Voices of Liberation (2021–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - Episode #1.1 - full transcript
[somber music playing]
♪ The bright horses have broken free
From the fields ♪
♪ They are horses of love
Their manes full of fire ♪
♪ They are parting the cities
Those bright burning horses ♪
♪ And everyone is hiding
And no one makes a sound ♪
♪ And I'm by your side
And I'm holding your hand ♪
[airoplane engine roaring]
[Winston Churchill]
We shall fight in France.
We shall fight on the seas and oceans.
We shall fight with growing confidence
and growing strength in the air.
We shall defend our island,
whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds.
We shall fight in the fields
and in the streets.
We shall fight in the hills,
we shall never surrender.
And if, which I do not
for a moment believe,
this island or large part of it
was subjugated and starving,
then our Empire, beyond the seas,
armed and guarded by the British Fleet,
would carry on the struggle until,
in God's good time,
the New World,
with all its power and might,
steps forth to the rescue
and the liberation of the old.
I'm Thomas Brodie-Sangster.
And this is the home where
my great-grandparents once lived.
Bignor Manor.
My great-grandfather,
Major Anthony Bertram,
was a French-speaking officer
in the Secret Intelligence Service
during World War II.
This was his coat
that was passed down to me.
It still bears the marks
of where he received his medals
for his work during the war.
I thought it appropriate
to wear it today.
The first chapter in the story
of the liberation of Europe
is that of D-Day on June 6th, 1944.
On that day, the Allied armies attacked
the Germans in France,
five years after the Germans
had occupied it.
But the story of D-Day can be traced back
to the spring of 1940,
when hundreds of thousands
of British soldiers
had to escape from the beaches of Dunkirk.
Running for their lives
from the advancing Germans.
Perhaps it was the now-famous speeches
of Winston Churchill,
which helped rally the country
against the Germans.
The Hun is always either
at your throat or your feet.
Perhaps the motivation for D-Day stemmed
from the non-stop bombings of London
and of other cities across Britain,
which led to more
than 60,000 civilian deaths
and destroyed millions of homes.
Or maybe it began with the failed raid
on Dieppe in 1942.
This had been a crushing defeat
for the Allies,
who suffered over 3000 killed or wounded
and almost 2000 prisoners of war.
Or maybe it was the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor,
which not only forced the USA
into World War II,
but also created a strong united force
against the Axis powers
of Germany, Japan, and Italy.
[airoplane engines roaring]
[explosions]
Perhaps the seeds of liberation
could be traced back to the letters
exchanged between the newly Allied
world leaders of Joseph Stalin,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill.
Stalin wrote to Churchill explaining
that the Soviet Union
and the United Kingdom were allies against
the aggression of Hitler's Germany.
This is what he wrote.
[male reader 1] To me
the military situations
of the Soviet Union,
as well as of Great Britain
would be considerably improved
if there could be established
a front against Hitler
in Northwestern France
and in the North in the Arctic.
A front in Northern France not only could
divert Hitler's forces from the east,
but at the same time would make it
impossible for Hitler to invade Britain.
The establishment of the front
just mentioned
would be popular with the British Army
as well as the whole population
of Southern England."
[Thomas]
And that is exactly what happened.
In 1942, the preparations
for the biggest military landing
in history started.
Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers
were shipped to Southern England.
It was the so-called Friendly Invasion.
[female reader 1] From the diary
written by Anne Joseph, June 1944.
"From our garden, we were able to watch
all the preparations for D-Day,
as Portsmouth and Langston Harbours
filled with the requisite craft.
As time went by, we were subjected
to a Friendly Invasion:
that of the Americans,
who appeared to us as quite amazing.
All that gum chewing got most parents
in the neighborhood tut-tutting
and threatening their children
with a fate worse than death
if any of us ever dared to chew gum.
The Canadians, sporting maple leaves
on their uniforms,
were always greeted with a smile.
One evening we heard
more outward-bound planes than usual
from nearby airfields.
We watched in amazement
as the sky was filled
with countless planes hauling gliders."
It wasn't only U.S., Canadian,
and British troops involved.
No, there were troops that came in from
all around the world to help the Allies
in their fight against the Germans.
They were from Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian,
Czechoslovakian, Polish, French,
Australian, New Zealand, and even Greek.
This truly was a world war.
Just imagine all those
different nationalities,
different cultures, amassed here
in the city of Portsmouth
in the South of England.
[male reader 2] Letter from
Private Jack Womer to his wife.
"Dear Theresa,
just about everything in England
is rationed to support the war effort.
There are shortages of sugar, flavorings,
flour, spices, fruits, meats,
eggs, milk, butter, lard, gasoline,
clothing, soap,
razor blades
and practically everything else,
because these items are needed
to support the English troops.
The rationing and the stress of the war
has taken its toll on the English people.
I can see the stress in their faces
and feel it in the air.
Most of the citizens look half-starved
because of the lack of food."
[soldiers chanting]
[Thomas] This mix of different
nationalities, races, and backgrounds
led to tensions between the men.
It had largely to do
with the difference in pay.
A white U.S. soldier got paid twice that
of an African American soldier
and three times that of a British soldier.
But most of the tensions
came from the segregation
that existed within the U.S. Army.
Separation due to skin tone
was still very present
in all aspects of American culture,
whereas in Britain this was not the case.
The racism from the American GI's
was so shocking to the British public
that it would often lead to fights
breaking out.
And of course, the African Americans
would be the ones
that would receive
the punishments.
For example, a white soldier accused
of rape would receive a prison sentence,
whereas an African American
would be executed.
[male reader 3] Private Frank Rossier,
audio testimony.
"So, we played them at rugby
and actually beat them,
but they got their own back
and beat us a basketball.
Then came the order that we were not
to play with the Black Yanks.
The white Yanks had objected.
As a cosmopolitan Cockney used to playing
with Black children, Indian children,
Chinese, or whatever as a kid,
it was part of my life
and I couldn't believe my ears.
I was 18 and I thought: "That's stupid."
I still can't believe it today."
[Thomas] While the Allies were
in South of England
to prepare the attack on the Germans
in Normandy,
the Germans were building
what they called the Atlantic Wall,
a concrete defense line of bunkers,
guns and minefields.
It was built along the North Sea Coast,
from Norway over Denmark,
Holland and Belgium,
down to the Spanish border
near the South of France.
It was 5000 km long.
[piano music plays]
[Thomas] At the end of 1943,
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
was sent to the west to inspect
the Atlantic Wall.
Rommel, a decorated World War I veteran
who had been in command
of the German troops in Egypt and Tunisia,
where he earned the nickname Desert Fox,
was asked by Hitler to take care
of the threats coming in
from the west.
Rommel began by strengthening the wall
because he thought
that it was far from strong enough
to hold off an attack from the sea.
Although around 900 000 people worked
on the Atlantic Wall,
it was never finished.
[man reading in German]
Diary of Franz Gockel.
Rommel saw the bay
as an ideal landing spot
for a conquest from the sea:
around ten kilometers of fine sand
with four entrances to the inland,
over slightly rising valleys.
Rommel's last comment was:
This bay must be protected
as soon as possible
against landing attempts by the allies.
So we worked very quickly on establishing
fortifications in this section.
One of the construction crews
of the Todt organization from Dusseldorf,
composed of Frenchmen
and predominantly Moroccans,
built ring stands within a few weeks,
in addition to the existing structures,
also called "Tobruk",
for light machine guns.
They built two artillery bunkers,
for 7.5 cm guns,
two ring stands for light mortars
and machine guns
and a group shelter
and an observation post for the artillery.
My great-grandfather offered up
his own family home
to be used as a safe house
for French resistance agents,
who would be secretly flown in from France
to receive further training
and information from him.
His wife, my great-grandma
Barbara Bertram,
became a clandestine housemother
to these men
who had passed through her home
every month.
Extracts of the diary of Barbara Bertram,
my grandmother.
"It must be awful to know you're going
to be tortured if you're caught.
I wonder more don't kill themselves.
I hate having to sew poison
into their cuffs.
It feels almost as if I was helping
to murder them.
Once a man arrived
who was suspected of being a double agent
and Tony had to stay up all night
questioning him.
That was very uncomfortable.
Of course, I was not told the result."
No one ever did find out the truth
about that particular agent.
However, rumor has it
that he was working both sides.
