♪ [theme song plays] ♪
[narrator] 1944. And on the Eastern Front,
Hitler's forces were being pushed
back towards the German border.
[explosions and gunfire]
But Germany was about to face a new threat.
In the west, Allied forces have been preparing
for months to open a new front in Northwest France.
Training for it was well underway.
But it was an attack that Hitler had long been expecting.
His problem was knowing when
and above all where it would come?
The stage was set for one of the greatest
battles of World War II, D-Day.
The Allied landings along the Normandy coast of France.
Since the early years of the war
Britain's prime minister, Winston Churchill,
had always been certain that at some point
an Allied invasion of Northern Europe would be necessary.
The only questions were when, where, and how?
To test the waters, British forces had already
mounted a number of practice operations.
[explosions]
In December of 1941, British commanders raided
the Vaagso islands off the coast of Nazi occupied north.
[explosions and gunfire]
It was an attempt to probe German defences
and tie down Hitler's troops in the north.
A fish oil factory and coastal defences
were blown up before the commanders withdrew.
Eight months later, Canadian and British troops
were sent in to mount a more ambitious raid
on the French port of Dieppe.
It too was designed to test the defences
and also to provide combat experience for the Canadians.
But this time it was a catastrophe.
[explosions]
As the landing craft approached the main beach
they were met by withering fire.
[explosions and gunfire]
Those troops that made it ashore
were immediately pinned down.
Behind them, the supporting tanks
became bogged down in the shingle.
Few managed to scale the sea wall.
Over 3,000 Allied soldiers were killed or taken prisoner.
Britain had learnt an important lesson,
never attempt a direct assault
on a German occupied port.
Equally importantly, the Dieppe disaster
reinforced the British view that an
invasion of Europe could not be rushed.
Churchill understood it would require careful planning.
Eventually in April 1943, at an Allied conference in Washington
Churchill and the U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt,
agreed upon a date.
D-Day, or Operation Overlord as the seaborne
invasion of France was formerly called,
would take place in the summer of 1944.
But by now the Germans were preparing for it in earnest.
Since the winter of 1941 they had
been building an Atlantic Wall.
It was a massive series of fortifications
running along the European coast
from Denmark to the Spanish border.
Gun emplacements have been
constructed at likely landing sites.
Beaches have been mined and covered in barbed wire.
Obstacles have been placed in
strategic places to block landing craft.
Hitler had boasted, "I am the greatest
builder of fortifications of all time."
In the summer of 1942, in the wake of the Dieppe attack,
work on the Atlantic Wall had been stepped up.
Hitler had also ordered an increase
in troop numbers in the region.
The German overall commander in the west,
Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt,
had been given 15 further divisions.
But the Western European coast
stretched for some 2,000 miles.
He didn't have the numbers to man the entire length.
Von Rundstedt faced a difficult decision:
Where should he position his over-stretched
forces to maximize their effect?
The question lead to bitter arguments
inside the German leadership.
Von Rundstedt proposed holding a large force
of panzers in reserve northwest of Paris.
He could then send it in against an invasion
once he knew where it was happening.
But the hugely respected field marshal, Erwin Rommel,
commander of the troops covering the sector
from Holland, along the French coast,
to the Loire had a different view.
Rommel's concern was Allied air power.
He'd seen it first hand when he'd fought the British
in North Africa and it had left a profound impression.
He feared that any counterattack would
be broken up by Allied aircraft long
before it could go into action.
Rommel had also inspected Hitler's Atlantic Wall
and found much of it wanting.
It had forced him to the conclusion that the best
place to position the panzers was as close as
possible to the most likely landing sites.
That way an invasion could be immediately
pushed back before it got a foothold.
Hitler compromised.
Rundstedt was given a small force he could
hold in reserve, though Hitler himself would have
the final say as to when it could be used.
The rest of the additional troops were scattered
along the entire Atlantic Seaboard,
in accordance with Rommel's wishes.
[seagulls cawing]
It would turn out to be the worst of all the solutions.
There were neither enough reserves,
nor enough tanks near the coast.
But in the autumn of 1943, none of this was clear.
In Britain the Allied planners were also
grappling with the problem of location.
Where was the best place to land?
