,

it's seven miles long alone.

I looked up from the front of my landing craft,

it was a mass of flame and smoke

and I thought, nobody could survive in that, nobody.

And as the men landed here,

they would not have been thinking about the rest of the landings,

what was happening in the big strategic picture,

the horizon would have crowded in until all they could care about, all they could see,

was just a circle around them of a couple of hundred metres.

They were interested in where the threat was coming from,

which machine gun was spitting fire at them

from the ruined houses up there.

A huge shell landed about 30 foot away, it caused a huge wave.

I fell in the water, went under

and pushed my feet and I just came out the water

and it only came up to there, I thought, "Oh, what a 'nana."

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

I suppose I was frightened out of my life a little bit,

you just keep going, you've got to get off that beach,

or else you're brown bread, ain't you?

We made for a burnt-out tank to get some cover,

because we could hear sniping going on and in fact,

I did see one officer go down as he ran towards us.

You feel, well, if there's something coming over

and it's going to hit you, it will and...

And that'll be the end of it.

I'd started to rush up the beach and there was a young,

a young soldier, he was trying to dig a hole,

and the waves were crashing down and filling his thing up with water,

and I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck

and I dragged him all the way up.

I shouldn't have done that, but I couldn't leave him there,

and I dragged him all the way up the back,

I got him up the back, dumped him down.

I said, "Where's your unit?" He said, "I don't know."

Oh, here we go.

That bloke, he looks very much like a friend of mine,

Bert Chillingsworth.

He got killed on D2. I'm around here somewhere.

You think you might be in this boat?

Yeah, we were both in 1 Troop.

-An explosion there...

-Yes.

-It looks like somebody's got it.

-Yeah.

That's it - that's where he fell off the boat.

Yeah, that's it, that's where I fell off the ramp.

Yeah. A bloke's stuck on there already.

-There's the guy going up to help.

-He's going back up to help him.

He's holding everybody up, you see. Chaos there...

Cor - I've never seen all these...

-They're queuing up to come down.

-Yeah.

Scared at this point or just focussing on getting up the beach?

Well, not scared, you...

You got to get down there and get moving, get inland -

that's the object.

After two and a half hours,

the German resistance collapsed.

Sword Beach had been taken.

The men now had to move inland fast

to capture Caen by nightfall.

On the western side of the invasion front,

Ed Shames and the 101st Airborne were now closing in on the River Douve,

but their mission to seize and hold two vital bridges hung in the balance.

This is the western edge of the bridge.

Of course, the central span was destroyed later in the Normandy battle,

but they wanted to secure these bridges.

But like so many of the parachute drops right across the battlefield,

pretty much everything went wrong, it was chaos.

Of the 250 paratroopers that were supposed to secure this bridge

and then push across the river, into the German defenders on the other side,

only around 40 turned up by dawn on June 6th.

We went down the river until we got to our bridges,

just about daylight we got there.

There were Germans across the river firing at us.

I'm over here. Don't waste any lead!

We were defending the bridge, that's all.

That's all we could do.

The Germans on the other side was firing constantly,

there was no let up.

Keep your head down!

They didn't have enough ammunition, they didn't have any comms,

their radios weren't working

and they didn't have nearly the kind of heavy weapons required

to take on the hundreds of German defenders that lined that bank.

SHOUTS IN GERMAN

'We had several men killed at the bridge.

'I told Sergeant Stockings...'

Keep your head down, snipers...

'He got a bullet right in the middle of his temple.

'Killed him instantly.'

It wasn't free that we did this, it was at a cost.

The US Rangers had finally reached the critical landing zone

at Pointe du Hoc.

Now they had to climb a 30-metre cliff

and destroy the German artillery,

so carefully monitored by the planners.

The enemy was waiting for them.

We were fired on while coming in.

This was not a surprise,

the enemy had had about 30 minutes

to get up out of his underground bunkers.

He was up there throwing hand grenades down

and firing right down on us.

GUNFIRE

But the worst of it was that there were two machine gun nests

that were shooting right into their backs.

The enemy, dammit, cut some of the ropes, you see.

That was not kosher, you know!

And there were two guys on the rope right in front of me, going up.

I yelled up to these fellas, "Boys,

"put your faces in and your butts out, they're throwing grenades."

Yet the first man to the top of the cliffs was there in 50 seconds

from the time they grounded down, and I don't know how he did it.

When they reached the top

the Rangers discovered their mission had been fruitless.

The big guns had been moved.

Reconnaissance photos had suggested this before D-Day,

but Allied leaders decided the mission should go ahead to make sure.

Days of British and American bombing

had turned this into a shattered pulverised moonscape,

these huge bits of reinforced concrete had been tossed around

like children's toy bricks, it was no place to keep heavy guns.

The Germans had moved them inland.

So the Rangers were desperately worried

they hadn't fulfilled the mission. Were the guns just there inland

and could still be brought to bring down fire on Omaha and Utah beaches?

A second wave of American soldiers

was now closing in on the killing field of Omaha Beach,

among them Bob Sales.

I could see what looked like dead men.

The A Company had landed ten minutes ahead of us.

There was fire and smoke, real chaos.