Regardless, I'm sure my great-grandmother
would have treated him very well,
as she was so famous for doing
with all the agents who visited her.
One of the more sinister tasks
that she had
was to sew cyanide capsules
into the cuffs of the men,
so that if captured, they at least
had the option to not be tortured.
Now, these missions
meant that the French resistance
were well informed
and prepared for the events of D-Day,
which in turn led to the success
of Operation Overlord.
The diary of Barbara Bertram.
"As soon as they were indoors,
we gave them a drink
and then we had reception pie.
When and why it came
to be known as reception pie,
I don't remember,
but it was also known in France too,
and people on arrival would ask me:
"What have we got for reception pie,
Madam Barbara?"
-[slow music playing]
-[airoplane engine roaring]
These unique aircraft
were specially painted in black
as to match that of the night sky.
A long-range fuel tank was added
underneath the fuselage
and all the armament was removed
from the rear to save weight
and to make space for the agents.
And they fitted this little ladder
on the side for easy access.
Obviously, the pilot goes upfront,
but the procedure for getting in the rear
was that the agent that arrived
would have to hand his bag down
to the agent waiting to receive it,
and then he would hand his bag
back to him and then they would swap out.
It sounds very straightforward
and obvious,
but things often went wrong,
and this is an illustration
of when it does.
During the preparations for D-Day,
hundreds of resistance agents
departed Bignor Manor
and were flown in
behind enemy lines by very brave pilots
who used nothing more than the light
of a full moon to guide them.
Now, for this covert of operations,
this is the machine they chose to use.
The Westland Lysander, also known as
"the spy taxi" for obvious reasons
and affectionately known as Lizzy
by those who flew it.
The idea was that the liberation
was going to happen
on the French or Belgian coasts.
The Allies used Spitfires fitted
with cameras to photograph
the landing beaches and defenses.
One of the most important pilots
was the Belgian engineer, Hugo Van Kuyck,
who joined the United States Army
after Pearl Harbor.
From his airplane, he took pictures
of the Normandy shores and sea currents.
The maps used on D-Day were based
on Van Kuyck's pictures,
and he also advised the military
commanders to set foot
on the beaches during the low tide.
[male reader 4] Letter to
Major H. an Kuyck, Intelligence Division,
from the Naval Commander,
Western Task Force.
"The attached letter
from the Naval Commander,
Western Task Force, is forwarded
with great pleasure.
The importance of the work performed
by you cannot be underestimated.
The successful completion of our mission
in this Theater
depends upon the exactness
and accuracy
of information furnished
to the higher headquarters.
I commend you for your superior
performance of duty.
Signed, C.R. Moore, Major General,
US Army, Chief Engineer."
And when you study these maps,
you see every feature is marked out.
Even the smallest flooded ditch
is present.
On top of all
of the reconnaissance photographs,
The BBC launched a contest
asking the British public
to send in any holiday pictures
they may have of the French Coast,
so the Intelligence Service
could piece together information
about the Normandy coastline as possible.
[man reading in German]
Letter from Erwin Rommel to his wife Lu,
April 27, 1944.
It looks like the British and Americans
are doing us the favor
of leaving us alone for a while.
This will be invaluable
to our coastal defences,
as we are now getting stronger every day,
at least on the ground,
although not yet in the air.
But even that will eventually change
to our benefit.
My little dog is very affectionate
and loves sweets.
He's sleeping in my room now.
Guernsey, Jersey, and Alderney
are three islands situated
in between France and Britain that fell
into German hands during the war.
Hitler was very pleased
that the Channel Islands
were under German control.
He referred to them
as his British conquest.
As part of the Atlantic Wall,
Organization Todt constructed
a massive number
of bunkers and tunnels on the islands.
As Rommel was convinced the Allies
were going to attack from the air,
minefields and booby traps were installed,
and he noted in his diary that a division
had been placed for 300,000 stalks
in the ground to deter airborne landings.
These were called "Rommel's asparaguses".
It was a system of wire-braced poles
up to two meters in height,
and most of them were laced with mines
and other booby traps.
Rommel also flooded big parts of Normandy
specifically to hinder
the landing of gliders,
and covered the Normandy beaches
with Czech hedgehogs, tetrahedrons,
nutcracker mines and Belgian gates,
and so on.
Bletchley Park.
Probably the most important institution
when it came to information gathering.
This is the place where the seemingly
impenetrable communication code
used by the German Enigma machine
were broken.
Alan Turing and his team used
a device called "The Bombe".
The far more complex Lorenz-code
was also deciphered here,
but using a different machine
called "Colossus".
This was considered to be a proto-computer
and far ahead of its time.
By '43, Bletchley had developed
a small community
of specialist cryptanalysts into a vast,
complex global intelligence factory
where about 8000 people worked,
the majority of which were women.
One of the incredible parts
of this operation
was that nobody knew about it.
None of the workers there would
speak to anyone
about what was really going on.
They didn't even talk to each other.
The Bombe code-breaking machine
was hugely important
to Operation Overlord.
It broke the code of German High Command,
as well as helped identify the locations
of German U-boats
and identified new secret weapons
that were in development,
such as rocket-powered V-weapons,
jet-powered aircraft and,
most alarming of all, atomic research.
The bombe machine was developed
by Alan Turing
and Gordon Welshman to help speed up
the code-breaking process,
so that by the time they
were decoded,
they were still operationally relevant.
It got its name from a previous machine
by the Polish Cipher Bureau called Bomba.
Alan Turing,
who was a key part of the team that was
at the basis of the Bombe machine,
was arrested and convicted in 1952
of homosexual acts.
He could choose between
an experimental castration
over the course of one year
or imprisonment.
He chose the first,
and in 1954 he was found dead.
Next to him lay an apple
laced with cyanide.
[instrumental music playing]
[ghostly war men yelling]
Welcome to Tyneham.
There were a few villages
just like this one
where the residents were asked
to leave their homes
so that soldiers could use them to train
in the art of house to house combat
and develop the skills needed
for urban warfare.
The villagers, they were promised
to return to their homes after the war,
but sadly, this promise was never kept.
And this is what remains.
[male reader 5]
Letter from the government,
written by C.H. Miller, Major General,
I/C Administration, Southern Command.
"The government appreciates
that this is no small sacrifice
which you are asked to make,
but they are sure that you will
give this further help
towards winning the war
with a good heart."
[male reader 6] Private Morton D. Elevitch
to his mom.
" This week they are teaching us to kill.
Now you probably looked away
and shuddered.
Well, Mom, I don't like the idea either,
but we all know it's for our own good.
The most strenuous work we do takes place
as we stand in one place:
Bayonet drill.
We lunge about it in definitive movements
and are required to growl,
grimace and look
at each other with hate.
Five hundred of us dance about screaming,
shouting and snarling.
They teach us how to withdraw
in a certain manner, too.
Because steel sticks to warm human flesh."
[upbeat vocal music plays]
[Thomas] During the war, many commodities
simply weren't available.
This meant people had to make do
with what they had.
The women of Britain came up
with a genius way
of dealing
with the lack of nylon stockings.
They learned that if they stained
their legs using gravy granules
and drew a seam line up the back, it would
create the desired effect of stockings.
[vocal music continues]
[Thomas] At the Tehran conference
in November of 1943,
Roosevelt and Churchill promised Stalin
that they would open
the long-delayed second front in May 1944.
In the end, this was postponed
until June of that year.
[piano music plays]
Air superiority was a vital element
in the buildup to June 6th.
Big Week was a sequence of raids
by the United States Army Air Force
and the RAF Bomber Command.
From the 20th to 25th February 1942,
as part of the European strategic
bombing campaign against Nazi Germany.
They dropped many
thousands of tons of bombs
on the main German aircraft industries
in Augsburg.
Almost a quarter of the city
was destroyed.
However, miraculously,
the production was completely unaffected.
Under Albert Speer's order, the damage
was repaired in a few weeks.
He even managed
to double aircraft production.
Seventy years later, in 2016,
fifty thousand people were asked
to leave their homes
while large World War II bombs
were removed.
The Luftwaffe's biggest problem
was that they had to fight on three fronts
with an ever dwindling fuel supply.
This meant that they had to downsize
the training regime of the new pilots.
Rookie pilots were rushed into combat
after only receiving 160 hours
of flight training.