Their chief planner, General Frederick Morgan,
quickly realised there were two principle options,
the Pas de Calais and Normandy.
The Pas de Calais was clearly the favourite.
It offered the shortest sea crossing.
And it offered the shortest and most direct way to Germany.
But it was also the most obvious route
and Morgan was sure the Germans were expecting it.
So, he decided to wrong-foot them
Morgan would land in Normandy.
It was the beginning of a huge gamble on which the fate
of hundreds of thousands of soldiers would depend.
In the autumn of 1943, Allied photo reconnaissance
aircraft swept over the beaches of Northern France.
It was part of a huge planning operation,
for the seaborne invasion of Europe.
The fortifications of the Atlantic Wall
were monitored by the French Resistance.
Men crept ashore to collect sand samples
to test whether armoured vehicles could be landed.
Northern France became the most reconnoitred
coastline in the history of warfare.
It soon became clear, any landing
would need some kind of port facilities.
But the disaster at Dieppe had shown
that it was too dangerous to attempt
a direct assault on a German occupied port.
Britain's planners were forced to come up
with an ingenious alternative.
Giant, hollow, concrete boxes were constructed in Britain
that could later be towed to the French coast.
There they would be suck to form an artificial harbour.
They were known by their code name, Mulberries.
[seagulls cawing]
The Mulberries would be supplied with
fuel by a pipeline unwound from
giant reels and dropped on the seabed.
It would run for a hundred miles.
The pumping station on the Isle of Wight
was disguised as an ice cream parlour.
[shouting]
But the raid on Dieppe had also
revealed a second problem,
How to get the first wave of troops off the beaches
and through the German fortifications?
The man told to solve that question
was General Percy Hobart, one of the pioneers
of armoured warfare.
Hobart came up with a series of ingenious devices.
The troops called them "the Funnies".
They included such extraordinary machines
as flame throwers and floating tanks.
Flail tanks for clearing mines.
The bobbin for laying firm paths across sand of shingle.
An armoured ramp for climbing seawalls.
The fascine carrier for tackling ditches.
And the bridging tank for wider obstacles.
That left just one problem,
How to stop the Germans rushing in
overwhelming reinforcements before
the Allies had established a foothold.
The answer was to keep them guessing until the very
last moment, as to where the invasion would take place.
Operation Bodyguard was a massive
and complex deception campaign.
German double agents in Britain now began
sending back to Germany, huge amounts of
carefully coordinated false information.
This emphasised that the main landings
would be in the Pas de Calais, although,
a faint attack might be launched in Normandy.
To muddy the waters still further,
the Allied military created a fictitious army unit,
the so-called First U.S. Army Group or FUSAG.
It was stationed, very obviously, in Kent,
bang opposite the Pas de Calais.
The man in charge of it was a pistol toting
U.S. general, George Patton, who had been removed
from action in Sicily after slapping shell shocked soldiers.
Patton was rated by the Germans
as the Allies best attacking general.
Just the man they expected to command
the invasion of Western Europe.
[man] Basher-five-two, this is
basher-one-one on alpha.
[narrator] Radio transmissions mimic
the wireless traffic of an army.
For the benefit of any Luftwaffe reconnaissance
aircraft flying over Britain, the fields of Kent
were filled with inflatable tanks
and carefully faked track marks.
There were dummy aircraft made of wood and canvas.
Harbours along the Kent coast were
filled with dummy landing craft.
There were even troops, though these
were in reality, backup units.
In late 1943 the Allies appointed
U.S. general, Dwight Eisenhower,
as Supreme Allied Commander
for the invasion of Europe.
British general, Bernard Montgomery, would be
in overall command of the initial assault troops.
D-Day was fixed for the 5th of June 1944.
Two months before the landing,
Eisenhower launched an elaborate air offensive
to disrupt German links to the coast.
[missiles whistling]
[explosions]
Once again, it was carefully planned
to give the impression the Allies target
was the Pas de Calais region.
As the date of the invasion approached,
Allied troop numbers in England reached over two million.
They were supported by more than 3,000 tanks,
and 12,000 aircraft.
The Germans were well aware an invasion was imminent.
But they had been completely taken in by
the Allies phony preparations in Kent
and were convinced the most likely
landing spot was the Pas de Calais.
Everything seemed to be going the Allies' way.
