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June 6, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #931

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters, number 931, if you can believe that.
	1931, if you can believe that.
	It is the 6th of June in the year 2024, which is exactly 80 years since the Allies invaded Europe, Bastion Europe, towards the end of World War II.
	And so today the podcast is going to be a bit different.
	Just a two man job and we're not going to have three different segments.
	We're just going to talk all about D-Day for the whole thing.
	So it's something a little bit different.
	And I am joined by Tim Davies.
	How are you, sir?
	Good, thank you.
	Brilliant.
	For anyone who doesn't know, which I can't believe they couldn't, you have got a history in the services.
	Yes, yes.
	20 years, I was a naval officer for five years, then an Air Force officer for 15, doing as a fast jet pilot on Tornado GL-4, based out of Lossiemouth, and then I instructed for about 10 years on various types of Hawk aircraft.
	And you have been in combat situations?
	Well, yeah, no one ever shot at me that I know about and I never shot at anyone else, hopefully.
	But, yeah, I did two tours of Iraq and a tour of Afghanistan, yeah.
	Right.
	OK, so it's a real pleasure, an honour and a pleasure, as always, to have you on.
	But today, I thought it was particularly apt to speak to somebody with a history in the services, because we're going to talk about one of the most intense days of the 20th century, certainly as far as the Western Allies were concerned.
	So DJ, the Earth has gone round the Sun 80 times since that day, that longest of days.
	So I just want to talk about, hopefully everyone out there won't mind it being a completely different format to usual, but you know if we're going to commemorate something I thought maybe let's let's do it properly.
	So I wanted to talk all about sort of the run-up to it, the preparation, the long wait and the day itself, not really too much after what happened on D-Day.
	So there's so much to say, I say this on Epochs a fair bit, there's so much you could say There's so many books written about it that even given an hour and 20 odd, we'll miss out a whole bit.
	So if there's someone out there that is particularly interested in this particular gun emplacement and action that happened there, and I don't even mention it, well, I can only apologise because there's so much to get through.
	So let's just dive straight in.
	No shilling or anything today.
	So, by summer of 1944, Everyone knew an Allied invasion was coming.
	In fact, the leaders of the Allies, Churchill and Roosevelt, had been promising Stalin for ages they're going to do it.
	It's what Stalin wanted more than anything.
	He was dying for the Allies to invade, to take pressure off the Eastern Front.
	And so, what, back in Casablanca, Churchill had met with them at Casablanca, and at Tehran in 43, and we'd always promised old Joe, Uncle Joe, that we was going to invade.
	But the timing of it, this is the first thing I wanted to talk about, the timing of it had to be really quite specific, because if we went too early, we're taking pressure off of Staling unnecessarily.
	Because, of course, even though the Soviets were our allies, we want the Soviets and the Nazis to wear each other down as much as possible.
	So we don't go too early, but we can't go too late because Stalin will end up with Stalin in Paris.
	Right.
	So the timing of it had to be just so.
	And anyway, the summer of 44 was when it was going to happen.
	But the actual specific timing of the day when it was going to happen was dictated largely by the weather.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, we'll be.
	Always.
	So the biggest sort of things to take into account was that the RAF wanted a dark night for the airborne troops, but for a bright moon to come up during that night, so that when the carriers and the gliders, the horses, dropped them in, it was dark, but once they were down, they had some moonlight.
	And it also needed to be a low tide for the landing crafts and things.
	And so there was only two, three, four days a month when you would get those conditions.
	And so in June of 1944, it was going to be the 5th, the 6th or the 7th of June were the only days when you would get that.
	Otherwise you'd have to wait until July.
	But there was really bad storms, some of the worst weather for 20 years in the channel at that point, so it was suboptimal.
	But you being a fast jet pilot, you know how weather is the be-all and end-all, right?
	Weather is everything, yeah.
	Yeah, I would have gone anyway because I'm a GR4 pilot, that's what we do.
	But no, you're absolutely right.
	There was a group captain called Stag, I believe, who was the guy eventually that turned around and said, it's supposed to be on the 5th of course.
	He turned around and went, can't go today because there's, I think there was storms lashing the beaches.
	The sea state was up.
	The sea state was still up actually on the morning of the invasion anyway, because a lot of the duplex drive tanks, the funnies that they put in, a lot of them sank on Omaha Beach, never reached the beach because it was six foot waves and they were only conditioned to one foot waves.
	So yeah, it's a hell of a call that you've got this group captain there that turns around.
	And Montgomery was, Livid with it.
	Absolutely livid.
	And it took the other commanders to go, calm down, it's just a delayed day.
	But yeah, he wants it to go.
	And it just shows, I think, personally, the power of the individuals, all the way through D-Day, it's about the individuals, that actually have enough weight to make tangible effect.
	And so he said, we've got a delayed day, and they did.
	Remember, the Air Force was actually airborne at the very end of the 5th anyway, from about 10 o'clock, because they did all the weather.
	The exploratory weather stuff.
	So they went in and looked at the medium level, high level cloud.
	They looked at the moon state, made sure that we could have those moons and everything.
	And then they came back and they were flying across the channel the whole time.
	And I think when the minesweeper was already out at that time, on the 5th, they were already out and they got brought back again.
	So yeah, absolutely.
	Everything was about the weather.
	Just before we carry on with D-Day, just a slight, quick, could a GR4 fly through almost any weather within reason?
	Yeah.
	If there was an electrical storm, you'd still just, it's fine, we'd just go.
	Yeah, I'd get hit by lightning over northern Iraq.
	Yeah, it does damage to the aeroplane, it really does, if you get hit by lightning.
	But yeah, I mean you wouldn't, there's some, obviously some weather that you wouldn't want to be involved in.
	Not only because it has, it moves aircraft around, don't get me wrong, in the back in those days, of course, weaponeering, you'd want as much stable airflow as you possibly could, because you need to be in sight of the surface in those days.
	And in the GR4, again, we could drop on GPS munitions, things like this, but you still, ideally, especially doing close air support, which there was elementary close air support on Normandy itself on those days, a lot of it was quite, Basic insofar as passing messages to aircraft to relay back to other aircraft.
	It was very sort of elementary.
	But yeah, the GR4 was an all-weather airplane, most definitely.
	In fact, we prefer to go in inclement weather because if I can't see them, they can't see me and therefore they can't target me necessarily in the same way they would do traditionally, yeah.
	Um, yeah, so it's very different in the 40s where a lot of the gliders are, uh, it's fabric.
	Madness.
	Yeah.
	Canvas winged.
	Canvas winged glider.
	I mean, the Horsa, I think six of those went into Pegasus Bridge, wasn't it?
	Other gliders, there's a bigger glider, the glider that carried tanks, like it's an eight ton glider that carried an eight ton tank.
	Who came up with that?
	Imagine the design.
	So you've got, what idea is this mate?
	I've got this eight ton glider, eight ton glider.
	It's just incredible.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So you need that, that weather needs, especially for those, those pilots.
	They were, they were, those pilots, you don't realize how good the glider pilots were.
	They were army glider pilots trained by the Royal Air Force.
	And these guys were known to be like the topper.
	And even then, some of the stories of the glider pilots, just, you got no choice of it.
	We're going to land here and then we're going to fight our way out of it.
	Madness.
	Most of the glider landings are just crash landings.
	Nearly all of them.
	All landings are crash landings.
	But yeah, if you can walk away from... But no, there they were.
	And a lot of the glider crews were killed.
	I can't remember which glider it was, but I do remember reading about it.
	Someone in the chat will be able to tell us here.
	They had this issue where sometimes the gliders would land and the heavy kit on the back would go through the cockpit and kill all the pilots because it would just smash through.
	And so they put a cable on the back of the glider that lifted the cockpit.
	I think it was the larger glider, lifted the cockpit out of the way.
	So it did happen and the actual vehicle went to the front.
	The cockpit was lifted up and it Missed the cruise.
	But that was the thing.
	You were going to hit trees.
	So many gliders smashed into trees.
	A lot of people were killed on landing.
	It's an incredible one.
	Those are people on D-Day and Operation Market Garden, which is next year in the year.
	That's right.
	It's too far in Holland.
	Yeah, there'll be like an artillery piece or part of an artillery piece or a jeep or something at the back.
	It crash lands and crushes everyone in it.
	Yeah, it's sort of really bad.
	Yeah.
	But OK, so talking about the the D-Day should have been on the 5th of June.
	And Ike had said go, and the giant armada, the giant biggest invasion fleet ever assembled, was within less than 40 meters from the Normandy shoreline.
	The minesweepers at the very, very front were about 38 miles from Normandy when Ike made the call, no the weather's too, too bad.
	Storms really, June storms.
	Turn it all around, which they did.
	And so, really, D-Day was originally slated for the 5th of June.
	Now, that's a big decision, isn't it?
	A massive, massive leadership call to turn it round.
	Because, as most people know, once you get a head of steam going, and once the momentum is going, for the biggest invasion at that point known, To turn it round is no small thing.
	I quite often think of an account from the first Gulf War.
	There's Bravo 2-0, Bravo 1-0 and Bravo 3-0.
	One of those, they landed in the Iraqi desert and the leader of the gang, of SAS guys, just took one look around and said, no, no, this is stupid and suicidal.
	We're going straight back.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And people said, That's not cowardly, that's one of the bravest decisions we've ever heard of.
	Yeah, people don't understand that at all, but you're absolutely right.
	Well, look what happened to Bravo Tuesday.
	Right, exactly.
	It was the right call to do.
	It was, and the bravery, because I said this on a podcast the other day, it was like, integrity is doing the right thing even when no one's looking, and someone corrected me and said, I'll stop you there, it's also doing the right thing when everyone's looking.
	And that's the sort of thing you don't really consider.
	That's what leadership's about, is going, I'm going to do the right thing, And it's going to be humiliating, like it's going to tear me apart, but it's the right thing.
	And I think that was a great quote.
	And you're absolutely right.
	Get out there and go, I've got the mission.
	Especially when you know the other patrols probably have gone.
	That's the thing.
	And you've gone, yeah, we're not going to go.
	Because everyone in that team is probably, well, they all default to the boss and go, yeah, all right, boss.
	But they're all probably thinking, let's get in there, you know.
	So to stop something that size, 170,000 men or something, crazy numbers.
	Yeah, 4,500 or 5,000 ships.
	Imagine that weather guy.
	So Stag stood up there in front of everyone going, Well I've got a few quotes here from the book by Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day.
	he's shouting at him and everything you know what's going on crazy yeah you mentioned stack i'll mention him in a bit um i've got a few quotes here from uh the the book by cornelius ryan the longest day there's also a film old black and white film with john wayne uh robert mitchum's in it a whole bunch of people out there uh richard burton those people um the film was really good but the book the original book by cornelius ryan in my opinion i think a lot of people would agree is sort of the gold standard for a history of d-day and
	There's been loads of books written.
	Anthony Beaver's got a great one.
	Stephen E. Ambrose, who did Band of Brothers, did Pegasus Bridge.
	James Holland.
	There's so many books.
