Episode 2 D-Day 70

Good morning and welcome to D-Day 70: The Heroes Remember.

I'm at Fort Southwick near Portsmouth today.

It was built in Victorian times, but during the Second World War,

this fort and the warren of underground tunnels

30 feet below me here

housed the secret communication headquarters

in the run-up to the Normandy Invasion.

This Friday is the 70th anniversary of D-Day,

the iconic battle of the Second World War,

and all this week we'll be recounting the events

that led up to this historic day -

a day that left its mark on all of those who took part in it.

You were no longer a teenager or anything like that - you were...

You had become a man.

You were at school one minute and you're nursing dying men the next!

I mean...only war would do that to you.

It took over one's whole life, of course, at that time.

It was very much...

..the be-all of one's existence.

You realised that life was not the sort of thing

that you could just fritter away.

It was something that you'd got to hold on to, and it was precious.

The events of 70 years ago changed the course of the Second World War.

It was an extraordinary endeavour,

but not without cost.

D-Day involved more than 150,000 troops -

and many of them paid the ultimate price.

Today, Dan Snow goes aboard

one of the Royal Navy's largest aircraft carriers

to look at the role of the fleet during D-Day.

It must have been so nerve-racking and tense for them,

but, again, they're trained to do it

and they did it to the best of their ability and they did it very well.

A veteran shares the incredible diary

he kept during the Normandy Invasion.

It's written in very small writing.

It was actually falling to pieces

and somebody very kindly put it together.

James Holland goes underground to explore the secret tunnels

that were home to the communication centre for D-Day.

If you look at more or less any history book on D-Day,

this place is missing. My mum lived two miles from here

and she didn't have a clue that the place was built.

And we follow a veteran's journey

to honour fallen soldiers on their return home.

Up here on top of Portsdown Hill, I'm right in D-Day country.

In the months leading up to the invasion,

a stretch of land from Portsmouth Harbour here on the coast

to ten miles inland was transformed into a vast Army camp.

It was declared a military exclusion zone, closed to all visitors.

The area all around me here

would have been full of British, Canadian and American troops

camping in fields, woods and requisitioned buildings.

Best friends Mary and Patricia, who were ten-year-old girls in 1944,

remember it vividly.

WARTIME MUSIC PLAYS

Well, in those days, the village was quite small.

And, well, we knew everyone in the village!

The whole area

was overrun with American soldiers - it was...

You know, they were everywhere.

Pat and I have been friends for round about 75 years.

We first met when we were about nine.

I can remember quite clearly when the GIs came - it was in April 1944.

The American army had moved in

and one of the lorries had collided with a load of pigs.

-Ooh!

-And the pigs had escaped,

and the GIs were running around trying to catch the pigs.

The whole thing was total chaos,

and that was my first introduction to the Americans.

They were very friendly - we got on with them extremely well.

Thursdays was a good day to sit on the fence and chat to the GIs.

They used to say, "Do you want some candy?"

-That's right, yes.

-And we never said no!

SHE CHUCKLES

You see, it's quite important to remember

that the farm was quite rural.

Pat and I were the only children, so we were quite spoilt, weren't we?

Yes, we were - very spoilt.

The farm barn was requisitioned, you see.

My father had no choice in it -

they just came and said, "We want your barn."

They used it for meetings and concerts.

From what I recall, they had a sort of projection...

-Yes, you're right. I remember that.

-..place up there,

where they used to show the films.

-Yes.

-And they used to put wooden chairs, didn't they?

-Yes.

-And, er...

-The stage was that end.

The stage was that end. That's right.

The films came straight from Hollywood,

before they went to the West End of London.

So when we were allowed... We weren't always allowed to go,

-but we used to go when we could, didn't we?

-Yes!

-And this is the famous cupboard.

-Oh, that's the cupboard!

-Oh!

-Look - it's so tiny!

Oh, my goodness!

-This is where you used to go.

-This was our air-raid shelter.

How many... Did you get in there with your mother?!

