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June 6, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:29:47
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1181
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for Friday the 6th of June 2025.
I'm your host Luca, joined today by Beau, and we are going to bring you today a special D-Day special, aren't we, for the 81st anniversary of D-Day.
So this is really going to be you just cooking in the kitchen and I'm going to be, you know, listening intensely and providing commentary where it matters.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, well last year we did this, so there's no segments today.
It's just one long thing commemorating June 6th.
And last year, if you can see, I did the same thing last year with retired squadron leader Tim Davies RAF.
And I didn't get through most of the things I wanted to get through.
I mean, an hour and a half isn't really all that long.
Or an hour and twenty, more realistically.
There's so much that can be said.
I mean, there's dozens, hundreds of books written about it.
You could do hours and hours and hours and hours of content on it if you wanted to.
So, anyway, last time I talked about as much as I could.
And so this time I'll talk about all different things.
Last time, if anyone wants to go back, what was it, episode 900 and something?
I talked a lot about the Germans last time.
Talked a lot about Rommel and von Rundstedt and Hitler, Jodel, Keitel.
Talked a lot about the Atlantic Wall.
Talked a fair bit about Eisenhower and his circus wagon.
Yeah, and the fact that the Germans were really set on the idea that the invasion was going to happen at Calais.
They were convinced.
Yes.
Yeah, they were convinced.
Yeah, so this time, and I didn't get to talk much really about the fighting or about the paratroops and all sorts of things, so this time I'm going to hope there might be a little bit of crossover, but I'll talk about all different things this time.
Maybe I'll make it a yearly, an annual thing, and over a few years I'll build up, I'll be able to talk about all sorts of stuff.
Maybe next year I'll be really specific and drill down into one thing and talk about just that, but this one's again a bit of an overview.
So I feel like even though a lot has happened in the last 24 hours with reform and Trump, we'll deal with that all next week because we had this slated in for a while now.
We considered abandoning this, but no.
This is more important, I think, in the scheme of things.
Alright, so let's just jump straight in.
Let's just start talking about things.
One of the things I wanted to mention straight off the bat, which we didn't talk about last time, was a quite well-known ill-fated exercise that happened earlier in the year.
I think it was back in May.
Operation Tiger, or Exercise Tiger, where they realised they needed to sort of practice beach landings.
Because the first thing to say is that all amphibious assaults are difficult, fraught with danger, unless you're completely unopposed.
I think the Americans at Da Nang in Vietnam were completely unopposed.
So if you're completely unopposed, okay.
But if there's any sort of resistance, if there's a stiff defence, it's tough, regardless of anything, really.
I mean, I'm thinking of Salerno or Anzio earlier in the war.
It's tough.
And the Germans are good, right?
They're professional fighters.
And they've been, presumably, because they conquered France, didn't they, in 1940?
So they've had four years to prepare for this invasion.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, that's another thing to say is that for years and years and years, well, ever since 1940, really, Hitler had said...
That's the only thing that matters.
But by the time of spring 1944, he had realised that, no, he's got to, despite losing at Stalingrad and at Kursk in 1942 and 1943, he realised he had to divert a bunch of staff, a bunch of resources and men.
Over to the Western Front, because if the Allies do just break in to fortress Europe, then it's definitely lost anyway.
So, one account I was reading was saying that if the Allies had landed in, say, April or May in southern France, they would have been more or less uncontested.
But by June, up in northern France...
It was, yeah.
Last year I talked a bit about the concept of Fortress Europe and that it's not really a fortress, it's not a continuous line.
The Atlantic Wall isn't anything like a continuous line and I won't go into any detail this time because I did last year all about Rommel and von Rundstedt's issues with that.
But nonetheless, we could have invaded anywhere from sort of northern Norway all the way down to the French Pyrenees.
That whole Atlantic seaboard, we could have invaded anywhere along there.
Everyone thought, particularly on the actual German high command, Hitler and OKW and Jodl Keitel and Rommel himself, thought that, assumed it would be at Calais, because we did lots and lots of diversionary tactics to make them think that, and kept pounding the Pas de Calais as if we were softening it up.
But it was all diversionary tactics, really.
and we go at Normandy.
So, but to practise it, In fact, there were two different ones, or a few different places on the Isle of Wight.
Anyway, there was one in Dorset.
So it's a full-scale practice, making it as realistic as possible.
And it just so happened there were like nine German subs, e-boats, there, and they sunk a couple of big landing ships, and like 750-odd guys died.
God.
They were just practicing.
I don't know why.
It's probably a bad choice to choose the south coast to practice on.
Yes.
I mean, it's a good choice for some reasons, because it's similar to the Normandy coast, but it was too close to German naval assets or submarine assets.
Well, they're only across the channel, aren't they?
Well, in the channel.
Literally in the channel.
Yeah.
So that's something that often, I didn't mention it last time, often doesn't get mentioned, so I thought I'd just quickly mention it.
OK, so I think we'll start off with talking a bit about the airborne invasion, because that's a big part of it.
Again, last year, I only really touched on it, so I thought we could spend a bit of time this time talking about it in a bit more detail.
So the idea is that when the Allied troops actually hit the beaches, lots and lots of stuff has happened before then.
You've had minesweepers, because the Germans had mined the sea.
Massively.
So it was like the biggest ever minesweeping operation ever to clear two lanes through the sea for the invasion forces.