	But I think most people would agree, I'm not really going out on a limb to say that Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Days is one of the best ones.
	And I've read it a couple of times and listened to it on audiobook a whole bunch of times.
	It's superb.
	That and A Bridge Too Far are just great.
	I sort of keep returning to them all the time.
	Anyway, so I've got a few quotes from that book.
	So first of all I wanted to draw us back to a moment in time earlier in the year in about mid-April 1944.
	We'll take a look at the Germans side of the equation.
	Now, they knew it was coming.
	It was sort of inevitable.
	And you can't build up in Britain, as we did, millions of Americans, thousands and thousands of aircraft, thousands of ships, just filling the south of England with ammo dumps and stuff.
	You can't keep that secret from the Germans.
	So they knew it was coming.
	They just didn't know exactly where or when.
	That's right.
	And they disagreed over what the strategy should be.
	So in Germany, the overall commander of the West, O.B.
	West, was Goethe von Rundstedt.
	And I talked about him in my four-part series I did with Josh all about Operation Market Garden on Epochs, check that out.
	Talked all about him.
	So he was the overall commander of the West.
	But he was an old A Wehrmacht guy.
	He wasn't even particularly Nazi.
	He didn't like Hitler.
	He was always rude about Hitler.
	He'd call him that Bavarian corporal and stuff.
	He was dismissive of him.
	There's a picture of von Rundstedt.
	And so he's the overall guy, but he was sort of old and wasn't really gung-ho enough for Hitler's taste.
	So he'd said back in 43, He said, I need loads more divisions.
	It turns out on D-Day, Hitler had something in the order of 60-65 divisions, not necessarily brilliant ones, someone like Press, Polish guys and stuff.
	Anyway, he had many, many divisions in the West, but von Rundstedt had wanted more, and Hitler, instead of giving him more, sent him Erwin Rommel.
	Right.
	He made Erwin Rommel a Field Marshal.
	Von Rundstedt is a Field Marshal.
	He made Rommel a Field Marshal and put him second in command effectively under Von Rundstedt.
	Put him in charge of Army Group B.
	So he's inferior in rank to von Rundstedt, but he basically got to make all the calls.
	Because whenever his ideas clashed with Rundstedt, Rommel would just say, well I've got the ear of Hitler and Hitler gave me completely elastic orders to do whatever I want.
	You can take up with Hitler if you don't like what I'm doing.
	Yeah, brilliant.
	And Rundstedt never did.
	Right.
	Because he was, in his mind, the way he operated was always, I might hate the political overlords and not even really be on board with sort of the National Socialist Program, but they are the rulers and the leaders and I'm a military officer, albeit an extremely senior one.
	Whatever they tell me to do, I've got to do.
	I'm obliged by duty to do.
	So if Hitler wants Rommel, my inferior, to actually be calling the strategic and tactical shots, I just sort of let it happen.
	So in other words, long story short, Rommel's really in command in the West.
	Although Von Rensselaer is above him.
	Now there's two big, I've mentioned Army Group B, there are two big armies, the 15th Army and the 7th Army.
	Because, in theory, we could have invaded anywhere from Holland, all the way down through Belgium, the whole French coast, all the way down to the Pyrenees.
	Yes, we could.
	We could have.
	But everyone thought we were going to invade at Calais, the port of Calais.
	And so, the Germans had put their best, strongest army, the 15th Army, there.
	And the 7th Army was defending Normandy.
	So they're the guys that actually do get it, the 7th Army.
	So, I mean, just to say about that, we went through massive, massive amounts of deception.
	We did.
	To make them think we were going to attack at Calais.
	Yeah, it was Bodyguard was not Fortitude.
	And that really led to the success from a guy who was codenamed Garbo, which was Juan Garcia, which is a Spanish national who decided one morning.
	To walk into the British Embassy, I think, in London and say, I want to be a spy.
	And they told him he was mad as a stick to go away.
	So he went back to Spain and he walked into the German sort of consulate in Madrid, I believe.
	I can't remember exactly where it was.
	It was in Spain.
	He said, I want to spy for you guys.
	And he was sick of course of the whole Spanish Civil War and everything else so he really wanted to help out the British primarily and the Germans went all right we'll go and make if I remember correctly he said they said go and go and tell us all the dispositions of all the Royal Air Force aircraft and squadrons so he went all right then so he actually left he went down to the coast he didn't get on a boat at all and he sat he got a job in a library And he just read loads of books and he made up loads of stuff.
	He just made up loads of stuff.
	The guy's mind was incredible and he just made up loads of dispositions and he took it back to the Germans and they went, oh, that's pretty good.
	And so he took that and now he's working with the Germans.
	He went then back to the British and went, I've got all this information.
	And the British went, crikey, and he became a double agent and worked for the British.
	And Op Fortitude, a lot of Op Fortitude was him Making up stories about all these people he had around in the UK, feeding him information about troop movements.
	He's making up like landing craft on Windermere that didn't exist.
	Like testing landing craft.
	Like how did he even know about Windermere?
	This guy was incredible.
	And he passed this stuff to the Germans and so the Germans felt that there was a massive buildup in clay.
	Of course, we had all the blow-up tanks, didn't we?
	We found how we could use rubber in America, I think it was.
	Bought it back, blew up these tanks, people carrying tanks down the road.
	And these things were really realistic, weren't they, all the trucks?
	And so it looked as if we were amassing down there.
	And there was also, remember the, I think like the daily, well the newspapers, Daily Express and was writing stuff in there about movements about, wasn't it that they brought, I don't know, I might be wrong here because I don't know this, but didn't they bring Patton in or something?
	I pretended that Patton was going to be running this operation from Dover basically and the Germans thought, well if they're bringing someone as important as him in, it must be coming out of Dover.
	Incredible stuff.
	I mean that Garbo guy is fascinating.
	It's a classic sort of espionage thing.
	Sort of double, double agent.
	Yeah, fascinating guy.
	Anyway, we were just feeding the Germans all kind of misinformation.
	Apparently in Cornelius Ryan he says that something along the lines of every German agent from Norway to Istanbul had been fed a different time and place that we were going to attack.
	Because we did largely catch them off guard, incredibly.
	But yeah, so we made out that there's like this whole invasion expeditionary forces under Patton.
	It was massing at Dover with sort of massive tank divisions and we'd been sort of fairly openly talking about it where we knew it'd get intercepted by the Germans.
	And yeah, like you say, loads of these sort of blow-up tanks.
	Um and and trucks and all sorts of things.
	Uh we had like a whole a whole sort of small team of people just working on that perception.
	You did and they did tank tracks and everything.
	So it looked as if these things are real.
	It's incredible from the air.
	Yeah.
	And also I mean there's other as you said I think one of the major parts is is that communication thing as well to make them think that we're coming out of somewhere else.
	But the other thing people don't realize is how we because I didn't really realize this how do you hide the main invasion going out of South Coast.
	How do you hide this stuff?
	A lot of it was just done in buildings and under camouflage and just hiding this massive force that was gathering.
	That's what I find incredible.
	Not so much the blow up tanks.
	How do you hide the main force?
	Yeah.
	Amazing.
	I mean they were thinking that it's Yeah because every port along the south coast was filled.
	Yeah yeah.
	The Germans mainly thought yeah it's gonna amass at some point at Dover and jump across to Calais and we've been sort of saturation bombing Calais and the environs around Calais for days and days and days again to give the impression that that's what we're we're peppering it up because that's where we're going to attack.
	We're doing south of Normandy as well but you can just do to cut the MSRs the main supply routes coming into Normandy we've been hammering that because we also had to hammer South of Calais as well, to make it look as if we're trying to isolate that.
	Because you couldn't not cut off those supply routes, you had to do that.
	But yes, absolutely, you had to do Calais as well.
	And it seems like they bought it.
	Certainly, von Rundstedt, Rommel and Hitler all thought that it would be, it would be Calais.
	In fact, there's one bit of information that, long before it actually happened, Hitler was one of the few people who thought it would be Normandy, and over the months was convinced that no, it must be Calais.
	Anyway, so, but Rommel was wrong.
	But I want to take us to a moment back in April of 44, where Rommel was looking out over the beaches with his assistant and adjutant, Lang, Captain Lang, and he said this.
	This is Rommel's words.
	He said, quote, The war will be won or lost on the beaches.
	We'll have only one chance to stop the enemy, and that's while he's in the water struggling to get ashore.
	Reserves will never get up to the point of attack, and it's foolish even to consider them.
	The main line of resistance will be here.
	Everything we have must be on the coast.
	Believe me, Lang, the first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive.
	For the Allies as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.
	End quote.
	Yeah.
	So I mentioned that they had a disagreement over strategy, so von Rundstedt thought that if you keep mass armies, or even army groups and things, right on the coast, Um, the Allies will just keep peppering them from the air, because we had largely air superiority by this point, and the combined Royal Navy and American Navy, when they attack their sort of naval batteries, they'll be able to just annihilate everything if we keep it on the coast.
	What we should do is sort of effectively allow them to get bridgeheads, and then we'll counter-attack.
	That's the best way.
	That's the most efficient way to do it.
	We can't stop them if they push and try hard enough.
	We can't stop them from gaining bridgeheads.
	So effectively concede that and we'll have the actual battles just a little inland to begin with.
	That was his thinking.
	Rommel said, as you said there, no, no, we've got to shoot them up whilst they're wading through the water.
	That's the time.
	That's the best place.
	Obviously, Rommel, I guess, was right, wasn't he?
	Well, Hitler agreed with Rommel, and he probably was right.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I'm not an expert on that at all, but yeah, it sounds pretty legit, doesn't it?
	The thing is, though, so Hitler had this concept of the Atlantic Wall.
	That's right.
	From Norway all the way down, wasn't it?
	Yeah.
	We're going to build this idea of Bastion Europe.
	That's right.
	Apparently, he was, end quote, obsessed with the concept.
	But the thing is, if you look at the Maginot Line or something, with defences like that, one, you can either go round it at some point, or if you push hard enough and break through, well then that's the whole ballgame again.
	So you could spend years and untold amounts of treasure and energy to build something like the Maginot Line or the Atlantic Wall, but once it's breached, That's it.
	All that effort and money is... It was like the wars of Carthage, wasn't it?
	Same thing.
	Going through those wars, wasn't it?
	And when you get in, then you... Yeah, I guess so.
	I guess it must be it.
	But you can understand his thinking.
	And of course, we think of it as a legitimate wall.
	But when you look at what the wall was, especially, it's not a wall as such.
	It's just these points.
	I think on Omaha, there were five exits, weren't there?
	If I remember, I might be wrong.
	Five points you can get off that beach.
	They were called the exits.
	And of course, you How do you bridge these?
	These are natural gullies, you know what I mean?
	So you can't build a wall around the whole of Europe, but it's a fortified area, isn't it?
	So if your people do get through, then you've got these pockets where you can attack them, I guess.
	Absolutely.
	Just to be clear, the Atlantic Wall is nothing like a continuous Great Wall of China.
	No.
	Not at all.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	No, just a string of defensive points and all sorts of concrete bunkers and all sorts of things.
	But it's not a wall.