Not many. It would have been...

-But you had Granny as well!

-Had Granny as well.

Not infrequently, we had these...

what we called doodlebugs, which were pilotless planes,

and they were dispatched from the French coast

and then when they got over the English coast,

the engine would cut out.

And then, within seconds, it would land and it was a bomb, virtually.

EXPLOSION

And so you had this really scary moment when you could hear it coming

and then the engine cut out.

And it was complete silence.

And you didn't know where to go,

because you didn't know where it was going to land.

I think this must have been taken about six weeks before D-Day -

sometime in early May, I expect.

The GI in the photograph was Sergeant Don Hillier.

He became quite friendly with us. He used to come in and out and chat.

He went on D-Day, or thereabouts, and we heard nothing more of him.

The thing I remember about D-Day is seeing all the...

The soldiers in the field the night before.

I sat there, watching them, then went to bed.

When I got up in the morning, looked out the window,

they were completely gone.

There was nothing left.

And I've always thought that must have been the eve of D-Day.

And I've often thought about that over the years.

That was the end of us...

-seeing the soldiers there.

-It was, yes.

Well, I'm joined by three women

who also vividly remember the build-up to D-Day.

Christian, Pam and Pat, you were all Wrens, weren't you?

Members of the Women's Royal Naval Service.

What was it that made you join up in the first place?

Well, it was mostly my godfather, who was a Destroyer captain,

and he said all the girls in the family should go into the Wrens,

so I went into the Wrens.

And you spoke German, didn't you?

I'd learnt German from my grandfather's cook,

who was an Austrian refugee,

and I went into what they called

the Special Duties Linguist Branch of Naval Intelligence.

-And Pam, you were also a linguist?

-Yes, I was.

Mine was academic - I had a degree in French and German.

And what spurred you on to join?

Oh, well, I think I had always had a...

..feeling for the Navy.

I spent a lot of my childhood wishing that I had been a boy

and could join the Navy.

And so when this opportunity arose,

I offered myself, and, of course, I had German.

And Christian, why did you join the Wrens?

Well, I was brought up in the Navy - my father was an admiral -

and so we travelled abroad with him as children.

So I'd always been involved in the Navy.

And I came back from France, which I'd been to

when I left school, having a telegram from my father saying,

"War - you must come home at once."

And so we all had to do our bit,

and obviously the Wrens was what I needed to join, so I joined it.

In the build-up - in the months and the weeks

in the build-up to D-Day - what were you doing?

Well, they had this part of the Admiralty

which was opposite the Horse Guards Parade.

It was called Richmond Terrace.

And there I had an office, deep down in the basement.

And the rest of the building was filled with...

Mostly, the top floor seemed to have

Churchill and all his boffins up there.

The whole office was surrounded by enormous maps of the French coast

and my job was to, er...

delineate every compass bearing from five different places,

from which they were going to land.

It was as if you were a captain of a ship and you came up

and you wanted to see where you were.

I had drawn out what you would see -

like, you might see a church, a castle, a railway, a road -

and then the next compass bearing, you would have to put exact details.

You had to be very accurate. It was interesting to know

that that was exactly where they were going to land.

And Pam, you were on the coast at the time, weren't you?

Yes, I was between Dover and Folkestone, on interception.

We were always twiddling away, just in case anything

really operational turned up, and we were watching 24 hours.

Like Pam, sort of searching along the radio frequencies

for German naval traffic.

Most of it was in Enigma four-letter code, using the German alphabet,

and all that was teleprinted immediately

to what we called Station X, which was Bletchley Park.

And we also listened to Morse - we also had to learn Morse -

so we could do it in Morse or plain language.

And there was a lot of traffic going on

from the German stations and ships at that time.

And you got the sense that this was building up,

-that something was going to happen?

-Oh, yes, you did.

It was very tense, somehow, the whole feeling.

The thing was, one couldn't dine out on it.

One couldn't say, "I've been working on..."

because it was all deadly secret,

and none of us ever told anybody - not even the next-door office,

which would have somebody doing something equally interesting.