This compared to the 400 hours
of the U.S. Air Force
and the 360 for the RAF.
[machine gun blasting]
[Thomas] At the time,
there was a sarcastic German saying:
"If you see a plane during the day,
it's the Americans.
If you see a plane at night,
it's the British.
If you don't see a plane at all,
it's the Luftwaffe."
"Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress,
Consolidated B-24 Liberator,
Lockheed P-38 Lightning,
Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, P-51 Mustang,
Glen Martin B-26 Marauder,
Havilland Mosquito."
[man reading in German]
A letter from Private Theodor Werry.
Yesterday I took two wounded men
and a doctor with me.
The two are badly injured
by an attack by a low-flying aircraft.
The cities in the area are
also heavily bombed
and it seems the English and Americans
don't care in the least
that our units are mostly
off the main roads
and they hit the poor French
so much harder.
Let's hope that this war will end soon.
[Thomas] After the bombing
and the play from the Allies,
the Germans understood that an attack
would take place any day now.
Somehow, they presumed
it was going to happen
on the Normandy or the Belgian coastline.
They just didn't know exactly when.
But the Allies made great efforts to pull
the wool over the eyes of their enemy.
Operation Bodyguard
was designed to mislead the Germans
during the early hours of the invasion.
Planning for Operation Bodyguard
didn't even begin
until Normandy had been selected
as the landing site.
Operation Bodyguard consisted
of five different operations.
The most known and probably most important
was Operation Fortitude,
which was designed to convince
the German leadership
that there would be not one,
but two landings,
namely Norway and Calais in France.
This would force the Germans
to divide their troops
over several possible landing sites.
Fortitude North was aimed
at creating the impression
that the Allies wanted to invade Norway.
To this end, a fictional Fourth Army
was established in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Under Fortitude South
a false First United States Army Group
was set up,
allegedly under the command
of General George Patton himself.
This completely fictitious army
was based in the South of England.
False radio signals
from non-existent army units
were repeatedly transmitted from Kent
to make the Germans think
that there were troops there.
Dummy tanks and airplanes
were popped up in fields,
as well as cardboard landing craft
which were moored up
in local rivers and harbours
in the hopes that they would be
seen by the German air force.
But there was more.
The Allies used German prisoner
General Hans Cramer to create a real hoax.
They changed road signs
and drove him through Portsmouth,
making the German officer believe
that they were in Dover.
He was even invited to a dinner
in his honor with General Patton.
When General Cramer was later exchanged,
he told Rommel
that the Southeast of England
was crowded with troops
and they were getting ready
for an invasion
which was going to be
launched from Dover.
[somber music plays]
The Germans may have constructed
their Atlantic Wall
and amassed a large number of troops
in Northern France
in anticipation of an invasion, however,
German High Command
could not agree on how to best
counter an Allied attack from the sea.
Field Marshal Rommel wanted to fight
them off on the beaches.
As General Von Schweppenburg thought it
best to allow the Allies to land
and then engage them
in the areas behind the beachhead.
Operation Bodyguard
was helped by several double agents
who fed false information to the Germans.
The most crucial one was Garbo.
Garbo, this is the code name
for the Spanish spy Joan Pujol Garcia.
He was not your stereotypical 007
sort of spy.
He was a small, balding,
unassuming sort of man,
but he completely fooled the Germans.
Pujol decided to put together
a group of fictional agents
to help him deceive the Germans.
He gave these non-existent individuals
missions, gave them a backstory, a family,
to make them as credible as possible.
He even went as far as
to have some of paid
and even killed by the German Abwehr.
In January 1944,
the Germans told Pujol that they were
expecting an invasion of Western Europe
and asked him
to gather information about it.
From then on, he sent more than
500 radio messages until D-Day,
trying to mislead the Germans
into giving them the idea
that the Allies would land in Calais.
[male reader 7] Audiofile,
Corporal Reginald Spittles.
"We had to go and see Monty
to give us a pep talk.
We was at Rudston village
and they lorried us over to this area.
He finished off by saying
that we would be going on to Germany.
"It would be just like cricket," he said.
"We're going to knock them for six."
and a little voice behind me said:
"I hope the buggers know this."
[Thomas] Montgomery's rivalry
with Rommel had such an impact on him
that he had a spaniel named Rommel
and a fox terrier named Hitler.
General Montgomery jotted down his plans
for D-Day on this piece of paper here
and presented it here
in this very building.
He finishes here with "simplicity".
"Simplicity is the key to success."
In his presentation, Montgomery emphasized
that the Allies must quickly move forward
and keep the initiative.
He stressed that the main D-Day objective
for the Second British Army
was to take Caen,
so that they could establish a base there
to house troops and launch operations
from that point.
He said that the army must
move quickly to gain control
of the Caen-Falaise corridor
in order to control the battle.
A slow, safe advance
would only give Rommel
the time that he needed to reinforce.
[man reading in German]
Diary of Franz Gockel.
There definitely have been hours
when no one thought about the war.
Mostly when the sun set over the sea.
A beautiful sight
that made you forget the war.
But the news from home
brought us back to reality,
and with all the more force,
as the war raged on violently,
not only on the fronts, but also at home.
[slow instrumental music plays]
One plus side to war is that it leads
to great innovation,
and innovation is key when it
comes to successful warfare.
The sandy beaches of Normandy
were very much unknown territory.
Had the Germans mined it?
How are the Allies going to deal
with all the defensive obstacles
that had been put in place?
And what about the effects of seawater
on all the pieces of machinery
that had to get ashore?
This is the fearsome
Churchill Crocodile tank.
It was fitted with a flamethrower
at the front,
capable of reaching 90 meters.
[fire blasting]
[explosions]
Among the many new armoured vehicles
were Hobart's Funnies.
Major General Percy Hobart
had modified existing tanks
into swimming Duplex-Drive Sherman tanks,
bridging tanks,
flamethrower Crocodile tanks, flail tanks
with a revolving drum of chains
that would flail the ground
and explode mines.
[somber music plays]
Look at this giant.
This enormous floating platform
was just one section
of a massive mobile harbor
known as the Mulberry Harbour.
Now, this section broke away in the storms
of June 5th, 1944,
just one day before D-Day.
You can imagine how puzzled
the locals must have been
when they saw this floating past.
Mulberry harbour was made
and used like a real harbour.
The idea was to have two of them in France
so that the Allies could bring
large amounts of equipment ashore
to supply and sustain the ground forces.
The assault on Dieppe in '42 proved
that they couldn't take over a harbour
without heavy bombardment,
which would destroy the facilities
needed to bring
such an enormous army ashore.
So the Allies decided to transport
two completely floating harbours
the size of Dover across
the English Channel.
It was an incredibly insane
yet genius plan
and was primordial in helping
D-Day succeed on every level.
[female reader 2] Betty Tabb,
Civilian, Slapton, Devon.
"There was a meeting called then
in the village hall and that confirmed
that there was going to be an evacuation
of the area for the American training.
My parents just couldn't believe it.
I mean, mom just said: "well, no,
it's not going to happen because it can't.
What are we going to do?"
[somber music plays]
[waves crashing ashore]
[male reader 8]
Diary of Lieutenants Downes.
"Operation Tiger proved
to be a major disaster.
Our ships were traveling
without escort ships,
even though German torpedo boats
were known to be lurking in the area.
These E-boats were very fast,
capable of speeds up to 50 knots,
while the LST's could
reach no more than 14 knots maximum.
Around midnight, the Germans spotted
our ships, attacked them,
sank LST 507
and damaged several others.
We were told of this tragedy
in detail afterwards,
but with threats of court-martial
if we uttered a word about it
to the civilians during our shore leave.
That night, 946 American soldiers
and sailors were reported
missing or killed."
[Thomas] The attack on the coastline took
place on the morning of the 27th April
and was marked by an incident
involving friendly fire.
Eisenhower felt
the men must be hardened
by exposure to real battle conditions,
some of the landing ships were delayed,
so they decided to postpone the landing.
A large number of landing crafts
didn't receive this message
and arrived on the beach
at the original scheduled time.
These men came under heavy fire
and rumors circulated
that around 450 men were killed.
As a result of the tragedy
that was Exercise Tiger,
many lives were lost,
but many lessons learnt.