	The word wall is used metaphorically there.
	But when Rommel was sent there in late 43, the German propaganda that Rommel himself had believed was that the Atlantic Wall was already built.
	And it was sort of impregnable.
	And Rommel gets them, he's like, it's half done.
	In places it's really not.
	I need loads more guns and mines.
	Rommel was also obsessed, and that's a quote, with the concept of mines as a defensive weapon.
	By the time of June 1944, there was in the order of maybe 3 million mines, land and sea mines, but he wanted 60 million if he'd got his way.
	So yeah, so Rommel and Voronstadt disagreed on exactly how to do it, but Rommel sort of would always get his way.
	Yeah, so, another quick thing to say then about the state of the war from the German point of view at this point.
	So, Rome falls on the 5th of June.
	Allied troops get into Rome on that day.
	It's actually quiet over these, if you can believe that.
	On the Eastern Front, with the Russians, it's sort of all quiet.
	There was a late thaw apparently.
	The Soviets are in Poland by this point.
	They're already in Poland.
	There was a late thaw in 1944, and so the Soviet summer offensive in 1944 hadn't kicked off yet.
	So it's actually all a bit quiet on the Eastern Front, but in Italy it's done, sort of thing.
	And then this happens.
	Now the Germans really didn't think Ike would attack on the 6th or the 5th or the 6th because the weather was so bad.
	It was storms, it was stormy.
	He delayed it for a day because the weather was so bad but on the 6th it wasn't much better.
	But he had to go, or he felt he had, because otherwise you'd have to put it back to July and then the cat really would be out of the bag.
	You'd have to keep hundreds of thousands of men on boats that whole time.
	It's not really doable, not really practicable to do that.
	So he sort of felt and he had to go on the 6th.
	I've got a fairly long couple of paragraphs here, again from the longest day, talking about the run-up to it and possible leaks, and also a little bit of an insight into Ike Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, who anyone might not know goes on to be President of the United States in the 50s.
	So I'm interested in Ike.
	I think most people that are interested in World War II You know, you read a little bit about Stalin and Hitler and Churchill and Roosevelt and then you go down to sort of the next most important people.
	Yeah.
	Someone like Ike.
	So always sort of fascinated by him and his character and what he's really like.
	Anyway, we've got a couple of paragraphs here.
	It might take a few minutes to read out but I think it's one of the best sort of segments in The Longest Day.
	So Cornelius Ryan wrote this.
	And now on this 10th Sunday, June the 4th, because June the 6th was a Tuesday.
	So on the 4th, a 10th Sunday, Supreme Headquarters was stunned by the news that there had been yet another leak.
	Earlier in the book he talked about the odd general here or there who at Claridge's had let something slip.
	It's sort of impossible to keep secrets for very long when maybe thousands of people, only a few, only a handful of people knew the exact time and date but lots and lots of people knew it was coming and anyway to keep something a secret like that is near impossible.
	So, yeah.
	Right, here's yet another leak.
	Far worse than any that had occurred before.
	During the night, an AP teletype operator had been practicing on an idle machine in an effort to improve her speed.
	By error, the perforated type carrying her practice flash somehow preceded the usual nightly Russian communique.
	It was corrected after only 30 seconds, but the word was out.
	The bulletin that reached the US read, Urgent, Press Associates, NYK Flash, Eisenhower's HQ announced Allied landings in France.
	Grave as the consequences of the message might prove to be, it was much too late to do anything about it now.
	The gigantic machinery of the invasion had moved into high gear.
	Now as the hours slipped by and the weather steadily worsened, the greatest airborne and amphibious force ever assembled.
	Very nice place actually.
	Eisenhower's decision.
	Would Ike confirm June the 6th as D-Day or would he be compelled because of channel weather the worst in 20 years to postpone the invasion once again?
	In a rain-lashed wood 20 miles from the naval headquarters at Southwick House, which is in Hampshire north of Portsmouth about five miles north of Portsmouth.
	Very nice place actually.
	At Southwick House the American had to make that decision that had to make that decision wrestled with the problem and tried to relax in his sparsely furnished three and a half tonne trailer Although he could have moved into more comfortable quarters at the big, sprawling Southwick house, Eisenhower had decided against it.
	He wanted to be as close as possible to the ports where his troops were loading.
	Several days before, he had ordered a small, compact battle headquarters set up, a few tents for his immediate staff, and several trailers, among them his own, which he had long ago named his Circus Wagon.
	Eisenhower's trailer, a long low caravan somewhat resembling a moving van, had three small compartments serving as a bedroom, living room and study.
	Besides these, neatly fitted into the trailer's length was a tiny galley, a miniature switchboard, a chemical toilet and at one end a glass enclosed observation deck.
	But the Supreme Commander was rarely around long enough to make full use of the trailer.
	He hardly ever made use of the living room or the study.
	When staff conferences were called, he generally held them in a tent next to the trailer.
	Only his bedroom had a lived-in look.
	It was definitely his.
	There was a large pile of Western paperbacks, like Western cowboy novels.
	Ike loved cowboy novels.
	So there's a stack of those on a table near his bunk and here too were the only pictures, photographs of his wife Mamie and his 21 year old son John in the uniform of a West Point cadet.
	From this trailer, Eisenhower commanded almost 3 million Allied troops.
	More than half of this immense command were American.
	Roughly 1.7 million soldiers, sailors, airmen and coastguardmen.
	British and Canadian forces together totaled around 1 million.
	And in addition, they were fighting French, Polish, Czech, Belgian, Norwegian and Dutch contingents.
	Never before had an American commanded so many men from so many nations or shouldered such an awesome burden of responsibility.
	Yet despite the magnitude of his assignment and his vast powers, there was little about this tall sunburnt Midwesterner with the infectious grin to indicate that he was the Supreme Commander.
	Unlike many other famous Allied commanders who were instantly recognizable by some visible trademark, such as an eccentric headgear or garish uniforms layered shoulder high with decorations, Everything about Eisenhower was restrained.
	Apart from the four stars of his rank, a single ribbon of decoration above his breast pocket, and a flaming sawed shoulder patch of SHAFE, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Eisenhower shunned all distinguishing marks.
	Even in the trailer there was little evidence of his authority.
	No flags, maps, framed directives, or signed photographs of the great or near great who often visited him.
	But in his bedroom, close to his bunk, were three small, important telephones, each a different colour.
	The red was for scrambled calls to Washington, the green was a direct line to Winston Churchill's residence at Number 10 Downing Street, London, and the black connected him to his brilliant Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, who'll come up again, later went on to be head of the CIA before Alan Dulles, one of his closest confidants.
	Yeah, Walter Bedell Smith, the immediate headquarters and other senior members of the High Command on this black telephone.
	It was on the black phone, to add to all his other worries, that Eisenhower heard of the erroneous flash concerning the landings.
	He said nothing when he was told the news.
	His naval aide, Captain Harry C. Butcher, recalls that the Supreme Commander merely grunted an acknowledgement, what was there to say or do now.
	Four months before, in the directive appointing him Supreme Commander, the combined chiefs of staff in Washington had spelled out his assignment in one precise paragraph.
	It read, You will enter the continent of Europe and in conjunction with the other allied nations undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.
	There in one sentence was the aim and purpose of the assault.
	End quote.
	So a lot said there, sorry, quite a long quote, but a little bit of an insight, you know, painting a picture of Ike and his trailer that he liked to use at this point in the war anyway, and that he was modest, he was sort of quite modest.
	Yeah, I suppose some of the best leaders are.
	Didn't we think that a lot of leaks had happened from when the practice landings had happened down in Devon, and they'd been targeted by U-boats, and they worried that some of the men there had been picked up in the U-boats, and they thought they may well have given The intention's away, but then they went, hang on, we can't, we can't run on that anyway, so let's just disregard it.
	But yeah, that was always a worry, wasn't it?
	It's funny that from the German side, they, it seems to me they just got fixated with the idea that it had to be Calais.
	Yeah, and I don't know, I mean, this is the thing, there's better, I mean, crikey, I think Andy Beaver writes some of this, doesn't he, doesn't he?
	But it's, if you look at it, it would make more sense.
	Oh yeah.
	Because it, I mean, you look at the distance of the channel, 150 miles is it?
	And then you're going to put swimming tanks in and they're going to swim ashore.
	It's like, I'll stop you there.
	What about tanks swimming?
	Yeah, no, I've got this great idea.
	Swimming tanks are going to swim ashore.
	Of course, a lot of them sank, didn't they?
	But yeah, I mean, it's, the easy thing would be to nip across to Calais.
	So their, the German thinking was it will be at Calais and it will be in good weather.
	Yeah.
	The Allies never really, in North Africa and Sicily and Italy, we'd always wait for good weather.
	Pretty much always.
	Yeah.
	Particularly because of the aircraft.
	You need clear skies.
	So the German thinking was, so it's going to be at Calais and it's going to be during good weather.
	Apparently a lot of May had been very good weather.
	And because we didn't attack in May, they thought, oh, they're not going to attack now in storms.
	And they're not going to do it at Normandy.
	So really, we did catch them off guard a bit.
	Both in the timing and the place.
	Yeah, a lot of forces have been moved away, haven't they, from the area back over towards Germany, I believe.
	Although there were some SS Panzer divisions in depth, weren't there?
	Weren't there seven divisions of heavy tanks there or something outside Caen?
	Yeah, and the 15th Army had a couple of Panzer divisions.
	And when it all went down on the 6th, the 7th Army asked for them and they don't get them.
	No, they don't.
	But I'll go into the detail of that when we come up to it.
	Yeah, they couldn't be resupplied either, could they?
	That's one of the things the Air Force did, was hit in depth to really hit any kind of supply that was coming up towards that area.
	I think that's one of the things that really stalls it.
	But yeah, fascinating stuff.
	So I've got another sort of long quote here and it's the I've got a few more quotes but it's the last one that's very long but I wanted to read it out because it's sort of everything that um again Cornelius Ryan's very good at sort of painting a picture and making it about the humans.
	Right.
	And giving you a scene.
	No wonder some of his books were made into movies, because they're quite cinematic.
	Right.
	And it's about the final decision to pull the trigger and do it.
	And we get to see, you mentioned Stag in there, and we get to see Monty as well in this quote.
	So I'll read it out.
	Cornelius Rhines says, quote, shortly before 9.30 that night, oh sorry, the night of the 5th, Eisenhower's senior commanders and their chiefs of staff gathered in the library of Southwick House.
	It was a large comfortable room with a table covered by a green baize cloth, several easy chairs and two sofas, dark oak woodcases lined three of the walls, but there were few books on the shelves and the room had a bare look.
	Heavy double blackout curtains hung at the windows, and on this night they muffled the drumming of the rain and the flat buckling sound of the wind.
	Standing about in the room in little groups, the staff officers talked quietly.
	Near the fireplace, Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, conversed with the pipe-smoking Deputy Supreme Commander, Air Chief Marshal Tedder.
	Seated to one side was the fiery Allied Naval Commander, Admiral Ramsey, and close by the Allied Air Commander, Air Chief Marshal Lee Mallory.