Of course, I never told anybody -

not even my husband - what I'd been doing.

We were all completely silent about what we were doing.

It was extraordinary.

Well, by early 1944, preparations for D-Day

were gathering momentum all over the country.

But the hub of the communication and plotting for Operation Overlord,

the codename for the invasion of Normandy,

was here, in a vast network of tunnels 30 feet below me.

They were dug into the chalky cliff as early as 1942,

in preparation for the Normandy Invasion.

James Holland explores this secret maze and looks at

some of the extraordinary inventions that D-Day required.

In June 1944, as more than 150,000 troops

were preparing to cross the Channel, many thousands more

were managing the huge logistical operation from Southwick.

The Allied commanders had their headquarters at Southwick House.

But all the information they needed,

from the progress of cross-Channel shipping thorough to radio traffic,

was co-ordinated here at Fort Southwick.

Or, to be more precise,

from the mile and a half of bombproof shelters down below it.

'Bob Hunt was nine years old

'when he found a door to a tunnel system below Fort Southwick.

'It began a lifelong interest in the extraordinary history

'of this little-known military headquarters

'that played such a vital role in the Normandy invasions.'

This is the plotting room we're actually standing in now.

6am, 6th June 1944, there were 700 people working underground.

-Really?

-They were working 12-hour shifts on, 12 off.

And there were another thousand working in the fort above us.

They were mostly Wrens as well - 18 years old. Several hundred of them.

And this is where the plotting table would have been.

It's kind of the size of a full-size snooker table, really.

And the plot was made on the map,

so radar reports of where the shipping was,

so there was an awful lot going on.

I never even knew this place existed.

I mean, it's as though it's just been completely forgotten, isn't it?

Well, it has. If you look at more or less any history book on D-Day,

this place is missing from it.

My mum, who was a girl then, 12 years old,

lived two miles from here

and she didn't have a clue that the place was built.

More than 100 rooms throughout the tunnel system housed everything from

plotting and telecommunication hubs to dormitories and dining rooms.

92-year-old Barbara Edwards was a Wren

and remembers travelling to work in the tunnels during the war.

A bus would arrive and we'd all pile on to that.

And then it would bring you to the opening tunnel

of the place and we'd have to pile out again,

and get out and hopefully find where you were meant to be,

which was more luck than good management really.

Can you remember the stairs from the top of Fort Southwick down to here?

All too well.

I used to spend my life going up and down stairs, really.

They were very, very steep.

-And a lot of them.

-And a lot of them.

Obviously in the summer of 1944, the Nazis unleashed a new weapon,

which was the doodlebugs, and they started coming over,

these rocket-propelled missiles, and terrorizing the British people.

Yes. At one time we were a target for our old friend doodlebugs.

And if they were directed properly they could hit something,

which luckily didn't happen very often.

As soon as you heard a doodlebug,

was to just go and get your head down, fast, go somewhere safe,

because it was bound to drop.

But luckily there weren't an awful lot of them, if I remember.

Are you surprised that people are still interested

-in the Second World War?

-No, I'm not.

I think it's a very good thing - it's the only way

they'll stop having another one, if they realise how awful it was,

and the waste of life.

The importance of the work

that Wrens like Barbara did - managing communications,

co-ordinating the movement of Allied forces,

and then the huge task of supplying those troops -

was critical to the Allies' success.

More than 150,000 men were landed on D-Day,

but by the middle of July that had risen to 1.5 million.

What you have to remember is that every single one of those troops

had to be fed, clothed and equipped.

In other words, victory was going to be all about logistics.

One problem was how to get thousands of vehicles to the French coast.

This gave birth to the incredible engineering feat

of the Mulberry harbours - giant floating platforms

that were towed across the Channel and assembled on the Normandy coast.

It still astounds me

that the British had the vision and frankly sheer nerve

to pull off something quite so extraordinary and huge

as the Mulberry harbours.