The troops were briefed.
Then the weather turned against them.
Rain lashed down, visibility was poor,
and the channel was storming.
Nevertheless, on the 4th of June 1944
the assault troops boarded their landing ships
and the amount of more than 5,000 vessels set sail.
But the rain continued to lash down
and later that day the invasion had to be postponed.
The ships returned to port and the assault troops
faced a nerve shredding wait.
Early the next morning the military leadership met again.
The naval commanders were keen to go ahead.
But the air chiefs were doubtful.
They worried the visibility would still be
too poor to provide effective air support.
After a long silence Eisenhower looked up,
"Let's go." he said.
Operation Overlord, the greatest
seaborne invasion ever, was underway.
D-Day had begun.
At 1:15 in the morning of the 6th of June 1944
British aircraft towing gliders
arrived over the coast of Northern France.
Then the gliders were released
and plunged down to capture vital bridges
over the Caen Canal in Eastern Normandy.
The Allies had launched their great gamble
to invade Hitler's empire in Western Europe.
50 miles to the west, U.S. paratroops came
down around the village of Sainte-Mère-Église.
[gunfire]
There was a fierce firefight.
But three hours later the village was in U.S. hands.
One of the most crucial battles of
World War II was underway.
An hour later, horrified German sentries
along the Normandy coast saw a vast
armada appear out of the mist.
They had had no warning.
[bell ringing]
The Allied fleet had sailed undercover of darkness.
Moreover, Allied counter measures had confused
the German radar into believing the main
weight of the attack was approaching the French coast
further east at the Pas de Calais.
Allied warships off the Normandy coast now began
pounding the German defensive positions.
[explosions]
Wave after wave of aircraft swept overhead.
[explosions]
Undercover of the bombardment
assault troops headed for the shore.
But as they closed in German artillery
and machine guns opened fire.
A number of the landing craft were hit.
Others fell foul of underwater obstructions.
But at 6:30 in the morning the first
waves of troops hit the beaches.
[gunfire]
At the far western end the U.S. 4th Infantry Division
came ashore near, at what they called, Utah Beach.
Within two hours it was linking up with
the U.S. paratroopers who'd landed at Sainte-Mère-Église.
Next door at Omaha Beach it was more difficult.
The beach was a defenders dream,
with high cliffs and few ways inland.
As the U.S. 1st Infantry Division waited ashore
they were mowed down by German machine guns.
[gunfire]
To make matters worse,
the American's amphibious tanks were swamped.
The troops were trapped on the beach.
Disaster was looming.
But finally, a few of the soldiers
managed to scale the cliffs.
Against all the odds the Americans
hung on to the beachhead.
Further east, in the centre of the landing area,
Britain's 50th Infantry Division came ashore at Gold Beach.
They too met savage fire.
[gunfire]
But now the British deployed their Funnies.
The troops were soon moving inland.
At the adjoining landing spot, Juno Beach,
the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division
faced a similar situation.
Here too, Britain's Funnies were vital
in helping the troops off the beach.
Finally, on the far left flank at Sword Beach
the British 3rd Infantry Division
met only patchy resistance.
Within hours its commanders had linked up with
the glider-borne troops at the Caen Canal.
By early afternoon the Allies had
successfully established all of the beachheads.
The timing of the invasion had caught
the Germans completely by surprise.
They'd expected the Allies to wait
until the weather had cleared.
Rommel, the operational German commander for
the whole of the Northwest French coast,
had taken the opportunity of bad weather
to visit his family in Germany.
His immediate subordinate in Normandy and Brittany,
General Friedrich Dollmann, was over a hundred
miles away taking part in a war game exercise.
Only the overall German commander for
the whole of Western Europe, Field Marshal
Gerd Von Rundstedt, was at his HQ.
But he needed Hitler's permission to move
his panzer reserves to the battlefield.
However, Hitler was asleep
and his aides wouldn't wake him.
It wasn't until midday that the Fuehrer
finally learned about the invasion
but he didn't take it seriously.
He was still convinced the main
attack would come in the Pas de Calais.
Normandy, he believed, was just a fake.
Finally, in the late afternoon when the scale of
the invasion was becoming all too clear,
Hitler unleashed his reserves.
But they were too far away to provide immediate support.