I said, "Captain, it looks like dead bodies all over the place to me."

He said, "There's something wrong."

When that ramp went down, the machine guns opened up on us

and it was just like bullets, bees swarming round.

The captain took off first

and right behind him was my friend Sergeant Wright.

When I got out on the ramp, I fell.

I hit that water and went to the bottom, I got rid of the radio.

I knew I'd drown if I tried to fight that radio.

Even in June it's unbelievably cold here

and because they'd landed on these sand banks,

they found that they couldn't touch the bottom

when they got off the landing craft, they couldn't get back on -

the landing craft were immediately reversing away to go and get more

of the attacking infantries,

they had no choice but to try and get to the shore,

swimming, but they got absolutely weighted down with their equipment.

I crawled up on the sand and there was Dick Wright,

my sergeant and my friend.

He was hollering, "I'm hit! I'm hit!"

And he raised up on his elbows.

Dick!

In that machine gun nest was a rifleman, a sniper.

But I knew he had seen me,

so I buried my face in the sand

and just waited for the shot to come.

And did what I knew of the 23rd Psalm.

The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want

He makes me lay down in green pastures...

I often wonder if I could have done something for Dick Wright,

but what do you do with somebody who's full of bullet holes

and the blood's coming up?

..He leads me beside the still water.

Yea, tho' I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

I shall fear no evil for thine...

'You've got to think of your own life.'

In these shallows, hundreds of Americans were drowned,

hundreds more cut to pieces by sniper fire,

machine gun fire, heavy artillery, shrapnel, high explosives.

This water ran red and the beach in front was covered in corpses.

As soon as the ramp was dropped,

the machine gun fire coming... came in there.

HEAVY GUNFIRE

Well, rather than run through that thing,

we started bailing off the side.

HE GROANS

Well, it was right around that time that I got hit.

I thought my arm was going to fall off.

The blood was pouring out of there, it looked like...

It wouldn't be long I'd have no more blood.

Your hope was that somebody was going to be able

to get to those machine gun nests and get rid of them,

because in time, they would have had us all.

One American Commando shouted,

"There are only two kinds of men on this beach -

"dead ones and those who are about to die.

"Let's get off the beach."

I knew I had to go forward. If I was going to survive

I had to get to that wall for self-protection.

And many men, when they were dying, would ask for God or their mother.

I've seen this happen time and time again.

I used one dead man to another, crawled from one to another,

crawled by a leg, an arm,

and of course, all hell was breaking loose.

It was just unbelievable.

It's amazing, but one of the things I thought of was that, you know,

in the United States, and all the people are going to work,

and they're getting up and that there, and here we are.

EXPLOSION

We saw fear and panic there.

They never would have gotten off the beach

if it hadn't been for the 5th Rangers.

In the heat of the battle, the second wave of US Rangers

due to attack Pointe du Hoc had been diverted.

They now landed on a less heavily defended part of Omaha Beach.

Due to the months of reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering,

they knew precisely where they were.

Now all that time at the sand tables and the maps paid off.

I knew exactly where I was.

I landed...

..probably right there, and went up above.

Here's the path I went up, and there's the little shack.

Those bluffs were covered with smoke when we got there.

The smoke blinded the infantry above us and they couldn't shoot at us.

By taking out the German machine gun nests,

the Rangers helped prevent further slaughter on the beach below.

At the same time, other Rangers were hunting down the artillery guns

moved from the Pointe du Hoc.

The senior man saw some wagon tracks, and he said,

"Well, wagon tracks, heavy loads - that could be the guns."

And he walked down there, about a half mile, and found the guns.

By 9:30, they had found and destroyed the guns,

plus they'd set up all the necessary road blocks.

D-Day was now more than 12 hours old.

Thousands of Allied troops had landed in Normandy.

These fantastic aerial photos taken on D-Day

show how the battle was progressing.

This one here, taken on Omaha, shows that after the initial massacre,

the Americans had managed to gain the upper hand

and were now landing reinforcements.

On the other four beaches, you can see similar things happening.

Landing craft going into the shallows,

tanks and heavy equipment rolling off and pushing inland.

Chillingly, you can also see lots of black dots

spread across the beaches and on the waterline,

and those are dead bodies, of men killed in the assault.

Despite the loss of life,

the years of intelligence-gathering seemed to be paying off.

But the Allies had also been lucky.

The stormy weather lulled Nazi leaders into believing

an invasion unlikely.

Erwin Rommel, Commander in Normandy,

was in southern Germany for his wife's birthday.

Even Hitler was slow to issue orders.

Without his authority, no-one dared act.

But as D-Day wore on, a concerted counterattack was inevitable.

It was now vital for the Allied troops to move inland

and press home their advantage.

But key targets identified by the aerial photographs

still had to be overcome.

One was a German bunker complex, codenamed Hillman.

That's Sword Beach down there.

You can see that line of fog.

And these aerial photos are absolutely fascinating.

They show that the Germans up here constructed

a hugely significant position.

You can see the trenches here, observation post, machine gun posts.

So, in order for the troops to get off this beach

and push inland, this would have to be neutralised.