But that wasn't the only project dreamt up by British engineers.

With vast numbers of vehicles over in Normandy, it was going to be

clear that supplying them with fuel was going to be a major problem.

The solution was just as ambitious.

A 70-mile-long pipeline was unrolled from huge drums

across the Channel in just ten hours.

Operation Pluto allowed millions of gallons of petrol

to be pumped directly to the front lines

from secret pumping stations on the Isle of Wight.

If you were a German reconnaissance plane flying over here,

this part of the Isle of Wight,

what you would've seen is a number of nondescript buildings -

an ice cream factory, a hotel, a derelict building over there.

In actual fact, what this was hiding

was one of the secret weapons in the war of logistics.

That old ice cream factory, for example, was hiding a pump,

while in the basement of the Grand Hotel

was the entire control and command centre.

Running across the road were a series of fuel pipes

that ran straight into the sea and all the way to France.

It was a truly astounding achievement.

We rightly remember those who landed on the beaches

and fought their way through Normandy,

but just as important were the many men and women supplying those troops

at the front - the plotters, planners and engineers,

people of tenacity and vision

whose contribution to victory should never be forgotten.

On Friday, a series of events in Normandy will be held to

commemorate the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

Heads of state, the Queen and other members of the Royal Family

will be attending memorial ceremonies throughout the day,

starting with a service at the cemetery in Bayeux.

Later, there will be an international event

at the Normandy town of Ouistreham. The day will conclude

with a march-past of the British veterans at Arromanches,

by the beach that was known as Gold Beach during D-Day.

Friday's events in Normandy are the official focus

of commemorations for D-Day, but many veterans have

their own way of remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

For Robert Coupe from Blackpool,

honouring his fallen comrades isn't just confined to the past.

Several times a year, he goes on a long train journey

to pay his respects to servicemen and women

who have died in recent conflicts.

I've been to them all except one,

and that was because I had another funeral at the same time.

I used to go and stand, er, at Wootton Bassett

and then at Brize Norton.

I think the least I could do is go.

I get up at five o'clock, and then the taxi comes and picks me up.

Then I get down to the station, plenty of time to catch the 8.44.

And the, er, the young manageress behind there

says, "Robert! Coffee?" "Yes."

I don't know why she likes me, but...

HE LAUGHS

I get in my chair, and off I go.

And I get off at Piccadilly.

And away I go then and get off at Oxford.

It's a hell of a way, is that.

I was called up at 18 years of age,

and I served for four and a half years.

I was attached to the 3rd Division,

and the 3rd British Division

was the most powerful division in the British Army,

because they were going in in the first wave

and they had to crack the defences and get through.

But we were all seasick. Yeah. Everybody was seasick.

I didn't care whether I got shot or not,

so long as I got my feet on to somewhere dry.

I felt terrible.

Off the landing craft and into the water,

and then up to the sandy beach

and then you'd 150 yards to go to the safety of the sea wall.

They told you that out of every six men that landed,

only one would reach the sea wall.

The other five would be wounded or killed.

And I was one out of the six. So...

It's like a lottery.

You know...

You had to say to yourself, "Well, these other five

"are going to get killed or wounded, but I'm going to be all right."

And in my case, it worked.

And the other five...

went down, like, you know.

Aye.

Yeah.

Lost a lot of men there.

We did.

And...

Yeah...

Yeah.

Yeah.

TANNOY: '..In a moment's time is Oxford. If you're leaving us here

'please make sure you get everything ready.

'Take care when you step from the train. Oxford the next stop.'

Everybody in this country, from every family,

there should be at least one of them

should go back to Normandy or to Brize Norton.

BELL TOLLS

If I was lying over there,

I'd like to think

someone would come round one day

and look at my grave and say,

"Oh, I knew him, yes, I remember him."

They should be remembered - there's no doubt about that.

Well, for many people this week will be very poignant,

as they remember the friends and family

and the roles that they played during D-Day.

Pam and Pat, you were here on the South Coast.