The Allies made a few changes
in preparation for the D-Day landings,
these included
standardizing radio frequencies,
providing better life-vest training
for the landing troops,
and a plan was made for small boats
to pick up any floating survivors.
[upbeat music plays]
[Thomas] On the 27th May,
the Secret Service MI5
and the Allied commanders
nearly had a heart attack
when they saw the Daily Telegraph
crossword section.
No less than three words directly related
to D-Day were used in this section.
Utah, Omaha, and Overlord were
all answers required to solve the puzzle.
The composer of this crossword,
Leonard Dawe,
who was the headmaster
of the Strand School in Surrey,
received a visit by MI5 personnel
who concluded that it was nothing
more than an unfortunate coincidence.
U.S. and Canadian troops
preparing for D-Day
were camped out close to this school
and the local schoolboys would
regularly mix with the soldiers.
It was during one of these moments
that a boy named Ronald French
overheard troops using code words,
and as headmaster Dawe
would often invite his pupils
to fill in his blank crossword
with any words that came to mind,
Ronald gave him the words
that he had just overheard.
But these code words were so secret
that it is puzzling any ordinary
infantry soldier would even know of them.
The crossword may have been solved,
but this in itself remains
one of the most puzzling mysteries
of D-Day that will never be solved.
[man reading in German]
Diary of Franz Gockel.
Late May, news came that troops
were embarking in southern England.
For us, however,
the days went on as before:
holding the fort, guarding the
weapons and expanding positions.
However, measures have been taken
to be more on alert.
[Thomas] The white stripes painted
on the wings of the Allied aircraft
were there to reduce the chances
of being attacked by friendly fire forces
during the Normandy landings.
A small-scale test exercise was flown over
the Overlord invasion fleet
on the 1st June,
to accustom the ships and crews
with the new markings.
[somber music plays]
The whole operation was led
in this very room
by the Supreme Commander
of the Allied Expeditionary Forces,
General Dwight Eisenhower
and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsey
and Air Marshall Trafford Leigh-Mallory.
Churchill and De Gaulle also came here
just a few days before D-Day.
It is said that Churchill
wished to join his troops at sea
so that he could witness
the landings for himself,
from onboard HMS Belfast,
and that it took King George himself
to stop him
by insisting that if Churchill were to go,
then he would have to go as well.
And of course,
that would never be allowed.
So, unfortunately, Churchill was denied
his front row seats of his invasion.
[somber music plays]
Even down here in this subterranean level
of Southwick House,
it would have been full of people
feverishly working and planning
in anticipation of D-Day.
The prime consideration for giving
the go-ahead for D-Day was the weather.
If it was too stormy
and the sea too rough,
it would be impossible to launch.
The Allies needed up-to-date observations
and barometric readings
from as far west as possible.
So ideally,
from the West Coast of Ireland.
James Stagg, the Allies'
senior weather forecaster,
established communications
with the Irish Meteorological Service
and managed to persuade them
to provide certain key data
from the most westerly weather station
in the British Isles,
Black Sod Lighthouse.
On the night of June 5th,
Stagg saw the barometer rising
and he realized
a window of opportunity was opening.
He informed Eisenhower,
and from the command room
at Southwick House,
the Commander in Chief assessed
the improving weather conditions
predicted by Stagg
and issued his famous order.
"Okay, let's go."
[piano music plays]
♪ I'm haunted by you ♪
[indistinct]
♪ I'm haunted by you ♪
[male reader 9] Audio file,
Major George Chambers.
"We were going over an American
landing craft infantry, LCL's,
and who should come along
but Winston Churchill, Ernie Bevin,
Field Marshall Smuts,
and I can't remember who else.
Churchill with his great big cigar.
He passed with tears
running down his cheeks.
God bless you, boys.
God bless you, boys.
And he walked on smoking his cigar.
We thought, my God, what are we up to?
What are we in for?"
[Thomas] From the fifth to the sixth
of June, between 11:30 p.m.
and 05:00 a.m.,
more than 1000 British bombers
relentlessly pounded ten coastal barriers
between Cherbourg and Le Havre.
At dawn, 1527 American bombers
started targeting beaches
between Le Havre and La Vire.
That morning, the rail
and road junctions were hit heavily too.
Caen, Flers, Condé-sur-Noireau
and Lisieux disappeared into flames.
[somber music plays]
The first of many casualties to occur
on that most fateful of days.
The two U.S. Air Force
B-26 Marauder aircraft,
which collided
with one another in mid-air.
Both went down, one of which crashed
right here in Ashburnham Park.
This is the crater left behind
by the impact
and the exploding bombs
on board.
You can still find bits
of debris scattered around the area.
And of the two crews,
there was only one survivor.
Lieutenant Tommy Potts.
[male reader 10] Letter Lieutenant
Tommy Potts to his parents.
"That day was a very
ill-eventful day for me.
My life was saved only by a parachute.
I was released from hospital
and can assure you that I am okay.
There is no need to worry.
I shall be flying
in three to four days again.
I can't explain what happened
and all that,
but I was the only one to survive."
[Thomas] The French resistance fighters
were also prepared for action
and ready to help the Allies
in the liberation of Normandy.
No doubt some of which may have spent time
with my grandparents in Sussex.
That night,
nearly 210 coded personal messages
were broadcast on the BBC
that called them into action.
For example: "the dice are on the mat"
which meant they
had to implement the Green plan,
which was the sabotage of Railways
or "It's hot in Suez",
which meant the outbreak
of guerrilla warfare against the Germans.
The Normandy resistance reacted
with sabotage by blowing up
dozens of railways
and cutting German telephone wires.
[somber music plays]
-[airoplane engines roaring]
-[bombs exploding]
[male reader 11] A letter
of Major Rodney Maude,
written to his mum.
"My dear Mum, you certainly won't get this
letter until after the event, as it were,
but I hope it won't be delayed too long.
I am writing this on-board the ship
in which we go across.
At the moment, of course, we are at anchor
off the coast of England,
surrounded by
a great many other ships and craft.
We embarked yesterday afternoon.
We had lunch in camp
and then got into buses and drove
very slowly down to the harbor.
The men were all very cheerful,
cracking jokes and cheering every girl
we passed on the way.
You would never have dreamed,
except from the amount of equipment
we were carrying,
that we were not going
to another exercise.
I must say I didn't feel
any difference myself."
A letter from W. Cutler,
Able seaman, to his fiancée, June 13.
"We saw a sight during the first evening
that was unbelievable.
The airborne came over
and it is utterly impossible
for me to describe our feelings
when we saw them.
From one horizon to the other,
that is as far as the eye can see,
the sky was blacked out by transports
and gliders.
There were hundreds beside
the fighter cover that accompanied them.
Never had anyone seen anything like it."
[Thomas] At the moment
of the first landings,
Field Marshal Rommel wasn't present.
He met with Hitler to speak
about the defense of the French coastline
against the English and he took advantage
of the moment
to celebrate his wife's birthday.
In his diary,
he wrote the following words.
[man reading in German]
Diary of Field Marshal Rommel.
5 until 8 June, 1944.
Fears of an invasion at this time
were relied a bit by the fact
that the tides are not favorable
for a few more days
and the fact that no aerial
reconnaissance gives an indication
that a landing is imminent.
The most urgent thing was to speak
to the Führer at the Obersalzberg
and to describe to him the extent of the
loss of men and material we would suffer
in the event of a landing,
and to send two more armored divisions,
an anti-aircraft corps
and a Nebelwerfer Brigade to Normandy.
[dramatic music plays]
[soldiers yelling]
[Thomas] When the day finally arrived
in the early hours of June 6th,
Allied forces launched the largest
combined naval,
air and land assault in history.
Nearly 7000 vessels, including
battleships, destroyers, minesweepers
and assault craft crossed
the English Channel
and landed more than 156,000 ground troops
across five Normandy beaches.
Ahead of the main invasion force
and in the early hours of June 6th,
soldiers were sent in by gliders to secure
key points such as Pegasus Bridge
and to take out the Merville Battery
and its 100-millimeter guns
that threatened Sword Beach.
In total, over 20,000 paratroopers
were dropped in behind enemy lines to help
facilitate the landing
of the main invading force.
They were supported and backed up
by 11,590 Allied aircraft.
This number completely overwhelmed
the German Luftwaffe.
This was the biggest
military operation ever.