So this is the main entrance, all facing north towards the coast -

a fantastic observation post, and it's brilliant.

There are careful German diagrams here,

showing all the notable landmarks with their exact distance.

For example, that double steeple over there, that's La-Delivrande

and it's 5,700 metres away.

So an observer here can see enemy troop formations

and then can phone down and give the artillery a precise bearing and a range.

HE GROANS

A huge plate of steel there, big thick walls,

reinforced concrete, steel plating on the roof,

three or four metres underground -

this bunker was designed to be pretty much indestructible.

It was clearly a battlefield command centre.

You can see the wiring here, the communications,

the maps on the wall. This is a place where all the information

is gathered from the battlefield...

SPEAKING IN GERMAN

..and then action is taken - artillery is called down,

air support is called for.

This is where the German commanders would win or lose

the battle for Normandy.

Taking Hillman was the task of the Suffolk Regiment,

but every attempt met fierce resistance.

It wasn't successful to begin with.

All sorts of armour was brought up - anti-tank guns,

a Royal Artillery came - and everything that came up here

and shot at the cupolas bounced off.

And it was only after 'Titch' Hunter had run forward with his Bren gun,

firing from the hip, that they capitulated.

Out came the Commandant,

and 70 men under guard that had given themselves up,

all coming out with suitcases,

and going back to a prisoner of war cage.

Advancing inland, the Allied troops faced another threat,

one the photo analysts had underestimated - the bocage.

The Germans hollowed out the backs of hedgerows

and put machine guns underneath the hedgerow

with just a little embrasure -

a little firing port out the front -

and you couldn't see them.

A German could be on the other side and you wouldn't even know it.

Where'd that come from?!

Stay down!

There was a German sniper

and he'd got three men that morning

and we couldn't figure out where he was.

But anyway, I worked my way round.

I was scared to death I'd make a sound, he'd turn round and blast me.

TWIG SNAPS

And I pumped six bullets in him

and he was about dead, and he made a motion for a cigarette.

And in a few minutes he was dead.

I was glad I killed him, and I said, "This evens the score a little bit

"for Dick Wright, because I loved Dick Wright."

GUNFIRE

EXPLOSION

At the River Douve, the 101st Airborne

were still holding on to the bridges.

And they, of course, wanted to use those bridges

to cross with their armour. They couldn't do it.

I think we did a good job.

I don't think I'm happy about what we did,

but we did what we had to... What had to be done.

This is just another classic example of what was going on

right across the Normandy battlefield on D-Day -

small groups of men involved in intense skirmishes,

flare-ups of extraordinary violence that individually were isolated,

but taken together had an absolutely decisive impact on the battle.

In the East, advancing British Commandos reinforced

the glider-borne troops who had captured Pegasus Bridge

in the first few minutes of D-Day.

We came to a huge open ground which led down to this place.

Yeah, you should have seen the Paras throwing all their hats up

in the air, yeah, and then we had to cross the bridge,

-run across that bridge a bit lively.

-Yeah.

Cos they had a machine gun rattling away at it.

-We was a minute, a minute or two late, that's all.

-Yeah.

-There was some naughty people stopped us trying to get there.

-Yeah.

Late in the day, Allied gliders flew in thousands of reinforcements.

-The whole of the Airlanding Brigade came in.

-Wonderful.

Hundreds and hundreds of gliders

-and we're all digging in like mad, aren't we?

-Yeah.

-Suddenly - boom, boom, boom - the aircrafts are going off.

-Yeah.

Aircraft guns are going off and we saw all this whole crowd

of gliders all coming in.

Wonderful sight.

As the sun set over Normandy on 6th June 1944,

the Allies took stock.

Not all the objectives had been met,

but they knew they faced heavy fighting in the weeks ahead.

As it was, they did not liberate Paris until August of that year.

D-Day wasn't the end of the war,

but it was perhaps the beginning of the end for the Nazis.

As such, it was a day that shaped the future of the world.

Two years of planning, millions of 3D photos,

and the largely forgotten work of the photo interpreters

at Medmenham had played a critical role in the invasion.

156,000 Allied troops had landed in Normandy.

A vital foothold in France had been secured.

Normandy was something that we had to overcome,

in order to get a hold on the Continent so we could win the war.

That was the key.

I never dared tell anybody else this,

so this is very strictly between us...

It was my utter surprise, because I landed precisely

where I had in mind. That was the most amazing thing really.

The countless acts of heroism and self-sacrifice had ensured victory.

Over 4,000 soldiers had died in a single day.

More than 10,000 were injured or missing.

On Omaha Beach alone,

at least 1,700 men had lost their lives.

I don't know where the words are to ever describe it, but...

when you think of all of the friends you lost...

So many of them perished on that day,

so soon after landing.

When you stop and think of all the things they've missed,

like the 60-something Christmases they missed,

the opportunity to raise their families...

Just what the price you pay when you lose your life fighting.

Very few people who are called heroes

believe themselves to be heroes.

Most of us know that that was what we had to do,

and we did it the best we could.

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

Well, you think about your mates, that's all. Yeah, yeah.

Get a bit emotional, like I am at the moment.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah.

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