Despite stubborn German resistance
the beachheads around Utah, Gold,
and Juno, and Sword were secure.
Only at Omaha was the situation more precarious.
Here German resistance had prevented
the U.S. troops moving more than a mile inland.
[gunfire]
By nightfall on the 6th of June over a hundred thousand
Allied troops had been landed in Normandy.
It had been an extraordinary feet of
planning, ingenuity, and courage.
The first day of the Allies great gamble had paid off.
But it was just the beginning,
now they had to build up, break out,
and push on into Europe.
As the second day dawned
on the greatest seaborne invasion ever attempted,
thousands of Allied troops had broken out of
their beachheads and were moving inland.
But they found the Normandy countryside hard going.
The patchwork of woodland and small fields provided
ideal terrain for German tanks and machine guns.
[explosions]
The Allies suffered heavy casualties.
Allied air power provided crucial support.
When von Rundstedt's panzer reinforcements arrived
they'd been so depleted by the air attacks that they
were unable to mount a major counterattack.
The German reinforcements were also hampered by
French Resistance fighters, operating behind German lines.
[gunfire]
They ambushed troop convoys and blew up bridges.
As a result the Das Reich SS-Panzer Division
took over two weeks to make a journey
which should have lasted a mere three days.
It's troops took out their fury on
the French civilian population.
The village of Oradour-sur-Glane
and it's 642 inhabitants were wiped out.
After four days of fighting all the Allied beachheads
were finally able to link up.
But they had still only managed
to penetrate 10 miles inland.
Eventually six days after the landing,
the British commander, General Montgomery,
launched a major assault on the strategically
important town of Caen.
The British 7th Armoured division,
the Desert Rats, advanced.
But it's spearhead ran into four German Tiger tanks.
The Allied Sherman tanks were completely outclassed.
Their guns were outranged and their shells
unable to penetrate the German armour.
They were particularly vulnerable because many ran on
petrol fuel and were liable to burst into flames when hit.
The Germans nicknamed the Sherman "the Ronson",
after the cigarette lighter or macabrely, "the Tommy Cooker".
In less than five minutes more than
10 British tanks were destroyed.
The attack on Caen stalled.
Outmatched by the German tanks,
the Allies relied on air power and artillery.
But it wasn't enough, the Desert Rats retreated.
Caen remained in German hands.
Meanwhile, further west, U.S. forces advanced on
the equally important port of Cherbourg.
It would take them nearly ten days to get close to them.
They weren't helped by the weather.
During the first week of the invasion
it had been relatively calm and supplies
and reinforcements had poured in through
the Mulberry artificial harbours.
But now the weather turned.
Gales swept the English Channel.
The U.S. Mulberry harbour at Omaha was destroyed.
The other Mulberry in the British sector was
badly damaged and put out of action for several days.
The flow of reinforcements slowed.
It meant the port of Cherbourg was
an even more vital objective.
As the U.S. forces now approached it
the German garrison resisted.
[gunfire]
There was fierce house to house fighting.
It would take the Allies a week to secure the city.
But the port had been trashed by the fleeing Germans.
It would take a further month before
it could be brought back into service.
Meanwhile, Montgomery launched another assault on Caen.
But the storms had turned the field into a sea of mud.
Low cloud meant air support was impossible.
To make matters worse, the newly arrived
elite German II SS Panzer Corps
was thrown into the defines of the city.
After four days the British were again forced to halt.
Then, as the clouds cleared,
nearly 500 Allied bombers devastated Caen.
British troops fought their way into the north suburbs.
But the ruins ideal defensive positions for the Germans.
Allied casualties mounted.
And after 48 hours the attack was, yet again, called off.
Three weeks later Montgomery tried for a fourth time.
The plan was to capture the remaining German strongholds
and then push on south, deeper into France.
After two more days of fighting the city was finally won.
The way now seemed open for the British tanks
to move south, deeper into France.
But the Germans were waiting with
their large force of panzers.
[gunfire]
The British advance stopped again.
The Americans in the west however,
were having an easier time.
The fighting around Caen had sucked in
the majority of German defenders.
As the American forces prepared to thrust further
into France, they faced only scattered opposition.
The scene was set for the Allied forces to breakout at last.