[somber music plays]
[airoplane engine roars]
[piano music plays]
♪ The bright horses have broken free
From the fields ♪
♪ They are horses of love
Their manes full of fire ♪
♪ They are parting the cities
Those bright burning horses ♪
♪ And everyone is hiding
And no one makes a sound ♪
♪ And I'm by your side
And I'm holding your hand ♪
[airoplane engine roaring]
[Winston Churchill]
We shall fight in France.
We shall fight on the seas and oceans.
We shall fight with growing confidence
and growing strength in the air.
We shall defend our island,
whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds.
We shall fight in the fields
and in the streets.
We shall fight in the hills,
we shall never surrender.
And if, which I do not
for a moment believe,
this island or large part of it
was subjugated and starving,
then our Empire, beyond the seas,
armed and guarded by the British Fleet,
would carry on the struggle until,
in God's good time,
the New World,
with all its power and might,
steps forth to the rescue
and the liberation of the old.
I'm Thomas Brodie-Sangster.
And this is the home where
my great-grandparents once lived.
Bignor Manor.
My great-grandfather,
Major Anthony Bertram,
was a French-speaking officer
in the Secret Intelligence Service
during World War II.
This was his coat
that was passed down to me.
It still bears the marks
of where he received his medals
for his work during the war.
I thought it appropriate
to wear it today.
The first chapter in the story
of the liberation of Europe
is that of D-Day on June 6th, 1944.
On that day, the Allied armies attacked
the Germans in France,
five years after the Germans
had occupied it.
But the story of D-Day can be traced back
to the spring of 1940,
when hundreds of thousands
of British soldiers
had to escape from the beaches of Dunkirk.
Running for their lives
from the advancing Germans.
Perhaps it was the now-famous speeches
of Winston Churchill,
which helped rally the country
against the Germans.
The Hun is always either
at your throat or your feet.
Perhaps the motivation for D-Day stemmed
from the non-stop bombings of London
and of other cities across Britain,
which led to more
than 60,000 civilian deaths
and destroyed millions of homes.
Or maybe it began with the failed raid
on Dieppe in 1942.
This had been a crushing defeat
for the Allies,
who suffered over 3000 killed or wounded
and almost 2000 prisoners of war.
Or maybe it was the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor,
which not only forced the USA
into World War II,
but also created a strong united force
against the Axis powers
of Germany, Japan, and Italy.
[airoplane engines roaring]
[explosions]
Perhaps the seeds of liberation
could be traced back to the letters
exchanged between the newly Allied
world leaders of Joseph Stalin,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill.
Stalin wrote to Churchill explaining
that the Soviet Union
and the United Kingdom were allies against
the aggression of Hitler's Germany.
This is what he wrote.
[male reader 1] To me
the military situations
of the Soviet Union,
as well as of Great Britain
would be considerably improved
if there could be established
a front against Hitler
in Northwestern France
and in the North in the Arctic.
A front in Northern France not only could
divert Hitler's forces from the east,
but at the same time would make it
impossible for Hitler to invade Britain.
The establishment of the front
just mentioned
would be popular with the British Army
as well as the whole population
of Southern England."
[Thomas]
And that is exactly what happened.
In 1942, the preparations
for the biggest military landing
in history started.
Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers
were shipped to Southern England.
It was the so-called Friendly Invasion.
[female reader 1] From the diary
written by Anne Joseph, June 1944.
"From our garden, we were able to watch
all the preparations for D-Day,
as Portsmouth and Langston Harbours
filled with the requisite craft.
As time went by, we were subjected
to a Friendly Invasion:
that of the Americans,
who appeared to us as quite amazing.
All that gum chewing got most parents
in the neighborhood tut-tutting
and threatening their children
with a fate worse than death
if any of us ever dared to chew gum.
The Canadians, sporting maple leaves
on their uniforms,
were always greeted with a smile.
One evening we heard
more outward-bound planes than usual
from nearby airfields.
We watched in amazement
as the sky was filled
with countless planes hauling gliders."
It wasn't only U.S., Canadian,
and British troops involved.
No, there were troops that came in from
all around the world to help the Allies
in their fight against the Germans.
They were from Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian,
Czechoslovakian, Polish, French,
Australian, New Zealand, and even Greek.
This truly was a world war.
Just imagine all those
different nationalities,
different cultures, amassed here
in the city of Portsmouth
in the South of England.
[male reader 2] Letter from
Private Jack Womer to his wife.
"Dear Theresa,
just about everything in England
is rationed to support the war effort.
There are shortages of sugar, flavorings,
flour, spices, fruits, meats,
eggs, milk, butter, lard, gasoline,
clothing, soap,
razor blades
and practically everything else,
because these items are needed
to support the English troops.
The rationing and the stress of the war
has taken its toll on the English people.
I can see the stress in their faces
and feel it in the air.
Most of the citizens look half-starved
because of the lack of food."
[soldiers chanting]
[Thomas] This mix of different
nationalities, races, and backgrounds
led to tensions between the men.
It had largely to do
with the difference in pay.
A white U.S. soldier got paid twice that
of an African American soldier
and three times that of a British soldier.
But most of the tensions
came from the segregation
that existed within the U.S. Army.
Separation due to skin tone
was still very present
in all aspects of American culture,
whereas in Britain this was not the case.
The racism from the American GI's
was so shocking to the British public
that it would often lead to fights
breaking out.
And of course, the African Americans
would be the ones
that would receive
the punishments.
For example, a white soldier accused
of rape would receive a prison sentence,
whereas an African American
would be executed.
[male reader 3] Private Frank Rossier,
audio testimony.
"So, we played them at rugby
and actually beat them,
but they got their own back
and beat us a basketball.
Then came the order that we were not
to play with the Black Yanks.
The white Yanks had objected.
As a cosmopolitan Cockney used to playing
with Black children, Indian children,
Chinese, or whatever as a kid,
it was part of my life
and I couldn't believe my ears.
I was 18 and I thought: "That's stupid."
I still can't believe it today."
[Thomas] While the Allies were
in South of England
to prepare the attack on the Germans
in Normandy,
the Germans were building
what they called the Atlantic Wall,
a concrete defense line of bunkers,
guns and minefields.
It was built along the North Sea Coast,
from Norway over Denmark,
Holland and Belgium,
down to the Spanish border
near the South of France.
It was 5000 km long.
[piano music plays]
[Thomas] At the end of 1943,
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
was sent to the west to inspect
the Atlantic Wall.
Rommel, a decorated World War I veteran
who had been in command
of the German troops in Egypt and Tunisia,
where he earned the nickname Desert Fox,
was asked by Hitler to take care
of the threats coming in
from the west.
Rommel began by strengthening the wall
because he thought
that it was far from strong enough
to hold off an attack from the sea.
Although around 900 000 people worked
on the Atlantic Wall,
it was never finished.
[man reading in German]
Diary of Franz Gockel.
Rommel saw the bay
as an ideal landing spot
for a conquest from the sea:
around ten kilometers of fine sand
with four entrances to the inland,
over slightly rising valleys.
Rommel's last comment was:
This bay must be protected
as soon as possible
against landing attempts by the allies.
So we worked very quickly on establishing
fortifications in this section.
One of the construction crews
of the Todt organization from Dusseldorf,
composed of Frenchmen
and predominantly Moroccans,
built ring stands within a few weeks,
in addition to the existing structures,
also called "Tobruk",
for light machine guns.
They built two artillery bunkers,
for 7.5 cm guns,
two ring stands for light mortars
and machine guns
and a group shelter
and an observation post for the artillery.
My great-grandfather offered up
his own family home
to be used as a safe house
for French resistance agents,
who would be secretly flown in from France
to receive further training
and information from him.
His wife, my great-grandma
Barbara Bertram,
became a clandestine housemother
to these men
who had passed through her home
every month.
Extracts of the diary of Barbara Bertram,
my grandmother.
"It must be awful to know you're going
to be tortured if you're caught.
I wonder more don't kill themselves.
I hate having to sew poison
into their cuffs.
It feels almost as if I was helping
to murder them.
Once a man arrived
who was suspected of being a double agent
and Tony had to stay up all night
questioning him.
That was very uncomfortable.
Of course, I was not told the result."
No one ever did find out the truth
about that particular agent.
However, rumor has it
that he was working both sides.