	Only one other officer was dressed informally, General Smith recalls.
	The peppery Montgomery, who would be in charge of the D-Day assault, wore his usual corduroy slacks and roll-neck sweater.
	These were the men who would translate the order to attack when Eisenhower gave the word to go.
	Now they and their staff officers, altogether there were 12 senior officers in the room, awaited the arrival of the Supreme Commander and the decisive conference that would begin at 9.30.
	At that time, they would hear the latest forecasts of the meteorologists.
	At exactly 9.30, the door opened and Eisenhower, neat in his dark green battle dress, strode in.
	There was just the faintest flicker of the old Eisenhower grin as he greeted his old friends, but the mask of worry quickly returned to his face as he opened the conference.
	There was no need for a preamble.
	Everyone knew the seriousness of the decision that had to be made.
	So almost immediately, the three senior Overlord Meteorologists... Overlord is the codename for the... if anyone doesn't know, for the actual... Overlord's the actual attack and Neptune was the naval element of it.
	So the three senior Overlord Meteorologists came in, led by their chief, Group Captain J.M.
	Stagg of the Royal Air Force, came into the room.
	There was a hushed silence as Stagg opened the briefing.
	Quickly he sketched the weather picture of the previous 24 hours, and then he quietly said, Gentlemen, there have been some rapid and unexpected developments in the situation.
	All eyes were on Stagg now, as he presented the anxious-faced Eisenhower and his commanders with a slender ray of hope.
	A new weather front had been spotted which he said would move up the channel within the next few hours and cause a gradual clearing over the assault areas.
	These improving conditions would last throughout the next day and would continue up to the morning of June the 6th.
	After that, the weather would continue to deteriorate again.
	During this promised period of fair weather, the winds would drop appreciably and the skies would clear, enough at least for bombers to operate on the night of the 5th and throughout the morning of the 6th.
	By noon, the cloud layer would thicken and the skies would become overcast again.
	In short, Eisenhower was being told that there was a barely tolerable period of conditions far below the minimal requirements, and these conditions would prevail for just little more than 24 hours.
	The moment Stagg had finished, He and the other two meteorologists were subjected to a barrage of questions.
	Were all of them confident about the accuracy of their predictions?
	Could their forecasts be wrong?
	Had they checked their reports with every available source?
	Was there any chance of the weather continuing to improve in the few days immediately after the 6th?
	Some of the questions were impossible for the weathermen to answer.
	Their report had been checked and double checked.
	And they were as optimistic as they could be about the forecast, but there was always the chance that the vagaries of the weather might prove them wrong.
	They answered as best they could, then they withdrew.
	For the next 15 minutes, Eisenhower and his commanders deliberated.
	The urgency of making a decision was stressed by Admiral Ramsey, the American task force of Omaha and Utah beaches, under the command of Rear Admiral A.G.
	Kirk.
	We'd have to get the order within the next half an hour if Overlord was to take place on Tuesday.
	Ramsey's concern was prompted by the refueling problem.
	If these forces sailed later and were then recalled it would be impossible to get them ready again for a possible attack on Wednesday the 7th.
	Eisenhower now polled his commanders one by one.
	General Smith thought the attack should go in on the 6th.
	It was a gamble but one that should be taken.
	Tedder and Lee Mallory were both fearful that even the predicted cloud cover would prove too much for the air forces to operate effectively.
	It might mean that the assault would have to take place without adequate air support.
	They thought it was going to be chancy.
	Montgomery stuck to the decision he had made the night before when the June the 5th D-Day had been postponed.
	I would say go, he said.
	It was now up to Ike.
	The moment had come when only he could make the decision.
	There was a long silence as Eisenhower weighed all the possibilities.
	General Smith, watching, was struck by the isolation and loneliness of the Supreme Commander as he sat, hands clasped before him, looking down at the table.
	The minutes ticked by.
	Some say as many as two minutes passed.
	Some say as many as five.
	Then Eisenhower, his face strained, looked up and announced his decision.
	Slowly he said, I'm quite positive we must give the order.
	I don't like it, but there it is.
	I don't see how we can do anything else.
	Yeah.
	So, um, sorry to subject you to quite a long paragraph there.
	No, I think it's a warm one.
	Yeah.
	That sort of... History turns on... Does.
	...moments like that, decisions like that.
	A handful of guys, a dozen guys sitting around.
	Are we doing this?
	Yes or no?
	And history goes.
	Yeah, there's always going to be that interjection.
	Everyone's going to come in with their opinion.
	You can see what they're doing to the Met guys.
	Like, are you sure?
	It's like, I'm as sure as the reports I've got from everyone that's made them and I've reviewed them with all the experience and history that I've got.
	Not any more sure than that.
	Well, could it be that you're... It's like, yeah, could be that I'm completely wrong.
	But everything we know says there's going to be a weather window tomorrow morning.
	Else you've got to wait another day.
	I love this stuff.
	It's fascinating with this, isn't it?
	Where the individual sits there and if you think about it, all he's doing, all Eisenhower's doing there is working on his own experiences.
	That's all he's got.
	So everything, and that's why you have that two minutes of deliberation sat there.
	It's not even you're thinking about different things.
	You've heard everything.
	You're just sitting there.
	I always talk about the coin toss.
	You flick a coin and you say to yourself, when it comes down, you go, right, if it's tails, I'm going to go.
	His head's not gonna go and you look at it and it makes you feel a certain way doesn't it?
	I wish it wasn't that one!
	It makes you really think and I saw you sat there for two minutes and at the end of the day it's like Thomas Sowell says there's politics there's no right or wrong answer there's only compromises.
	He knows he's gonna get people killed.
	Is there going to be more dying tomorrow morning or is it going to be more dying the next day?
	That's what it's got to be.
	So how do we, you know, we've got all the information now, everyone's ready to go.
	Everything really kind of weighs, as far as I'm concerned, on that positive decision that you're making at the moment.
	There's impact there, there's progress, everything's ready to go, or you delay, you get that slump.
	Now we need more.
	So I think, you know, I can understand why that came out with a positive go.
	Yeah, I mean, it's a truism that politics is the art of compromise.
	Gotta be.
	And I guess war planning is as well, on some level.
	Yep, gotta be, yep.
	But as you said earlier with that Bravo 3-0, wasn't it, when they got out and they went No.
	And also, remember, this has worked out beforehand, a lot of this stuff.
	We call what-ifs.
	What if this happens?
	What if you land on the ground?
	You can't see.
	Well, we get back in the helicopter and we fly home again.
	You know, it's that stuff.
	So when you get out, hopefully most stuff is, is ready to go.
	So, um, but yeah, I mean, the weight of that decision, really, when you think about it, it's incredible, but that's, that's why he's paid the big money.
	Hashtag, he's not paid the big money.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	The weight of that.
	The weight of that decision, and others like it, sort of incredible.
	Yeah, take a stronger man than me to be able to sort of not be crushed by it, right?
	Well, yes, I think you're right.
	But in the same vein, A lot of people are going to die from that decision, insofar as the bombers aren't going to be able to accurately bomb.
	And we do see this as well, especially around the town of Caen, where a lot of civilians were killed by the Royal Air Force, I think, primarily.
	And then the United States Air Force bombing, where they tried to bomb the targets, but they just couldn't see enough, and they actually bombed a lot of the town.
	So far, I think seven days after they went into Normandy and actually got to Cannes, which is one of their objectives, they didn't hit it for another six or seven days, they couldn't move through the rubble and the destruction quick enough to sort of take the enemy positions because it had been bombed so heavily by us.
	And it hadn't bombed those positions we needed to take, it bombed the town itself.
	You know, it's that problem.
	It's, yeah, we can go, but there's always going to be a compromise.
	So yeah, we can probably get troops on the beach.
	Yeah, we'd probably get some initial air cover on the beaches, most definitely, and minesweepers, all that kind of stuff.
	We can get ships in, we can get the little swimming tanks, we can do all that stuff, we can get troops.
	But you know what?
	We're going to really compromise ourselves on that close air support element.
	It wasn't necessarily called that back then, but the close air support element, the troop support element of aviation because of the cloud cover is going to make it very hard.
	Yeah, we would often bomb and strafe areas just before we went into them with lots of civilian casualties from outside of the We're allies.
	That was just the way it was done then.
	That was just the calculation.
	Nothing's going to stop our infantry and tank divisions getting where they need to go if we end up strafing a civilian train to bits.
	It's a total war, isn't it?
	Yeah, right.
	That's just the way it's got to be.
	Yeah, we did it all sorts of times.
	But like, in your experience, did you ever, were you ever sort of asked, given orders to do a particular sortie, whether it's training or the real thing, and you think, this is 50-50, this is chancey dicey as hell, but we're going to do it anyway, we've sort of got to do it anyway?
	Yeah I'd say that for me a lot of the stuff that you do when I was in Iraq it was quite benign it wasn't as kinetic as say some of the squadrons came out after me who did have more of a close air support role in certain areas but when you do exercise like red flag things like this I remember walking out to the jet and my weapons officer I wrote an essay about it you know I'll be gonna die today type thing and he's absolutely right it's about positive thinking It's like, are we going to die again tonight?
	Because I was doing nights.
	And it just is.
	Red flag takes it to a level.
	That's why you do it.
	So this isn't a shock to you.
	Takes it to a level where sometimes, how do we come back from that?
	And they do have losses on these big exercises.
	They do have fatalities.
	Sometimes you come back.
	I remember one where a friend of mine called, called Pikey, called Pixel.
	In fact, Pikey I'll call him Pixel.
	He went to fly for the Australians in the end, for a bit.
	And the Americans as well.
	We went out to do a night vision workup.
	We needed to stay on topic.
	Night vision goggles.
	We thought we were the bad men.
	We're going to do a night vision workout.
	And the boss was like, no, no, you're not experienced, not experienced.
	We're like, we're experienced.
	And eventually he went, all right, go and do it.
	And after the first night, we came back in horrendous conditions, like weather, you know, dark as anything.
	He both came back.
	And as you both walked in, he's in one jet, I'm in the other.
	We both walked in and I said, how was that?
	And he was like, I never want to do that again.
	And so the boss was absolutely right.
	You know, you need experience and you need that.
	And so, yeah, sometimes you do go and you think, I don't know how either.
	I don't know how we're coming back from this.
	And if you look at the stories of some of the aircrew, very young, taken off from Tangmir, Thorney Island, some of the southern airfields, they were sick before they got on the aeroplanes.
	You know, some of them were physically sick and they never came back.
	And they knew they were never coming back, you know, on some of these raids.
	I just guess, you know, I kind of wish we still had some of this.
	And I guess we do in the country.
	But what I mean is that kind of fortitude, that kind of perseverance, that kind of thing where you're doing something for something else that you may never see again.
	That you're planting a tree for your kid, you're going to plant a tree and you're going to die.
	That tree will grow up and your kids will benefit from it.
	These men that went across that channel and I think they were all men I think there was an Ernest Hemingway's wife stowed aboard as a journalist and she has a stretcher bearer and was on the beaches but everyone was men there but these men that did this knowing that they probably weren't going to come back did it for a reason and it was something bigger than themselves and I don't know whether we still have that now but I'd like to think somewhere we still do.