What was it like just in those last few days before D-Day?

It was a very tense time, of course.

We had a tremendous amount of troops in the area.

We hadn't been allowed to go outside a 20-mile limit

for, oh, a couple of months before D-Day.

We knew that it was going to happen,

but we didn't know where, we didn't know when.

And we were really longing for it to happen

because the war would never come to an end if D-Day didn't take place.

Pam, there must have been that great sense of anticipation,

-of something about to happen?

-Oh, yes.

We simply knew that it was going to happen, but we didn't know when.

And Pat, what else did you see on the coast?

Well, because we were on this cliff looking straight over to France,

of course they'd built all the... a lot of the Mulberry,

the landing craft and so on, further north.

And all these had to come in convoys past our cliff

-and go down towards the West.

-So these great floating harbours...

And we saw these bits of the Mulberry harbour

that looked like billiard tables upside down,

and we couldn't think what these things were.

And of course it was within shelling range of the Germans,

so they would now and then shell these convoys.

And we all saw - not on D-Day, I think it was before D-Day -

we saw them actually hit a small ship and the ship burst into flames.

And it was in a whole long line of landing craft and other ships,

and the convoy went on. The orders were obviously, they didn't stop.

And this ship was just down below our cliff, burning away.

It was the saddest thing I think we saw.

Pam and Pat, you were here on the South Coast.

When did you first realise that D-Day was actually taking place?

I went on watch on the night of June 5th.

Nobody told us anything for quite a long time,

although it was quite obvious that something was in the wind.

And eventually they did tell us.

And, er... I wanted to stay on watch

because something was happening and I wanted to be in on it.

But eventually I had to leave the watch room

and I then just walked out onto the cliff.

By this time it was broad daylight and I looked across to Calais,

and I thought of my future husband,

who was a prisoner-of-war in Germany.

And I was thinking, "At last, my dear, we're coming to get you.

"Every minute somebody is coming nearer, and you will soon be free."

And after that I went to bed, because I'd been up all night.

I wasn't on duty that night. I had been the day before.

But one of our Wren friends rushed round all our cabins

and said, "It's started! It's started!"

And so we all got up, and put on our jerseys and things

because it was about four in the morning.

And went out on the cliff and there just happened to be

a convoy going past - these barges and landing craft.

And I do remember it was a hazy morning, and they sort of

disappeared into the haze, and then there was just no sound at all.

You knew it had happened.

But it was hours before we heard any more.

And very difficult to get the information.

And Pam, you were sure as they set off that it was going to succeed?

Oh, yes - I don't think we had any doubts about it at all.

You couldn't really think anything else -

you couldn't possibly be despondent after all this time.

And what did you think, Christian, as it was all taking place?

Can you remember how you felt about it?

I can't ever remember anybody who thought

we weren't going to win the war, from the very first day.

We all knew we would win it - especially when Churchill

kept telling us we were going to, anyway. But we all knew it.

Christian, Pam, Pat - thank you so much

for sharing your extraordinary memories with us.

Now, every day this week Dan Snow is meeting present-day troops

to find out what D-Day means to them.

Today, he joins the crew on board

one of the Royal Navy's largest aircraft carriers

to explore the vital role the fleet played during the Normandy invasion.

D-Day was the biggest seaborne invasion in history.

But before a boot hit the sand of the French beaches,

it was the job of the Navy to clear a path and get them there.

-NEWSCASTER:

-Under the command of General Eisenhower,

Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces,

began landing Allied armies this morning

on the northern coast of France.

Nearly 7,000 ships and landing craft assembled in the Channel on D-Day.

Their mission, To knock out the enemy's defences

and deliver the Allied troops safely.

70 years later, the Royal Navy still does the same job.

I'm flying off the northern coast of Scotland

to board HMS Illustrious,

one of the biggest and most important warships in the Navy.

This 22,000-tonne ship, nicknamed Lusty,

is the Royal Navy's helicopter and commando carrier.

MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION

I want to find out what the actions of the troops

on D-Day 70 years ago

mean to the men and women of the modern Royal Navy.

Illustrious is currently playing a key part

in Exercise Joint Warrior -

the largest land, sea and air military exercise

currently going on in Europe.

There are ten different nations taking part

and Illustrious is currently right in the middle

of a task group of 14 different naval vessels.

The 700 men and women on board are being trained to respond to

all sorts of wartime scenarios.

From a fire on board...

..to a full airborne attack.

SHOUTED COMMANDS

SHOUTING

MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION

'While the technology and style of warfare has changed

'dramatically since 1944...

'..many of the principles are just the same.'

So you're in charge of the engines on this ship.

What would your counterpart have been doing

back on D-Day on those ships off the beach?

Very much the same - just different technology.

Whilst the warfare branch fight the war,

we look after the internals of the ship

to make sure the command team

are still able to fight through regardless of damage.

You have a personal connection to D-Day - what is it?

My father landed on D-Day itself on Juno Beach -

he was a Royal Marine.

The most memorable thing for him

was finding a Canadian dying on the side of the road,

and going to talk to him and ease him through the pain.

From then on, he lit a candle for this one Canadian

as a representative of all that he went through.

For most of the young men involved in D-Day,

it would have been their first time away from home

and certainly their first taste of action.

Ben, how long have you been in the Navy?

I've been in the Navy for just under a year.

So is this your first sort of big exercise?

This is my only exercise so far

that's not been in the training aspect of it all.

-Is it quite exciting?

-Very exciting, it is.

It's nerve-racking at times, but nevertheless exciting.

In a battle situation like the ships off D-Day,

I can imagine guys like you down in the engine rooms,

down in the bottom of the ship, not knowing what's going on upstairs -

does that sort of... Is that quite scary?

Yeah, it is. You're constantly waiting for something to happen,

for a situation to take place for you to react to.

Have your experiences here

made you think about what it must have been like

for guys in a big battle like D-Day?

A lot of the time they were pinned down,

they didn't have a great deal of knowledge about what was happening.

It must have been so nerve-racking and tense for them.

But again, they're trained to do it,

they did it to their best of their ability, and they did it very well.

The Royal Marines of D-Day made their final assault on the coast

by boarding landing craft - a difficult and dangerous journey.

Modern-day marines are more likely to be delivered by helicopter,

but the nervous wait is just the same.

So you're in charge of corralling

a bunch of psyched-up 23-year-old Royal Marines

and making them stand in these lines to get on the right aircraft.

That's correct, yeah.

Would you say that's a job that requires a big voice?

To be fair, Royal Marines do what they're told.

It's when you don't tell them what to do

that they start making it up for themselves.

Can you imagine what your equivalents were doing on D-Day,

getting all the guys from those transport vessels down into

those landing craft - what kind of skills would they have needed?

I don't know about skills, but I know that previously

when I've launched from either this platform or other ones

that you have thoroughly been through your plan.

And when you're standing there on the lift going up to the aircraft,

you've got that dry-mouthed anticipation

about what's going to come next.

In your mind you're always like going over what you're going to do

when you get off the aircraft.

Not so much anticipating what you're going to encounter,

but just making sure you've remembered your part in it,

and that you're going to do it.

MUFFLED COMMANDS

Did your dad, as someone who was a Royal Marine,

so who understands both the naval and the army side -

did he have a great respect for what the Navy did in getting them safely

to that beach and getting them all ashore in an orderly fashion?

Very much so.

He fully recognised the importance the Navy had

of enabling D-Day to happen at all.

If it wasn't for naval gunfire support ahead of the landings,

then it just wouldn't have happened.

One of the young men who was on a Royal Navy ship on D-Day

was Richard Llewellyn.

As an 18-year-old midshipman on HMS Ajax,

one of the first ships to open fire on D-Day,

he kept a detailed diary recording his impressions of that day.