Regardless, I'm sure my great-grandmother
would have treated him very well,
as she was so famous for doing
with all the agents who visited her.
One of the more sinister tasks
that she had
was to sew cyanide capsules
into the cuffs of the men,
so that if captured, they at least
had the option to not be tortured.
Now, these missions
meant that the French resistance
were well informed
and prepared for the events of D-Day,
which in turn led to the success
of Operation Overlord.
The diary of Barbara Bertram.
"As soon as they were indoors,
we gave them a drink
and then we had reception pie.
When and why it came
to be known as reception pie,
I don't remember,
but it was also known in France too,
and people on arrival would ask me:
"What have we got for reception pie,
Madam Barbara?"
-[slow music playing]
-[airoplane engine roaring]
These unique aircraft
were specially painted in black
as to match that of the night sky.
A long-range fuel tank was added
underneath the fuselage
and all the armament was removed
from the rear to save weight
and to make space for the agents.
And they fitted this little ladder
on the side for easy access.
Obviously, the pilot goes upfront,
but the procedure for getting in the rear
was that the agent that arrived
would have to hand his bag down
to the agent waiting to receive it,
and then he would hand his bag
back to him and then they would swap out.
It sounds very straightforward
and obvious,
but things often went wrong,
and this is an illustration
of when it does.
During the preparations for D-Day,
hundreds of resistance agents
departed Bignor Manor
and were flown in
behind enemy lines by very brave pilots
who used nothing more than the light
of a full moon to guide them.
Now, for this covert of operations,
this is the machine they chose to use.
The Westland Lysander, also known as
"the spy taxi" for obvious reasons
and affectionately known as Lizzy
by those who flew it.
The idea was that the liberation
was going to happen
on the French or Belgian coasts.
The Allies used Spitfires fitted
with cameras to photograph
the landing beaches and defenses.
One of the most important pilots
was the Belgian engineer, Hugo Van Kuyck,
who joined the United States Army
after Pearl Harbor.
From his airplane, he took pictures
of the Normandy shores and sea currents.
The maps used on D-Day were based
on Van Kuyck's pictures,
and he also advised the military
commanders to set foot
on the beaches during the low tide.
[male reader 4] Letter to
Major H. an Kuyck, Intelligence Division,
from the Naval Commander,
Western Task Force.
"The attached letter
from the Naval Commander,
Western Task Force, is forwarded
with great pleasure.
The importance of the work performed
by you cannot be underestimated.
The successful completion of our mission
in this Theater
depends upon the exactness
and accuracy
of information furnished
to the higher headquarters.
I commend you for your superior
performance of duty.
Signed, C.R. Moore, Major General,
US Army, Chief Engineer."
And when you study these maps,
you see every feature is marked out.
Even the smallest flooded ditch
is present.
On top of all
of the reconnaissance photographs,
The BBC launched a contest
asking the British public
to send in any holiday pictures
they may have of the French Coast,
so the Intelligence Service
could piece together information
about the Normandy coastline as possible.
[man reading in German]
Letter from Erwin Rommel to his wife Lu,
April 27, 1944.
It looks like the British and Americans
are doing us the favor
of leaving us alone for a while.
This will be invaluable
to our coastal defences,
as we are now getting stronger every day,
at least on the ground,
although not yet in the air.
But even that will eventually change
to our benefit.
My little dog is very affectionate
and loves sweets.
He's sleeping in my room now.
Guernsey, Jersey, and Alderney
are three islands situated
in between France and Britain that fell
into German hands during the war.
Hitler was very pleased
that the Channel Islands
were under German control.
He referred to them
as his British conquest.
As part of the Atlantic Wall,
Organization Todt constructed
a massive number
of bunkers and tunnels on the islands.
As Rommel was convinced the Allies
were going to attack from the air,
minefields and booby traps were installed,
and he noted in his diary that a division
had been placed for 300,000 stalks
in the ground to deter airborne landings.
These were called "Rommel's asparaguses".
It was a system of wire-braced poles
up to two meters in height,
and most of them were laced with mines
and other booby traps.
Rommel also flooded big parts of Normandy
specifically to hinder
the landing of gliders,
and covered the Normandy beaches
with Czech hedgehogs, tetrahedrons,
nutcracker mines and Belgian gates,
and so on.
Bletchley Park.
Probably the most important institution
when it came to information gathering.
This is the place where the seemingly
impenetrable communication code
used by the German Enigma machine
were broken.
Alan Turing and his team used
a device called "The Bombe".
The far more complex Lorenz-code
was also deciphered here,
but using a different machine
called "Colossus".
This was considered to be a proto-computer
and far ahead of its time.
By '43, Bletchley had developed
a small community
of specialist cryptanalysts into a vast,
complex global intelligence factory
where about 8000 people worked,
the majority of which were women.
One of the incredible parts
of this operation
was that nobody knew about it.
None of the workers there would
speak to anyone
about what was really going on.
They didn't even talk to each other.
The Bombe code-breaking machine
was hugely important
to Operation Overlord.
It broke the code of German High Command,
as well as helped identify the locations
of German U-boats
and identified new secret weapons
that were in development,
such as rocket-powered V-weapons,
jet-powered aircraft and,
most alarming of all, atomic research.
The bombe machine was developed
by Alan Turing
and Gordon Welshman to help speed up
the code-breaking process,
so that by the time they
were decoded,
they were still operationally relevant.
It got its name from a previous machine
by the Polish Cipher Bureau called Bomba.
Alan Turing,
who was a key part of the team that was
at the basis of the Bombe machine,
was arrested and convicted in 1952
of homosexual acts.
He could choose between
an experimental castration
over the course of one year
or imprisonment.
He chose the first,
and in 1954 he was found dead.
Next to him lay an apple
laced with cyanide.
[instrumental music playing]
[ghostly war men yelling]
Welcome to Tyneham.
There were a few villages
just like this one
where the residents were asked
to leave their homes
so that soldiers could use them to train
in the art of house to house combat
and develop the skills needed
for urban warfare.
The villagers, they were promised
to return to their homes after the war,
but sadly, this promise was never kept.
And this is what remains.
[male reader 5]
Letter from the government,
written by C.H. Miller, Major General,
I/C Administration, Southern Command.
"The government appreciates
that this is no small sacrifice
which you are asked to make,
but they are sure that you will
give this further help
towards winning the war
with a good heart."
[male reader 6] Private Morton D. Elevitch
to his mom.
" This week they are teaching us to kill.
Now you probably looked away
and shuddered.
Well, Mom, I don't like the idea either,
but we all know it's for our own good.
The most strenuous work we do takes place
as we stand in one place:
Bayonet drill.
We lunge about it in definitive movements
and are required to growl,
grimace and look
at each other with hate.
Five hundred of us dance about screaming,
shouting and snarling.
They teach us how to withdraw
in a certain manner, too.
Because steel sticks to warm human flesh."
[upbeat vocal music plays]
[Thomas] During the war, many commodities
simply weren't available.
This meant people had to make do
with what they had.
The women of Britain came up
with a genius way
of dealing
with the lack of nylon stockings.
They learned that if they stained
their legs using gravy granules
and drew a seam line up the back, it would
create the desired effect of stockings.
[vocal music continues]
[Thomas] At the Tehran conference
in November of 1943,
Roosevelt and Churchill promised Stalin
that they would open
the long-delayed second front in May 1944.
In the end, this was postponed
until June of that year.
[piano music plays]
Air superiority was a vital element
in the buildup to June 6th.
Big Week was a sequence of raids
by the United States Army Air Force
and the RAF Bomber Command.
From the 20th to 25th February 1942,
as part of the European strategic
bombing campaign against Nazi Germany.
They dropped many
thousands of tons of bombs
on the main German aircraft industries
in Augsburg.
Almost a quarter of the city
was destroyed.
However, miraculously,
the production was completely unaffected.
Under Albert Speer's order, the damage
was repaired in a few weeks.
He even managed
to double aircraft production.
Seventy years later, in 2016,
fifty thousand people were asked
to leave their homes
while large World War II bombs
were removed.
The Luftwaffe's biggest problem
was that they had to fight on three fronts
with an ever dwindling fuel supply.
This meant that they had to downsize
the training regime of the new pilots.
Rookie pilots were rushed into combat
after only receiving 160 hours
of flight training.