	Incredible really.
	God, you've mentioned at least half a dozen things there I'd like to bounce off and talk more about.
	Unfortunately, already, there's still 50 minutes in.
	No, no, no!
	No, no, not you!
	I've been telling the story too slowly.
	But just super quick to say, yeah, there was quite a lot of journalists, like an NBC reporter In the first wave at Omaha Beach.
	That's right, I read something like that.
	Was it NBC or something?
	I think it was NBC, yeah.
	There was loads of reporters, like, in the flotilla.
	There's a picture I've got.
	Oh, there's Ike's trailer.
	That's Ike and his trailer there.
	There's another picture.
	Jack, have you got it?
	It said Southwick House with Walter Cronkite.
	I lived about a mile away from Southwark House actually, because my mum still lives in Waterlooville, North Portsmouth, and this is where the whole thing was being set up, was there.
	It's a fascinating place to go, it's near Denmead.
	My father actually led military vehicles out, I was on the 40th anniversary, the 4-0, 40th anniversary of D-Day, when I was 10.
	back in '84 and my dad was head of, well, general secretary of something called the Military Vehicle Conservation Group that became the Military Vehicle Trust.
	Some of your watchers will know this, of course.
	And he took out, he had a BSM-20 motorcycle.
	He was a Royal Marine and he got this motorcycle from Malta and rebuilt it in my youth and he had this bike used to...
	Oh!
	Yeah, yeah, I'll send you some pictures now.
	And he took, he took all tanks, half tracks, you know, all sorts, into Germany, into northern France, Normandy, and he went round St Mariglies, Caen, all those areas that were, and I was 10, so I was riding, I was riding on tanks and everything at the time.
	It's fascinating when you think about it and the tanks that you see now, my sister is out there at the moment on the on the tour with veterans.
	She's a young police officer from Hampshire and there's tanks there that my father put on the plinths on Normandy on the coastline there to sort of commemorate the events and everything.
	So yeah, the family's quite involved in this.
	In fact, the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth, a lot of the memorabilia there is from my father and his guys in the group, and they actually put the tank there, they put everything else there.
	So, if anyone goes to the D-Day Museum, my dad put a lot of stuff there.
	Cool, yeah, really cool keeping it alive, and there's lots going on out there right now.
	There is, yeah, yeah, fascinating, yeah, yeah.
	So there's a picture, that's from the 50s, that's much later.
	You can see Ike's a bit older.
	That's from the 50s.
	And that's actually the map room at Southwick House.
	That's Walter Cronkite there, famous 20th century American correspondent.
	He actually dropped in Operation Market Diver.
	Did he?
	He actually jumped out of an aeroplane for Market Garden.
	A quick, very, very quick side note there.
	When his glider, oh no that was it, he was in a glider and it crashed, crash landed, split open.
	And his helmet went flying as nearly everyone's did.
	And he picked up the closest, and it was under fire immediately on the landing zone.
	He picked up another helmet and put it on and started crawling away.
	But he picked up the helmet of a lieutenant.
	We've got two stripes down the back of it, and he's crawling away with his typewriter, and he found that there was loads of other guys following him.
	Oh, brilliant.
	He didn't know where he was going or what he was doing, but they thought he was a lieutenant.
	Anyway, that's what's going on.
	That's excellent.
	Okay, so God, there's so many, there's so many elements today.
	Yeah, we haven't started yet.
	We haven't even landed on the beaches.
	Okay, so I'll just crack on with another big bit, where the Germans, because of the weather, And because we hadn't yet attacked in May, and because of the deceptions and all sorts of things, they were largely convinced we weren't going to attack on the 5th or the 6th of June.
	To the point where Rommel goes home.
	He drives back to Germany.
	He's convinced that if we didn't attack on the 4th or the 5th, it's not going to happen on the 6th.
	Boss.
	And there was also a big war games thing arranged, what they called it, a Kriegsspiel is the German, Kriegsspiel.
	They were going to have a big war games and loads of the senior commanders were meant to go to another place in France, Rennes, to take part in that.
	And so, anyway, on the 6th, Loads of the senior commanders just weren't where they should be.
	Like, to a sort of a crazy degree.
	I've got a paragraph here, I'll read it.
	It says, quote, and so it was that one by one senior officers from Rommel Down had left the front on the very eve of the battle All of them had reasons, but it was almost as though a capricious fate had manipulated their departure.
	Rommel was in Germany.
	It was his wife's birthday.
	He'd got some handmade suede shoes.
	Brilliant.
	He was almost dying of exhaustion, and he was well overdue some leave, but he took it at the wrong time.
	Yeah, Rommel was in Germany.
	As was Army Group B's operation officer, von Tempelhoff.
	Admiral Theodor Kranke, the naval commander in the West, after informing von Rundstedt that patrol boats were unable to leave harbour because of rough seas, set out for Bordeaux in the south of France.
	Lieutenant-General Heinz Helmich, commander of the 243rd Division, which was holding one side of the Cherbourg Peninsula, i.e.
	right where Utah and Omaha Beach are, had departed for Rennes on this wargaming thing.
	So did Lieutenant-Colonel Carl von Schlieben of the 709th Division, Major-General Wilhelm Farley of the Tufts 91st Air Landing Division, which had just moved into Normandy, prepared to go.
	Colonel Wilhelm Mayer Dietring, Rundstedt's intelligence officer, was on leave and the chief of staff of one division could not be reached at all.
	He was off hunting with his French mistress.
	After D-Day, the coincidences of these multiple departures from the invasion front struck Hitler so forcibly that there was actually talk of an investigation to see whether the British service could have been... intelligent services... could have possibly had anything to do with it.
	They weren't.
	It was just dumb luck on our part.
	The fact was, Hitler himself was no more prepared for the great day than his generals.
	The Fuhrer was at his Berziskaden retreat in Bavaria.
	So let's talk about that.
	Wolf's Lair, isn't it?
	Is that the one?
	No, the Wolf's Lair is his... Oh God, I should... Isn't the Wolf's Lair his eastern front?
	I thought Wolfslayer was in Bavaria.
	I'm pretty sure I went there, but either way, yeah.
	Is it the eagle's nest?
	Yeah, could be that one.
	That's his garden.
	I think Wolfslayer is his thing out in Poland.
	But he was, at that time, he was medicating to get to sleep.
	So, and apparently he was pontificating that night and telling about politics and everything else and everyone stayed awake, I think.
	I think some couple went to bed quite early, but he stayed up to about three in the morning and then he took some medication to get to sleep.
	So he went to bed very late.
	So no one woke him up, did they?
	I think it was Albert Speer eventually came and said the next day, go wake him up.
	You know what I mean?
	Just this is ridiculous.
	There's been an invasion, but no one woke him up.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, Hitler loved to stay up late and get up late.
	Yeah.
	So he'd quite often go to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning and sleep to like noon.
	Yeah.
	Or something.
	That was his routine.
	That's how he lived.
	And yeah, he'd been up till 3 or 4 the night before listening to music.
	And then Dr Morell had given him a sleeping draft.
	Nice.
	Some sort of cocktail of drugs to knock him out basically.
	Apparently Hitler could barely sleep without it at this point.
	By this point Hitler was something of a drug addict.
	Was that what it was?
	Morel made him one.
	Oh I see, so it was the medication stuff wasn't it?
	That's what I mean, it was that constant medication.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, Morel was giving him uppers and downers all the time.
	So, yeah.
	OK, so there's just a whole bunch here I'm going to have to cut out, unfortunately.
	A word then on the Armada.
	So it's the biggest, it is the biggest up to that point or ever, sort of amphibious thing.
	20,000 ships, something like that, wasn't it?
	5,000.
	5,000 ships, is it?
	How many landing craft were there?
	1,400 or something like that?
	Yeah, 1,400, 1,500.
	And thousands of aeroplanes.
	20,000 aeroplanes, that's right, yeah.
	Tens of thousands of guys.
	Yep.
	So, Cornelius Ryan is good at painting a picture, so I'll quickly read this paragraph.
	He says, quote, Off the French coast, a little before 9pm, a dozen small ships appeared.
	They moved quietly along the horizon, so close that their crews could clearly see the houses of Normandy.
	The ships went unnoticed.
	They finished their job and then moved back.
	They were British minesweepers, the vanguard of the mightiest fleet ever assembled.
	For now, back in the Channel, ploughing through the choppy grey waters, a phalanx of ships bore down on Hitler's Europe.
	The might and fury of the free world unleashed at last.
	They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description.
	There were fast new attack transports, slow rust-scarred freighters, small ocean liners, channel steamers, hospital ships, weather-beaten tankers, coasters and swarms of fussing tugs.
	There were endless columns of shallow draft landing ships.
	Great wallowing vessels, some of them almost 350 feet long.
	Many of these and other heavier transports carried smaller landing craft for the actual beach assault, more than 1,500 of them.
	Ahead of the convoys were processions of minesweepers, coastguard cutters, buoy layers and motor launches.
	Barrage balloons flew above the ships.
	Squadrons of fighter planes weaved below the clouds, and surrounding this fantastic cavalcade of ships, packed with men, guns, tanks, motor vehicles and suppliers, was a formidable array of 702 warships.
	Now there's all sorts of battleships.
	There was the USS Augusta, HMS Nelson, Ramillies, Warspite, HMS Ajax who was involved in taking out the Graf Spee.
	Right.
	The USS Texas, Arkansas and Nevada.
	Now if anyone knows the stuff, Nevada was hit badly at Pearl Harbor.
	My goodness.
	The Japanese had written it off.
	Didn't know that.
	And the Americans had repaired it and it was at D-Day.
	Legends!
	Now just to give it some perspective, the Germans were able to launch three torpedo boats Yeah, eboats.
	And actually they fired 18 torpedoes, if I remember correctly, and they did sink one Norwegian frigate called the Svenner.
	That was the only losses.
	And then they got hit, didn't they, and they ran away because basically every ship turned on them.
	And a big shout out, quickly before we can, to Coastal Command.
	Those guys flying the Catalinas and the Sunderlands, one of which was my grandfather who died recently at the age of about 99.
	They cleared out the whole U-boat threat from the channel.
	They were so successful that they get overlooked now when we talk about this because they didn't take part, they didn't need to, they'd done everything, they'd cleared it all out.
	So the reason that there weren't any U-boats out there, the reason that the fleet wasn't hit hard at all by anything really, I mean one loss really, that was it, was because Coastal Command was so effective.
	In hunting down these submarines and everything, yeah.
	We had two what they call midget subs out there, the X-20 and the X-23, just sitting just off of Normandy for like ever since the 4th, the night of the 4th, just sitting there watching.
	And yeah, they were completely unmolested by it.
	There was no German submarine.
	No, there wasn't.
	Nothing at all.
	No, crazy.
	They had it to themselves.
	And yeah, so there's a guy called Hoffman, I think was the German commander.
	He had three sort of torpedo boats.
	And when the invasion comes.
	Let's have a go.