At 9:30 in the morning of the 25th of July 1944,
over 1,800 Allied aircraft carpet bombed a four mile
stretch of the German front line, south of Cherbourg.
It was the beginning of Operation Cobra,
the U.S. breakout into France.
The German defenders were stunned
by the size of the assault.
So too were some of the U.S. soldiers.
The plan had been for the bombers to fly in from the east,
parallel to the U.S. front line, to minimize
the risk of bombing American troops.
But most of the aircraft came in
over the top of the U.S. lines.
Bombs fell short.
Over a hundred U.S. troops were hit and killed.
Yet, despite the ferocity of the bombardment,
when the U.S. forces later picked
themselves up and moved forward,
they found to their astonishment substantial
numbers of German troops had survived.
The survivors mounted a stubborn resistance.
As fighting raged it looked as though the Americans
would fail to break through the German lines.
[explosions]
But then the German defences crumbled.
The next morning U.S. tanks broke through
and moved forward into open country.
There was now almost no German resistance left
and the Americans quickly pushed deeper into France.
The hill town of Coutances fell.
Then the crossroads town of Avranches.
As the Allies pressed forward they were helped
by change and confusion in the German high command.
At the beginning of July, three weeks after
the D-Day landings, Hitler dismissed
the German Commander-In-Chief, Field Marshal
Gerd von Rundstedt, for defeatism.
Von Rundstedt had made little attempt to hide his
belief when Germany faced an unwinnable struggle.
He was replaced by Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge,
fresh from the Eastern Front but with little
knowledge of Northwestern France.
Two weeks later, Rommel, the second most
senior German officer on the front was
severely injured when his staff car
was strafed by a British fighter.
Then, with the Nazi command already in confusion,
there was an assassination attempt on Hitler's life.
On July the 20th 1944, a disillusioned,
aristocratic war hero,
Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg,
planted a bomb in the planning hut at
Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia.
[explosion]
Four officers were killed,
but Hitler was sheltered by a heavy, solid oak
conference table and escaped with only minor injuries.
The plot was swiftly and brutally put down.
[speaking in foreign language]
Von Stauffenberg was shot and his
principal collaborators put on trial.
They would later be hanged.
Hitler put a brave face on and visited
some of the wounded in hospitals.
But it hardened still further
his distrust of his senior officers.
He would, despite his many earlier misjudgements,
demand even greater control over events on the battlefield.
Back in France, General George Patton,
back in charge of a real fighting force,
ordered his troops to fan out.
They took Rennes, Mayenne,
and headed for Le Mans.
They were now moving round behind
the German forces still battling it out with
the British and Canadians near Caen.
[explosions and gunfire]
With the Americans to their south and the British
to their north it seemed the German forces
in Normandy would be surrounded.
Hitler issued his usual order, that there
should be no retreat, but as the Allies squeezed in
on them the Germans began to flee.
They were remorselessly harried by
Allied aircraft and artillery.
[explosions]
The casualties were appalling.
Finally, on the 20th of August 1944, the Allied forces
moving in from both the north and south, met up.
The so called Falaise gap, named after
the nearby French village, had been closed.
Large numbers of Germans were trapped.
Over 10,000 more Germans caught
in the Allied pincer died.
A further 50,000 were taken prisoner.
The German Army in Western Europe was in chaos.
[cars honking]
Meanwhile, far to the south,
on the French Mediterranean coast near Caen,
there was a second Allied seaborne invasion.
U.S. troops came ashore virtually unopposed.
They were helped by paratroopers from the free French Army,
men who had escaped from German occupied
French territory in Europe and North Africa.
The landing had always been opposed by the British,
who regarded it as a diversion.
But the United States had long regarded it
as an essential part of clearing the Germans out of France.
[crowd cheering]
The troops were greeted by an ecstatic civilian population.
It was soon advancing rapidly up the Rhone valley.
Lyons was liberated on September the 3rd 1944.
10 days later they reached Dijon
and made contact with Patton's forces
advancing from Western France.
German units stationed across the region fled.
In barely three weeks of headlong advance
the Allied invasion of Europe had liberated most of France.
That left Paris, where French Resistance fighters
now rose up against the German occupation.
There seemed little to prevent the Allied onrush
from continuing to the German border.
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