This compared to the 400 hours
of the U.S. Air Force
and the 360 for the RAF.
[machine gun blasting]
[Thomas] At the time,
there was a sarcastic German saying:
"If you see a plane during the day,
it's the Americans.
If you see a plane at night,
it's the British.
If you don't see a plane at all,
it's the Luftwaffe."
"Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress,
Consolidated B-24 Liberator,
Lockheed P-38 Lightning,
Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, P-51 Mustang,
Glen Martin B-26 Marauder,
Havilland Mosquito."
[man reading in German]
A letter from Private Theodor Werry.
Yesterday I took two wounded men
and a doctor with me.
The two are badly injured
by an attack by a low-flying aircraft.
The cities in the area are
also heavily bombed
and it seems the English and Americans
don't care in the least
that our units are mostly
off the main roads
and they hit the poor French
so much harder.
Let's hope that this war will end soon.
[Thomas] After the bombing
and the play from the Allies,
the Germans understood that an attack
would take place any day now.
Somehow, they presumed
it was going to happen
on the Normandy or the Belgian coastline.
They just didn't know exactly when.
But the Allies made great efforts to pull
the wool over the eyes of their enemy.
Operation Bodyguard
was designed to mislead the Germans
during the early hours of the invasion.
Planning for Operation Bodyguard
didn't even begin
until Normandy had been selected
as the landing site.
Operation Bodyguard consisted
of five different operations.
The most known and probably most important
was Operation Fortitude,
which was designed to convince
the German leadership
that there would be not one,
but two landings,
namely Norway and Calais in France.
This would force the Germans
to divide their troops
over several possible landing sites.
Fortitude North was aimed
at creating the impression
that the Allies wanted to invade Norway.
To this end, a fictional Fourth Army
was established in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Under Fortitude South
a false First United States Army Group
was set up,
allegedly under the command
of General George Patton himself.
This completely fictitious army
was based in the South of England.
False radio signals
from non-existent army units
were repeatedly transmitted from Kent
to make the Germans think
that there were troops there.
Dummy tanks and airplanes
were popped up in fields,
as well as cardboard landing craft
which were moored up
in local rivers and harbours
in the hopes that they would be
seen by the German air force.
But there was more.
The Allies used German prisoner
General Hans Cramer to create a real hoax.
They changed road signs
and drove him through Portsmouth,
making the German officer believe
that they were in Dover.
He was even invited to a dinner
in his honor with General Patton.
When General Cramer was later exchanged,
he told Rommel
that the Southeast of England
was crowded with troops
and they were getting ready
for an invasion
which was going to be
launched from Dover.
[somber music plays]
The Germans may have constructed
their Atlantic Wall
and amassed a large number of troops
in Northern France
in anticipation of an invasion, however,
German High Command
could not agree on how to best
counter an Allied attack from the sea.
Field Marshal Rommel wanted to fight
them off on the beaches.
As General Von Schweppenburg thought it
best to allow the Allies to land
and then engage them
in the areas behind the beachhead.
Operation Bodyguard
was helped by several double agents
who fed false information to the Germans.
The most crucial one was Garbo.
Garbo, this is the code name
for the Spanish spy Joan Pujol Garcia.
He was not your stereotypical 007
sort of spy.
He was a small, balding,
unassuming sort of man,
but he completely fooled the Germans.
Pujol decided to put together
a group of fictional agents
to help him deceive the Germans.
He gave these non-existent individuals
missions, gave them a backstory, a family,
to make them as credible as possible.
He even went as far as
to have some of paid
and even killed by the German Abwehr.
In January 1944,
the Germans told Pujol that they were
expecting an invasion of Western Europe
and asked him
to gather information about it.
From then on, he sent more than
500 radio messages until D-Day,
trying to mislead the Germans
into giving them the idea
that the Allies would land in Calais.
[male reader 7] Audiofile,
Corporal Reginald Spittles.
"We had to go and see Monty
to give us a pep talk.
We was at Rudston village
and they lorried us over to this area.
He finished off by saying
that we would be going on to Germany.
"It would be just like cricket," he said.
"We're going to knock them for six."
and a little voice behind me said:
"I hope the buggers know this."
[Thomas] Montgomery's rivalry
with Rommel had such an impact on him
that he had a spaniel named Rommel
and a fox terrier named Hitler.
General Montgomery jotted down his plans
for D-Day on this piece of paper here
and presented it here
in this very building.
He finishes here with "simplicity".
"Simplicity is the key to success."
In his presentation, Montgomery emphasized
that the Allies must quickly move forward
and keep the initiative.
He stressed that the main D-Day objective
for the Second British Army
was to take Caen,
so that they could establish a base there
to house troops and launch operations
from that point.
He said that the army must
move quickly to gain control
of the Caen-Falaise corridor
in order to control the battle.
A slow, safe advance
would only give Rommel
the time that he needed to reinforce.
[man reading in German]
Diary of Franz Gockel.
There definitely have been hours
when no one thought about the war.
Mostly when the sun set over the sea.
A beautiful sight
that made you forget the war.
But the news from home
brought us back to reality,
and with all the more force,
as the war raged on violently,
not only on the fronts, but also at home.
[slow instrumental music plays]
One plus side to war is that it leads
to great innovation,
and innovation is key when it
comes to successful warfare.
The sandy beaches of Normandy
were very much unknown territory.
Had the Germans mined it?
How are the Allies going to deal
with all the defensive obstacles
that had been put in place?
And what about the effects of seawater
on all the pieces of machinery
that had to get ashore?
This is the fearsome
Churchill Crocodile tank.
It was fitted with a flamethrower
at the front,
capable of reaching 90 meters.
[fire blasting]
[explosions]
Among the many new armoured vehicles
were Hobart's Funnies.
Major General Percy Hobart
had modified existing tanks
into swimming Duplex-Drive Sherman tanks,
bridging tanks,
flamethrower Crocodile tanks, flail tanks
with a revolving drum of chains
that would flail the ground
and explode mines.
[somber music plays]
Look at this giant.
This enormous floating platform
was just one section
of a massive mobile harbor
known as the Mulberry Harbour.
Now, this section broke away in the storms
of June 5th, 1944,
just one day before D-Day.
You can imagine how puzzled
the locals must have been
when they saw this floating past.
Mulberry harbour was made
and used like a real harbour.
The idea was to have two of them in France
so that the Allies could bring
large amounts of equipment ashore
to supply and sustain the ground forces.
The assault on Dieppe in '42 proved
that they couldn't take over a harbour
without heavy bombardment,
which would destroy the facilities
needed to bring
such an enormous army ashore.
So the Allies decided to transport
two completely floating harbours
the size of Dover across
the English Channel.
It was an incredibly insane
yet genius plan
and was primordial in helping
D-Day succeed on every level.
[female reader 2] Betty Tabb,
Civilian, Slapton, Devon.
"There was a meeting called then
in the village hall and that confirmed
that there was going to be an evacuation
of the area for the American training.
My parents just couldn't believe it.
I mean, mom just said: "well, no,
it's not going to happen because it can't.
What are we going to do?"
[somber music plays]
[waves crashing ashore]
[male reader 8]
Diary of Lieutenants Downes.
"Operation Tiger proved
to be a major disaster.
Our ships were traveling
without escort ships,
even though German torpedo boats
were known to be lurking in the area.
These E-boats were very fast,
capable of speeds up to 50 knots,
while the LST's could
reach no more than 14 knots maximum.
Around midnight, the Germans spotted
our ships, attacked them,
sank LST 507
and damaged several others.
We were told of this tragedy
in detail afterwards,
but with threats of court-martial
if we uttered a word about it
to the civilians during our shore leave.
That night, 946 American soldiers
and sailors were reported
missing or killed."
[Thomas] The attack on the coastline took
place on the morning of the 27th April
and was marked by an incident
involving friendly fire.
Eisenhower felt
the men must be hardened
by exposure to real battle conditions,
some of the landing ships were delayed,
so they decided to postpone the landing.
A large number of landing crafts
didn't receive this message
and arrived on the beach
at the original scheduled time.
These men came under heavy fire
and rumors circulated
that around 450 men were killed.
As a result of the tragedy
that was Exercise Tiger,
many lives were lost,
but many lessons learnt.
The Allies made a few changes
in preparation for the D-Day landings,
these included
standardizing radio frequencies,
providing better life-vest training
for the landing troops,
and a plan was made for small boats
to pick up any floating survivors.