	Yeah.
	I love that attitude.
	Let's have a go.
	Let's do it.
	Come on.
	It's like, and you just come over the rise.
	You're like, what are you doing again?
	Yeah.
	How many ships is that?
	Just, just get the torpedoes out and we're going, mate.
	You know what I mean?
	It would have been unbelievable, right?
	Oh, it'd be ridiculous.
	You spread, right, all the torpedoes going that way and they all missed apart from one.
	That's the thing.
	And it took out this Norwegian, this Norwegian steamer.
	But yeah, I mean, incredible.
	You just, what are we doing here again?
	Just, this is a little bit outnumbered.
	He said, because no one had ever seen anything like it, again it was unprecedented, this sort of invasion fleet, and there was a smoke screen by the time he'd sort of scrambled his three torpedo boats, he said he's coming out of the water, he goes through this smoke screen, he said It's like, oh!
	I'm in a bad place.
	Horizon to horizon.
	Yeah, I'm in a bad place.
	Like 700 warships.
	All the guns going errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Oh, what a legend.
	Legend.
	Obviously for the wrong reasons, but yeah.
	So, again, there's so many books, there's so much you could just say just about the naval side of things.
	Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah.
	But we've got to move on, unfortunately, because time's already ticking on.
	So, again, another thing we've got to talk about before we get on to the actual beaches is the airborne element of it.
	Now, Operation Market Garden, late in September, October 1944, was the biggest ever airborne thing.
	But before that, this was the biggest ever airborne thing ever attempted.
	Something like 17, 18 or thousand paratroopers dropped the night of the 6th, the morning of the 6th.
	So at like bang on midnight, they drop in the pathfinders.
	In the wrong place?
	Largely in the wrong place.
	Now if anyone doesn't know who the Pathfinders are, they're paratroopers, you go in there and they're supposed to keep quiet and not really get in any fight and just light the way for the main paratroops to land.
	Yeah.
	And they were, it was almost an impossible task.
	It was yeah, it's ridiculous yeah.
	And so...
	But still, that's super ballsy.
	Yeah.
	I feel like being a Pathfinder, it's like being an SAS dude.
	Yeah, being a legend.
	You're behind enemy lines, almost on your own.
	That's right, JTAC, same thing.
	Yeah, exactly the same thing.
	Sort of crazily ballsy.
	Yeah.
	Good chance it's a one-way ticket.
	Probably not right there.
	So yeah, be a Pathfinder.
	Off you go.
	Yeah.
	And it was all volunteers, the Pathfinders.
	Can you believe that?
	Just volunteers.
	Guy go, yeah.
	Well, there was an episode where the British Army were using the same kind of flares, I think, that the Americans were using.
	So the British Army pathfinders were using the same flares.
	They're saying, these are yellow flares, bomb the yellow flares.
	They didn't realise that the US Army were using those yellow flares to get people to drop on them.
	So a lot of, I think a lot of British were killed through bombing raids on their own, unfortunately, by their own side.
	So that was a mix-up.
	You know, those mix-ups do happen.
	But yeah, they would drop all over the place.
	And then, of course, same thing happened with the paratroopers when they came in.
	The problem is with dropping parachute-borne soldiers is that it's not an exact science.
	And it certainly wasn't in the 40s.
	So it's almost a new concept, almost.
	I mean, the Germans used it earlier in the war.
	But it wasn't a tried and tested concept.
	And so anyway, especially in the dark.
	A lot of them, so there's the British Airborne Divisions, Red Devils, there's the 101st US Screaming Eagles, and the 82nd Airborne.
	Now it was the first, 101st, the first time they'd dropped into combat.
	The 82nd had been used in Sicily and Italy, so this wasn't their first party.
	Right.
	But nonetheless, so there's so much to say.
	I mean, even just about San Mariglies.
	Yeah, that's right.
	All sorts of fighting going on.
	Very contested, wasn't it?
	Wasn't it like a junction, wasn't it, San Mariglies?
	When I was 10, I went to San Mariglies and they always, every year, they put a parachutist on the steeple of the church.
	It was a guy called Steele, in fact, I remember him saying.
	And the Germans, he played dead when the Germans swept through the town.
	He couldn't get down and he played dead.
	The Germans still shot at him and shot his heel off.
	And so he sat there going, I'm being dead.
	But yeah, he actually, they obviously put someone on.
	But remember, they put paratroopers in that were like dummies as well.
	Yeah.
	Called Oscars and Ruperts.
	And so they asked the officers and they threw these dummies out there as well.
	I mean, the whole thing is staggering how all this comes together.
	And then, of course, these paratroopers that are spread all over the place form up units and then they get fighting as these different units of different people.
	Must be pretty incredible when you think about it.
	Yeah, crazy.
	So they had a number of things they needed to do.
	The two main things was try and capture key points.
	So there's a particular town just behind the beaches that you need to take.
	So there's that.
	Particular gun emplacements that we look down on over the beaches, take those.
	But also one of the main, again on a strategic level, was to take and hold the flanks.
	All the way at Utah and all the way at Seoul.
	When the Germans counter attack to just hold that up or frustrate that in any possible way.
	So they had really really key importance and there's so many stories in the book The Longest Day and in Anthony Beaver.
	They talk loads about all the different stories of all the paratroopers if anyone's ever seen Band of Brothers.
	Yeah, you ended up with 101st guys linking up with 82nd guys and just randomly making... A lot of guys fell in, there was a really marshy area.
	Yeah, flooded fields.
	Near the Deve River.
	And loads of guys drowned.
	If you accidentally jumped too late or dropped too late and fell in the sea, you're going to drown.
	You're just going to sink to the bottom before you can take your stuff off and you're going to drown.
	Quite a few guys drowned there.
	My grandfather actually, my dad's dad, was in the 101st.
	He was one of the guys that wouldn't hardly ever talk about it.
	You know, some combat vets, they love talking about it.
	They've got hats on with badges.
	It's the greatest thing that ever happened to them.
	They love talking about it.
	Other people, like, they don't really ever talk about it.
	Anyway, my granddad, who I only ever met once, was one of those guys.
	One of the only things, apparently, that the family ever sort of got out of him was that he said, on D, he dropped into France in 44, and he said he remembers seeing trees full of dead paratroopers.
	That might have been Sam Merigliese, I'm not sure, because there's all sorts of accounts of that.
	Yeah.
	Where when Sam Merigliese was being relieved, a lot of the trees around that, in and around that area, were full of dead, mainly 101st guys, I think.
	Yeah.
	Definitely paratroopers.
	Yeah.
	Anyway.
	Yeah, you're a sitting duck.
	When you're coming down on your parachute, you're sort of a sitting duck.
	Yeah, that's right, they were.
	Yeah, there's only a 35 second drop as well.
	A lot of it's only a 40 second drop.
	They're out the door and that's them.
	It's not much.
	And those 40s parachutes don't slow you down as much as a modern parachute.
	You still hit the ground bloody hard.
	Especially when you hang stuff off them and yeah.
	Incredible.
	So there's so many stories about all of that stuff.
	So a lot of historians argue whether it was a complete shambles and just an exercise in getting it all wrong or whether they actually did really well.
	Considering.
	Cornelius Ryan says that they actually do really quite well considering.
	To actually hold the flanks by the morning, by daybreak.
	They'd sort of taken, even though a lot of the gunning placements overlooking particularly Omaha Beach hadn't been taken, but a fair amount of them had and the flanks were at least disrupted So in that sense, they did well.
	Very quick, literally two or three lines here.
	We're told, quote, It was nearly dawn, the dawn that nearly 18,000 paratroopers had been fighting towards.
	In less than five hours, they had more than fulfilled the expectations of General Eisenhower and his commanders.
	The airborne armies had confused the enemy and disrupted his communications, and now, holding the flanks at either end of the Normandy invasion area, They had to a great extent blocked the movement of enemy reinforcements.
	So remarkable.
	So I guess we'll have to move on to the actual God, I'm going to have to miss that so much, unfortunately.
	The actual thing.
	Well, a quick note about Hitler and Jodl.
	So once the news got through that there is a big invasion happening on the Normandy beaches, the guys of the 7th Army Group, or Army Group B, they phoned through to Jodl or Army Group B, they phoned through to Jodl in Bavaria, in Hitler's command.
	And he said, is it like 100, 100% clear that it's the main invasion?
	They're like, well, we don't know, but it looks, it looks to be, it almost certainly is, yeah.
	And he's like, okay, thanks.
	Hung up, didn't wake Hitler up.
	Didn't, didn't, no one really knew, von Rundstedt knew, but beyond that, hardly anyone knew that Rommel wasn't even at his post.
	Like, Jodl thought Rommel was there conducting the battle.
	Yes, so... I didn't know that.
	Yodel speaks to another guy called Putkarma, an Admiral Putkarma, and they talk about it between themselves.
	Should we wake up Hitler?
	Should we?
	Because the 7th Army and von Rundstedt ask for a couple of Panzer divisions to be released from the Pas-de-Calais region, from the Paris region.
	There's the 12th Panzer Division and the Leer Panzer Division.
	Hitler was in charge of those divisions?
	Yeah, they were under OKW, in other words under Yeah, his control, only his control, that's right.
	And it should have been the protocol that, okay, they're under his command, but if the Allies are invading, just take them and use them.
	Yeah.
	That was the protocol.
	So they ring up, Von Rundstedt sent an order just for paper, just for a paper trail to say, I have in fact asked OKW.
	But when he did, they said no.
	They said, no, you can't have them and we're not going to wake Hitler up.
	I guess they were still trying to work out whether the main invasion was going to be in Calais, weren't they?
	Well a lot of them said, you're wrong, it can't be happening at Normandy, it's going to happen at Calais.
	But also remember that Op Glimmer had dropped a lot of this, what we call chaff now, but a lot of deception into that channel to make it look like there were seaborne elements moving from Dover into Calais.
	So the radar returns would have shown you a lot of returns coming into Calais at the time on the 6th and the preceding day.
	So they may well have been thinking actually there is a massive force coming up.
	Where has the time gone?
	I've only got about another 15 minutes or so before we have to get to everything.
	OK, I was going to talk about the Armada more and more descriptions of this giant, this giant thing, all the lists of different ships.
	Nah, don't worry about it.
	We can't do it, so we'll have to talk about the actual beaches then, the actual invasion.
	H-hour, at least for the more easterly beaches of Utah and Omaha, was half past six in the morning.
	Yeah, varied, didn't it?
	Half past seven for the Canadians were attacking at Juneau Beach, Golden Sword were British, but Omaha and Utah were... American beaches only, weren't they?
	And if anyone knows, the biggest amount of fatalities went down at Omaha Beach.
	Bloody Omaha.
	Yeah.
	Not that the other beaches were a cakewalk, but Omaha, and they broke Omaha into a few different segments.
	Dog Green and Fox Green were where it was a real hell, where sometimes there were close to or 100% casualties in the first waves.
	Just mown down completely.
	Because apparently the bluffs, or the cliffs, the Germans were just looking straight down on them.
	It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
	Particularly Fox Green and Dog Green, but all of Omaha Beach was no joke.