"After an anxious forenoon

"during which the sea was really rough,

"we have rounded Land's End and are now on our way up the Channel.

"The waves have gone down and the sun is shining,

"the coast of Cornwall is visible and the sea is a wonderful blue.

"One might almost say perfect invasion weather."

For 60 years after 1944, the only date I remember in the calendar,

apart from my birthday and Christmas, was June 6th.

It's a day I remember vividly

for the noise, the spectacle of the whole thing,

I mean, it was a gigantic operation.

The cruiser squadron, the 15th Cruiser Squadron,

included HMS Ajax and HMS Belfast.

Belfast was a much heavier cruiser,

probably nearly 50% heavier and bigger than HMS Ajax.

HMS Ajax was a sort of... Almost a disposable warship.

I was 18. I was a midshipman.

I managed to get a job as the navigator's tanky.

It was a sort of navigator's assistant.

A midshipman on board HM ships had to keep what was called a log book.

A heavily bound book, and you wrote in it each day.

And that eventually went to the captain who had to sign it

and so on. So it was an official log,

without any feelings or sort of dramatic detail in.

But I kept a little diary,

which I just scribbled in, just over the D-Day period.

It's written in very small writing.

It was actually falling to pieces

and someone has very kindly put it together.

"At lunchtime today the conversation

"ran on lines of who'd be coming out OK.

"Personally I think this is a bad line for a conversation,

"but it was really only jokingly.

"Somehow I have a feeling of confidence that we'll all be OK."

I remember going down the Channel, at night,

obviously it was dark, but because it was nearly midsummer,

there was never total darkness in spite of the weather being overcast.

And we could see ships all around us on every side.

We forged ahead, because we had to put the shore batteries

out of action before the landings could take place.

"The noise is intense, aircraft bombing shore defences, all ships

"bombarding, landing craft fitted with rocket launchers blasting off.

"Amazing scenes of action.

"The Yanks to the right, us to the left."

EXPLOSIONS

It was the noise. The aircraft going overhead.

There was bombing going on. There was gunfire from everywhere.

AMERICAN NEWSREEL: The 11,000 planes that opened the path

through the so-called impregnable Atlantic Wall.

There was a huge amount going on

and there were aircraft overhead, hundreds of them.

NEWSREEL: Meanwhile, at Cherbourg in Normandy,

the Allied lighting strikes.

When they were firing at an elevation,

those barrels were really, really close to an open bridge.

It was deafening. It was very, very noisy indeed.

"The whole ship rocked.

"Another near miss on Ajax port bow. Terrific flash,

"blinded and doubled up. Thought hit."

NEWSREEL: And the enemies' Hedgehog defences are ahead.

This is the supreme moment of invasion.

This is frontal assault on an entrenched enemy.

INTENSE GUNFIRE

The people who landed on the beach on the first wave,

they were, to my mind, the real heroes

who really made it possible for the invasion to succeed.

The rest of us were just the supporting people

who made that possible. And so...

People say, "We're so proud of you"

and I think, "Well, "what are you proud of?"

I was in the Navy, which I was very lucky to be, obviously,

and I was just doing my job as far as I was concerned.

Well, that's it from us for today.

Tomorrow, with just two days to go before the D-Day anniversary,

we'll be talking to a nurse who took care of some of the casualties

who were brought back here from the beaches in France.

Certainly in the early days of the landings,

the loss of life and injuries was terrific.

As one man left, there was always another lined up to come in.

We never had an empty bed.

James Holland looks into training and rehearsals for D-Day.

Often we'd go out at night on a boat

and come in and hit the beach in the morning.

And go round firing blanks,

scaring the schoolkids on their way to school and all that stuff.

And we hear from a veteran who was one of the first

to land on the Normandy beaches.

We expected people to get killed or injured.

We knew what we were going to go through.

And...I mean... We were scared, but we had to do it.

So join us again tomorrow morning

when I'll be down there in Portsmouth at the Royal Navy Base,

one of the largest embarkation points for the Normandy invasion.

Goodbye.