[upbeat music plays]
[Thomas] On the 27th May,
the Secret Service MI5
and the Allied commanders
nearly had a heart attack
when they saw the Daily Telegraph
crossword section.
No less than three words directly related
to D-Day were used in this section.
Utah, Omaha, and Overlord were
all answers required to solve the puzzle.
The composer of this crossword,
Leonard Dawe,
who was the headmaster
of the Strand School in Surrey,
received a visit by MI5 personnel
who concluded that it was nothing
more than an unfortunate coincidence.
U.S. and Canadian troops
preparing for D-Day
were camped out close to this school
and the local schoolboys would
regularly mix with the soldiers.
It was during one of these moments
that a boy named Ronald French
overheard troops using code words,
and as headmaster Dawe
would often invite his pupils
to fill in his blank crossword
with any words that came to mind,
Ronald gave him the words
that he had just overheard.
But these code words were so secret
that it is puzzling any ordinary
infantry soldier would even know of them.
The crossword may have been solved,
but this in itself remains
one of the most puzzling mysteries
of D-Day that will never be solved.
[man reading in German]
Diary of Franz Gockel.
Late May, news came that troops
were embarking in southern England.
For us, however,
the days went on as before:
holding the fort, guarding the
weapons and expanding positions.
However, measures have been taken
to be more on alert.
[Thomas] The white stripes painted
on the wings of the Allied aircraft
were there to reduce the chances
of being attacked by friendly fire forces
during the Normandy landings.
A small-scale test exercise was flown over
the Overlord invasion fleet
on the 1st June,
to accustom the ships and crews
with the new markings.
[somber music plays]
The whole operation was led
in this very room
by the Supreme Commander
of the Allied Expeditionary Forces,
General Dwight Eisenhower
and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsey
and Air Marshall Trafford Leigh-Mallory.
Churchill and De Gaulle also came here
just a few days before D-Day.
It is said that Churchill
wished to join his troops at sea
so that he could witness
the landings for himself,
from onboard HMS Belfast,
and that it took King George himself
to stop him
by insisting that if Churchill were to go,
then he would have to go as well.
And of course,
that would never be allowed.
So, unfortunately, Churchill was denied
his front row seats of his invasion.
[somber music plays]
Even down here in this subterranean level
of Southwick House,
it would have been full of people
feverishly working and planning
in anticipation of D-Day.
The prime consideration for giving
the go-ahead for D-Day was the weather.
If it was too stormy
and the sea too rough,
it would be impossible to launch.
The Allies needed up-to-date observations
and barometric readings
from as far west as possible.
So ideally,
from the West Coast of Ireland.
James Stagg, the Allies'
senior weather forecaster,
established communications
with the Irish Meteorological Service
and managed to persuade them
to provide certain key data
from the most westerly weather station
in the British Isles,
Black Sod Lighthouse.
On the night of June 5th,
Stagg saw the barometer rising
and he realized
a window of opportunity was opening.
He informed Eisenhower,
and from the command room
at Southwick House,
the Commander in Chief assessed
the improving weather conditions
predicted by Stagg
and issued his famous order.
"Okay, let's go."
[piano music plays]
♪ I'm haunted by you ♪
[indistinct]
♪ I'm haunted by you ♪
[male reader 9] Audio file,
Major George Chambers.
"We were going over an American
landing craft infantry, LCL's,
and who should come along
but Winston Churchill, Ernie Bevin,
Field Marshall Smuts,
and I can't remember who else.
Churchill with his great big cigar.
He passed with tears
running down his cheeks.
God bless you, boys.
God bless you, boys.
And he walked on smoking his cigar.
We thought, my God, what are we up to?
What are we in for?"
[Thomas] From the fifth to the sixth
of June, between 11:30 p.m.
and 05:00 a.m.,
more than 1000 British bombers
relentlessly pounded ten coastal barriers
between Cherbourg and Le Havre.
At dawn, 1527 American bombers
started targeting beaches
between Le Havre and La Vire.
That morning, the rail
and road junctions were hit heavily too.
Caen, Flers, Condé-sur-Noireau
and Lisieux disappeared into flames.
[somber music plays]
The first of many casualties to occur
on that most fateful of days.
The two U.S. Air Force
B-26 Marauder aircraft,
which collided
with one another in mid-air.
Both went down, one of which crashed
right here in Ashburnham Park.
This is the crater left behind
by the impact
and the exploding bombs
on board.
You can still find bits
of debris scattered around the area.
And of the two crews,
there was only one survivor.
Lieutenant Tommy Potts.
[male reader 10] Letter Lieutenant
Tommy Potts to his parents.
"That day was a very
ill-eventful day for me.
My life was saved only by a parachute.
I was released from hospital
and can assure you that I am okay.
There is no need to worry.
I shall be flying
in three to four days again.
I can't explain what happened
and all that,
but I was the only one to survive."
[Thomas] The French resistance fighters
were also prepared for action
and ready to help the Allies
in the liberation of Normandy.
No doubt some of which may have spent time
with my grandparents in Sussex.
That night,
nearly 210 coded personal messages
were broadcast on the BBC
that called them into action.
For example: "the dice are on the mat"
which meant they
had to implement the Green plan,
which was the sabotage of Railways
or "It's hot in Suez",
which meant the outbreak
of guerrilla warfare against the Germans.
The Normandy resistance reacted
with sabotage by blowing up
dozens of railways
and cutting German telephone wires.
[somber music plays]
-[airoplane engines roaring]
-[bombs exploding]
[male reader 11] A letter
of Major Rodney Maude,
written to his mum.
"My dear Mum, you certainly won't get this
letter until after the event, as it were,
but I hope it won't be delayed too long.
I am writing this on-board the ship
in which we go across.
At the moment, of course, we are at anchor
off the coast of England,
surrounded by
a great many other ships and craft.
We embarked yesterday afternoon.
We had lunch in camp
and then got into buses and drove
very slowly down to the harbor.
The men were all very cheerful,
cracking jokes and cheering every girl
we passed on the way.
You would never have dreamed,
except from the amount of equipment
we were carrying,
that we were not going
to another exercise.
I must say I didn't feel
any difference myself."
A letter from W. Cutler,
Able seaman, to his fiancée, June 13.
"We saw a sight during the first evening
that was unbelievable.
The airborne came over
and it is utterly impossible
for me to describe our feelings
when we saw them.
From one horizon to the other,
that is as far as the eye can see,
the sky was blacked out by transports
and gliders.
There were hundreds beside
the fighter cover that accompanied them.
Never had anyone seen anything like it."
[Thomas] At the moment
of the first landings,
Field Marshal Rommel wasn't present.
He met with Hitler to speak
about the defense of the French coastline
against the English and he took advantage
of the moment
to celebrate his wife's birthday.
In his diary,
he wrote the following words.
[man reading in German]
Diary of Field Marshal Rommel.
5 until 8 June, 1944.
Fears of an invasion at this time
were relied a bit by the fact
that the tides are not favorable
for a few more days
and the fact that no aerial
reconnaissance gives an indication
that a landing is imminent.
The most urgent thing was to speak
to the Führer at the Obersalzberg
and to describe to him the extent of the
loss of men and material we would suffer
in the event of a landing,
and to send two more armored divisions,
an anti-aircraft corps
and a Nebelwerfer Brigade to Normandy.
[dramatic music plays]
[soldiers yelling]
[Thomas] When the day finally arrived
in the early hours of June 6th,
Allied forces launched the largest
combined naval,
air and land assault in history.
Nearly 7000 vessels, including
battleships, destroyers, minesweepers
and assault craft crossed
the English Channel
and landed more than 156,000 ground troops
across five Normandy beaches.
Ahead of the main invasion force
and in the early hours of June 6th,
soldiers were sent in by gliders to secure
key points such as Pegasus Bridge
and to take out the Merville Battery
and its 100-millimeter guns
that threatened Sword Beach.
In total, over 20,000 paratroopers
were dropped in behind enemy lines to help
facilitate the landing
of the main invading force.
They were supported and backed up
by 11,590 Allied aircraft.
This number completely overwhelmed
the German Luftwaffe.
This was the biggest
military operation ever.
[somber music plays]
[airoplane engine roars]
[piano music plays]