	To the point where after the third or fourth ways, Omar Bradley, who was the commander of the Americans in that, was on the ship thinking, Maybe let's just pull out there and just redirect everything to Utah.
	No, no, they kept going until they took it all.
	Um, two and a half thousand casualties.
	That's right, two and a half thousand, yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, in the scheme of things, on the Eastern Front, it's small potatoes, but to have been there, it would have been hell.
	Well, it's forcing you back into the sea, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	That's what they're trying to do, is force you back into the sea.
	Yeah.
	And the men, and I'm not blaming them, they stalled on the beaches.
	And a lot of this stuff's all about momentum.
	It's easy for me to sit here talking and say, it's all about momentum, you've got to keep pushing.
	But, Sometimes, there was a few examples of you guys, senior officers, just standing up in the hail of bullets and men saying, I don't know how he stood up and didn't get shot.
	Some people just standing up and saying, come on men.
	There's one quote where he said, the only people staying on this beach are dead people or people about to die.
	Yeah.
	So you've got to push forward.
	That's right.
	I won't even have time to talk about Poison Coconut or anything.
	Yeah, no exactly, but a lot of the armour that was coming behind them didn't actually reach the beach.
	A lot of the landing craft as well hit sandbars instead and were quite out on the water.
	They couldn't actually get into the beach, so a lot of guys drowned trying to get out.
	Yeah, and what can you do?
	You mentioned right near the beginning they had loads of amphibious tanks.
	Yeah, DDs and the Funnies.
	741st Tank Battalion, 60 plus tanks.
	They were supposed to float the last little bit and straight away 27 of them just sunk.
	27 out of I think it was 32 and actually the first guys radioed back and said don't come.
	Yeah.
	You know, but the thing about it is, the six foot waves there, they thought it was going to be one foot wave they've been testing.
	If you ever look at these weird things, they had this canvas thing around them.
	You think, that's never going to work.
	Apparently it did.
	You could float tanks.
	Who knew you could float tanks?
	But, um, it had all the hatches open and actually only five guys out of all those 20 odd tanks were killed.
	The other guys came out the hatches and swam away and went, this is ridiculous.
	But they dropped the tanks three miles out, 15,000 feet out.
	A lot of the tanks were dropped, three miles.
	They were only ever supposed to do about half a mile.
	They dropped them three miles out.
	You're like, this is going to be, you'd be on the side, wouldn't you, given it's got that Madness, yeah.
	There's loads of accounts of seasickness.
	Loads.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Loads of accounts of the landing crafts almost sinking and people bailing out with their helmets for dear life.
	I'm going to do another quote here because it paints a picture so well of particularly Omaha Beach.
	We had a giant amount of Flak going in, both from the ships or the battleships, and the air cover, and people thought, we've pounded those beaches so hard, no way anything can live.
	Nearly everything did.
	Yeah.
	Nearly everything did.
	Dug in.
	That's right.
	Yeah.
	Kanye West says, now the deadly martial music of the bombardment seem to grow and swell.
	As the thin wavy line of assault crafts closed in on Omaha Beach, landing ships laying about a thousand yards offshore joined in the shelling and then thousands of flashing rockets whooshed over the heads of the soldiers.
	For the troops it seemed inconceivable that anything could survive the weight of firepower that flayed the German defences.
	The beach was wreathed in a haze and plumes of smoke from grass fires drifted lazily down from the bluffs.
	Still the German guns remained silent.
	The boats boarded in.
	In the thrashing surf and running back up the beach, men could now see the lethal jungles of steel and concrete obstacles.
	They were strewn everywhere, draped with barbed wire and capped with mines.
	They were as cruel and as ugly as the men had expected.
	A bit further down we're told.
	Through the din and clamour, one sound was nearer, deadlier than all the rest.
	The sound of machine gun bullets.
	Clanging across the steel, snoat-like noses of the boats, artillery roared, mortar shells rained down.
	All along the four miles of Omaha Beach, German guns flayed the assault craft.
	It was H-hour.
	They came ashore on Omaha Beach, the slogging, unglamorous men that no one envied.
	No battle ensigns flew for them, no horns or bugles sounded, but they had history on their side.
	They came from regiments that had bivouacked at places like Valley Forge, Stony Creek, Antietam, Gettysburg, and had fought in the Argonne, and had crossed the beaches of North Africa, Sicily and Salerno.
	Now they had one more beach to cross, and they would call this one Bloody Omaha.
	So yeah, a lot of them were cut down.
	I mentioned Point du Coq very briefly there.
	It's where a bunch of rangers, 220-odd rangers, were tasked with scaling this almost sheer cliff, no stories higher, just with grappling hooks and ladders, or just their bare hands, because there was a gun emplacement at the top that they had to take out.
	By the end of the day, only 90 of them were left.
	And when they got up there, the guns weren't even there.
	The Germans hadn't even put the guns in place.
	They were just killed on the beach, trying to attempt to climb that cliff.
	Loads of them, yeah.
	Yeah, a lot of the actual guns were abandoned.
	Well, I say a lot.
	I mean, what does that quantify?
	I mean, it doesn't at all, does it?
	But when they did get to some artillery pieces and everything, they had been abandoned.
	Right.
	I mean, well, OK, so, I mean, it depends where you were.
	So, for example, on Gold Beach, one of the British beaches, like the Hampshire's did their beach storming and got ripped up something fearsome, massive casualties.
	And like the Dorsets, Either side of them was more or less fine.
	Hardly any casualties.
	There was one bit on Gold Beach where the account of one of the Padres was that he had nothing to do.
	They had no resistance, no casualties.
	The Padre spent all day helping unload crates of ammo.
	Yeah.
	And then one mile away, it's hell.
	Yeah.
	So it was a lottery on D-Day.
	So Utah Beach,
	That it accidentally they didn't land where they'd meant to they landed a thousand or two thousand odd meters further east Just because of the confusion of war and because the tide was yeah It was just taking them that way and so they landed not exactly where they meant to But it was fortuitous because if they'd land where they're meant to the Germans had something forum right where they did land They only had they had like under 20 casualties or something in the first instance They had to side had to decide whether to use that one
	Beachhead and the one road leading back into the mainland and ferry everything through that or try and take the part they meant to which was heavily defended.
	They decided not to and it sounded like that was a good decision.
	It saved a lot of lives.
	Isolate and move on.
	Yeah.
	So, I wanted to really talk about the actual beach stuff a lot more, but we just simply haven't got time, unfortunately.
	Maybe I can do an Epochs going into crazy detail about what happened almost minute by minute.
	So, a lot of the beaches, like Gold and Sword and Juno, in places anyway, they were off the beaches within 45 minutes an hour.
	That's right.
	Um, parts of, there was part of, uh, I think Juno Beach, they were still fighting for like five hours.
	Uh, at Omaha, like eight hours later, they're still struggling to get off the beach.
	Well, they had traffic jams on some of the beaches.
	They couldn't get off.
	I mean, the traffic was so jammed up, they couldn't move it.
	So that's why you get marshals, you get military police.
	That's my father when he was on his motorcycle.
	He was a military police officer.
	That was their job there was to get people moving off the beach so they could accommodate supplies coming in behind.
	And the military police there had all the signs up.
	You saw some of the signs in the videos, you know, decompany this way type thing.
	That was their job to marshal people out from the actual landing area to clear it for the rest of the guys coming in.
	Yeah, because one of the worst nightmare situation is there's just a, everyone's blocked on the beach.
	Get killed, yeah.
	And that's, that's a catastrophe.
	They didn't know that they weren't going to get bombed by the Luftwaffe as well.
	They didn't realise that a lot of the aircraft weren't there at the time, so.
	That's another thing, just quickly to say that in the whole of the Western Europe, the Luftwaffe had something in the order of, apparently it's, according to the historians, it's completely disputed, there's all sorts of different sources, but they had something in the order of 180-odd fighter aeroplanes, which is hardly anything to begin with.
	Then they decided a couple of days before this to move nearly all of them back to nearly the German border to defend against almost daily bombing attacks on Germany.
	So in the Normandy area they had two fighter planes, the Germans.
	One commanded by Joseph Pipps Priller and him and his wingman did fly their two planes into combat.
	Legends.
	And strafed the beaches, I think one of the British beaches.
	I mean incredible when you think about it.
	Yeah.
	Just you and your mate, what are you doing today?
	Not much mate, apparently there's an invasion going on, you're up for it, let's go and do some.
	Madness.
	Chance of getting, chance of coming back from that is Non-existent, isn't it?
	The skies are filled with British and American fighter planes, and there's two of you.
	Yeah.
	And you do it anyway.
	Well, the interesting thing about the Allied planes going across, they painted the stripes on them, the Normandy invasion stripes, because of the confusion at Sicily, where a lot of the friendly fire was directed at them.
	And those stripes on the planes were literally painted, I think on the 3rd of June, like literally before the invasion.
	Some of the paint was still wet on the aircraft when they got airborne.
	Because they're literally like paint the jets up, paint the aircraft up, paint them, paint them, paint them.
	Off you go.
	So it's a real last minute thing.
	So that's Pip's Priller.
	So God, one last thing to say there.
	So they had like no U-boat to speak of.
	They had essentially no aircraft, no air force to speak of.
	Yeah, they're very limited, yeah.
	And they had very little armour in the two Panzer divisions they did have.
	Weren't dispatched until very, very late in the day and wouldn't get to the Normandy region until the next day.
	Which was a game changer, a massive, massive game changer.
	And loads of their senior staff, including Roman himself, weren't even there.
	So we got lucky in all sorts of ways.
	It could have gone a lot, lot worse.
	It was about luck.
	From our point of view.
	About luck.
	Could have gone a lot worse.
	So just to say then, when Hitler does finally get up and hears about it, he throws a bit of a strop.
	And er... I thought he was alright about it.
	I thought he was like...
	Yeah, no, sorry, I thought he was, didn't he then kind of go, well at least that's done now, now I can concentrate on the Eastern Front?
	Didn't he kind of, wasn't that kind of his attitude?
	Like, I'm kind of alright with it?
	Well, he's not alright with it, you know?
	Right, yeah.
	Well, to begin with, when he was first told, he apparently had a stroke for about five minutes and walked out.
	Did he?
	Walked out, there was, Keitel was there, I think Keitel and Yodel told him.
	Okay.
	And he apparently was just shouting his head off for about five minutes.
	Brilliant.
	And walked out saying, is it or isn't the invasion, is it or is it not the invasion?
	And stormed off and came back minutes later and then started talking about what they actually did.
	And I think by the end of the day or the next day, his thinking, obviously still pretty far off the mark, his thinking was, well, at least it's over now, at least like that tension, we can actually start moving divisions around and try and contain them and do everything.
	So he was off the mind of bringing it on.
	Yeah.
	She's crazy.
	But yeah, they were just the back-and-forth between OB West, i.e.
	the German forces in the West, and OKW, Hitler's command, to release these panzer divisions.
	It's just this back-and-forth going, surely you're not gonna...
	not allow us to move.
	Surely you're not going to and they just kept saying no you need a word from Hitler and he hasn't given it so no.
	So from the German point of view it's just sort of crazy.
	In depth around around Caen and beyond they did have a lot of tank divisions in that SS tank panzer divisions down there and heavy armor in depth but they just didn't move up to the front.
	Yeah.
	Well not I suppose not in the way they thought it was going to.
	I think it was the 21st Panzer Division was sort of, yeah, in and around that region.
	Yeah, they weren't moved up quick enough.
	People weren't making the decisions.
	Yeah.
	Loads of the senior guys, all the way through the 6th, just kept insisting amongst themselves that this is a diversion.
	It's still coming at Calais.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Well, a lot of it was encircled, so they went around the armour and then they trapped up any supply to the armour.
	They didn't necessarily deal with the armour in the way that they thought they were going to have to.
	They just isolated it and moved on.
	Which...
	Unfortunately, we've got to start just talking about comments now.
	Oh, OK.
	Well, cool.
	Comments.
	These people are awesome, so I like talking about them.
	I think I'm going to have to do an EPOX.
	OK.
	Doing it in much more detail.
	Yeah, you should do, because there's a lot of stuff that you come out with.
	I learn so much when you dig deep into this stuff.
	I embrace them all.
	OK, so some comments here.
	Nice comments, please, because I've had a hard time this week.
	OK.
	Bleach Demon says, Beau, brilliant change in format on this auspicious day.
	Thank you.
	Er, Cringelord Commander says, great to see Tim back.
	One of the best guests ever.
	Yeah?
	Yes.
	You're not wrong.
	Loving his man.
	Tad McGage says, oh, very neat idea to have a historical day stream.
	Yeah, thanks.
	Yeah, it's nice, isn't it?
	Nord Navara says, oh, now this is quite something.
	What a way to commemorate the most important of dates.
	We will remember them.
	Maureen Peters says, every year on the anniversary of D-Day, French citizens take sand from Omaha Beach, which looks almost golden, take it to the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colliville-sur-Mer and rub it on the gravestones of the fallen soldiers.
	Yeah, on the names.
	To give the names a golden shine.
	They do this for all the soldiers buried there.
	That's nice.
	Schoolchildren are asked to join as well to make sure it stays a tradition.
	George Hap says, I appreciate honouring the anniversary of D-Day while the generals get the spotlight.
	It's the name of soldiers who have to sacrifice the most.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah.
	These poor guys, some of the first waves at bloody Omaha were just nearly 100% casualties.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, you're just all getting mowed down.
	Crazy, crazy.
	You can't really, you can't really, you can just say those words, right, but you can't really ever appreciate what that really is.
	Even watching Saving Private Ryan or whatever, you still can't I don't know how you do that.
	I think it's really weird because someone was saying that it's not really taught in school and you could argue well how much of this do we teach in school but you've got to teach enough in school that you realise there are sacrifices made so that you don't have to do those things because that tells you then when you're a young person that you might also have to make those sacrifices in future whether we agree with governments and what they're doing today or not.
	The fact is if you want to be an Englishman or you want to be a British person you have to make those sacrifices so that those coming behind you can also live.
	It just has to be that way.
	We've all got, you know, I haven't got any kids, but I've got nephews and nieces and some, you know, I joined the military for 20 years to make those sacrifices so that they don't have to.
	I'm lucky, you know, Saleer, but you're right.
	Whoever's saying that, we need to remember those individual soldiers, not just the generals.
	Yeah, definitely.
	Yeah, some of the stories of some of the paratroopers essentially behind enemy lines as the day breaks, taking out various gunning places.
	Absolutely.
	Crazy actions.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, Pegasus Bridge was one of them, wasn't it?
	They'd stormed Pegasus and they're like, there's no one here.
	The bridge wasn't even, the charges wouldn't even be laid on the bridge.
	So they went to the cafe, had a few glasses of champagne and went...
	We're still doing this war thing.
	Yeah, yeah, we are.
	Then they went off to do all the fighting.
	But of course, they went there to try and blow lots of bridges to stop the supply lines to keep other bridges open.
	And I mean, the fighting was just ridiculous.
	I mean, an open ground as well, they're landing in open ground, you know, you're just landing in a parachute, and then everyone's firing weapons at you.
	It's ridiculous.
	I mean, the glider pilots as well, they're landing in the dark in areas that they really can't see, into trees with heavy machinery behind them, you know, carrying 30 troops as well.
	I mean, ridiculous.
	It's like, who came up with that idea?
	It's just, it's like, well, you're a glider pilot, mate.
	Oh, brilliant.
	What do I do?
	Oh, you're going to slam yourself into trees.
	And hopefully, you know, you get out.
	And then they had to fight, of course.
	Well, actually, what actually happened, the glider pilots, I'll stop, the glider pilots were expected to fight with the units, but they were so rare, these glider pilots, that actually a lot of them were shipped back to the front, like straight away, get back to the beaches, show your chip, get on the boats, get back there, because we need you to bring more gliders in.
	So a lot of glider pilots had to make their own way back to the beaches.
	How are you doing that?
	Like, hold a hand of someone at least, you know what I mean?
	Walking through lanes by yourself, you know what I mean?
	Hoping you don't come across an SS Panzer division.
	Madness to get back to the beach where everyone's trying to shoot people coming that way.
	Here's my chip.
	Nowadays we think of someone that would drop behind enemy lines to be, that's sort of purely a special forces sort of role.
	You'd have to be the best of the best, the hardest of the hard.
	Yeah.
	And it's like, no, you're just a, let's say just, you're a glider pilot, but you're going to be doing something ridiculously dangerous.
	Yeah.
	Ridiculously dangerous.
	After you've done that bit.
	Yeah.
	And then you, then you're just in an escape and invasion situation.
	Off you go.
	And then if you survive and come back, we'll make you do it straight away again.
	Thanks for that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I get all the girls, so a lot I do, you know what I mean?
	It's ridiculous.
	When you say, if it was World War Two, would you rather be a tanker, an infantryman, a submariner, on a battleship?
	One of the things I wouldn't want to do is be a glider pilot.
	Yeah, can I not do that?
	Is there any option to do something other than that?
	Yeah, that's really valid.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	OK, so Sean 487 for $10 Super Chat says, my grandfather died over Flanders in Sackville, Canada a few years ago.
	Mount Allison Arts University students spray-painted Nazi symbols over the memorials.
	Yes, we're weird, aren't we?
	Young people, innit?
	I've got quite a lot of comments here.
	I obviously won't get through them all, I'm afraid.
	Well, okay, so Alex Ogle says, regarding innocents being caught up in the battles, I vaguely recall hearing about a woman's silent prayer to the bombers as they flew over her house in Europe.
	Bomb me if it kills the Nazis and frees our lands.
	Let your bombs fall on me.
	After four years of brutal rule and a command economy, rapacious stealing from everyone else to pop up their own failed ideals, as is true with all socialist endeavours, the European people were ready for invasion and would accept the risks in order to grab at freedom.
	Northern Zuma says, my great grandad landed on Sauld with the Scottish Commandos.
	Oh really?
	I remember him telling me about his vivid memories of the mad bagpiper.
	Yeah, there's lots of accounts of particularly British and Canadian guys singing.
	Yeah, you can imagine.
	Someone with bagpipes.
	Stay away from that guy.
	When the Germans hear that, that guy's in trouble.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No matter where you are, no matter where in history, if you hear, um, like the bagpipes, battle bagpipes, you're probably going to be in for a bad day.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You know, it's a bad thing for you.
	You don't want to be.
	What's that noise?
	Yeah.
	You don't want to be hearing that.
	What a legend.
	That's great though, that Zoomer there, and he says he calls himself a Zoomer, still connected with those people that went and did that.
	So that's the thing, you know, we look at the younger generation, I don't personally, I've got a lot of time for them, but a lot of people don't have a lot of time for the younger generation and yet that young person there is still talking about grandfather.
	You know, that's amazing to me.
	He goes on to say about the Mad Bag Piper, from which Lord Lovett exercised his right as Chief of Clan Frasier to have a personal piper accompany them on Salt Beach.
	And I naively asked about D-Day when I was a child.
	There's another account of a guy, Roosevelt, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, who was the old Theodore Roosevelt's son.
	And he was on the beach, he was a brigadier general, but he insisted on landing on the beach in the first wave.
	I think he was on Utah, he was on Utah.
	And there's like mortars going off all around him, and he's just smoking a pipe and looking at a map.
	You know one of those people, Absolut Sangfroid?
	He actually died, he completely survived unscratched.
	And then died of a heart attack a couple of days later.
	No, I remember this.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I read this before.
	He did, didn't he?
	Yeah.
	Got through the beaches.
	He was one of those guys that was insanely brave, just not caring that there's machine guns firing all around him.
	Water's going off all around him, just carrying on like it's not happening.
	Probably the way to go when you think about it.
	You can crawl around and get killed or you can walk and get killed, but maybe a little bit of cover would be beneficial.
	That's why a lot of the armour when it came on, they're all behind the armour trying to help the armour get up the beach with the mine tanks and everything, the flail tanks that came through, all the funny tanks they built.
	Yeah, there's so much here I'm going to have to... I'd have dug a little shell scrape probably and just hid there for a while, couple of days, you know?
	Wake me up when it's all gone.
	Covered myself with sand, you know?
	That was one of the things, on every beach, they expected the beaches to be filled with craters.
	Because they'd just seen it get completely smashed for a few hours.
	At least the beach is going to have lots of craters on it.
	Hardly any.
	Yeah, weird.
	Particularly on Omaha, they were like...
	I thought there'd be loads of cover.
	Well, they've been shelling.
	They've been shelling the fortifications.
	They've been hammering those.
	I think 5,000 tons of bombs or something ludicrous.
	Of course, a lot of them have been a bit in depth.
	They hadn't actually hit the sort of place they should have hit because of the cloud cover and stuff.
	Seems like from one of the German accounts, we took out a lot of the observation posts, but not the gunning placements.
	We thought the observation posts were gunning placements.
	That's interesting, I didn't know that.
	So, on Omaha Beach at least, I had a great paragraph here, this is no time to read it, it lists all the mortars and rockets and heavy gunning placements and like 80 machine gun nests.
	Really?
	And out of 22 heavy guns, all of them were still active.
	When the first wave landed, all of them, miraculously.
	Crazy.
	So, yeah, I keep saying it, but really, unfortunately, we've run out of time.
	I had loads more quotes and things I wanted to say, but I have to save it for an Epochs, I suppose.
	Well, I hope we've done the topic some justice.
	I hope we've talked about a couple of things, at least, that you won't get on your average Documentary.
	Yeah, hopefully.
	Yeah.
	So, well, we'll have to leave it there.
	Thanks, Tim, for your time.
	If you want to quickly say where people can find you?
	Oh, no, you know where to find me.
	I'm normally getting shouted out on Twitter or something by someone who doesn't like what I'm putting out.
	Or Fast Jet Performance on YouTube, of course.
	Yeah, Fast Jet Performance.
	Check it out.
	OK, so, well, we'll leave it there.

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