There's like two 250-odd minesweeper ships.
And then there were frogmen.
To come in and the defences, underwater defences, right at the beaches.
All sorts of baffles and mines.
All sorts of things had to be kind of swept away.
There's even a couple of allied midget subs.
So a lot of, as well as actual naval bombardment of the beaches themselves before anyone actually lands.
And on top of all of that, as well as air cover and lots and lots of bombing raids, there was this airborne invasion, obviously behind enemy lines.
Of course.
And there was the British 6th Airborne Division, the Red Devils, the 82nd, the Veteran 82nd, they'd seen action in the Mediterranean already, and the famous 101st Airborne.
The Screaming Eagles, who actually hadn't seen any combat yet.
This was their first combat stuff.
And it was, you know, a massive airborne effort.
Like 24-odd thousand guys, about 8,000 men apiece of those three divisions.
So it's a massive thing.
and it's got to be said that parachute technology was still completely in its infancy.
Like, you know, today now...
When they land, sometimes they can come in at an angle and they just run along a bit.
Yes.
And there's no hard landing whatsoever.
Well, 1940-era parachutes were not like that.
Right.
You had very little steering and you came down hard.
And if you were laden down with lots and lots of gear, as they nearly all were, you could come down really hard.
And if you're unlucky, or actually, if you're a bit older...
And even if you're not, even if you're a bit unlucky, even if you're a 19-year-old and fighting fit, you can still break a leg or just hit something on the way down and break your hip.
Loads of guys were injured as soon as they hit the ground.
As soon as they hit the ground, they're badly injured.
And then you're injured behind enemy lines as well.
With luck of the draw on whether or not they come across you.
You're sort of worse than useless.
You're then a burden.
Both on D-Day and in Operation Market Garden, there's a senior officer who gets his men to wheel him around in a barrow for the next few days or weeks.
Because he's not prepared to not continue.
But he just cannot walk.
There's lots of accounts of French civilians and things finding paratroopers and, like, their back's broken or something, you know?
Yeah, I remember you talking to Tim in the last episode as well about just trees, trees full of dead paratroopers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or just ghastly.
Yeah, or sometimes whole fields just filled with Because there's two delivery mechanisms.
One is to parachute out of an airplane.
The other was gliders.
Gliders come in and land, stroke crash land.
But if you came in by parachute, even though they dropped you very low, only a few hundred feet, you're only in the air for 30, 40 seconds maybe, that whole time you're a complete sitting duck.
So sometimes if you're unlucky to drop over, you know, a machine gun position.
For the Germans, shooting fish in a barrel, you're a giant target.
Even at night, they can see your parachute.
Apparently, the parachutes are all different colours as well.
You think they're always white, but they're not.
All the accounts say they're all different colours.
Is there a reason for that?
Not that I know of.
I guess it's just a case of the material.
Yeah, I suppose so.
using as any parachute they can get their hands on.
Right.
So, uh, yeah, there are accounts of fields, Oh yeah, trees.
A guy would get hung up in a tree and once again for the Germans, the easiest thing in the world just to shoot you there and that's where you hang until that bit of ground is formally liberated and you can be cut down.
Yeah, loads of accounts of that.
So, okay, a quick super high-level rundown of the war by 1944.
I said last time that on the Eastern Front, there was a late thaw, the Soviets were already in Poland, and their summer offensive, they hadn't launched it yet because of a late thaw.
There's a little bit more to it than that.
In fact, Stalin was deliberately waiting.
As was everyone, really.
Right.
Everyone was waiting to see what happened here.
Because the Allies, Churchill and Roosevelt, had been saying, we're going to create a Western Front for you, Joe.
They've been saying that since 1942.
Yes.
And Stalin's just waiting and waiting and waiting.
And by this point, by June, May, June 1944, Stalin's like, I'm just going to wait.
Waiting for you to do this.
And even the Japanese are watching on tentatively, right?
because if the Allies were pushed back at Normandy and it was a failure, it was sort of a Dieppe style failure, then the whole war would have gone a different way because the Allied policy was Europe first.
So everything in the Pacific would have been Of course.
We would have needed months again to build up.
So basically everyone's holding their breath for this amphibious invasion.
And of course the Germans are.
And went into it last year all about how they got it wrong.
The senior commanders on the German side got it wrong.
They thought the weather was too bad.
Because the Allies would always launch this sort of thing in the Mediterranean, for example, in North Africa, when the skies were clear.
And this wasn't the case.
So particularly Rommel had convinced himself it would probably be in Calais anyway, and it certainly won't be on the 5th or the 6th of June because the weather's too crap.
So he wasn't even in the country.
He was back in Germany visiting home on some leave.
And lots and lots of senior commanders on the German side.
Weren't there for whatever reason.
I find it so interesting about just the question of the weather.
When you think back to the Norman Conquest or something, and you go back to Godwinson, and the fact that the Conqueror was delayed because simply the weather, the winds were in the wrong direction.
And it's even over nearly 900 years later, even though technology is so much more advanced, even though everything's just so much more efficient now, the weapons are more destructive.
Those simple things, those simple eternal questions of war, such as just what's the weather like, still are massively important in the larger calculus.
Is it a high tide?
Is it a full moon?
Yeah.
All that sort of thing, yeah.
I mean, it's interesting actually that Normandy, this isn't Normandy's first rodeo, having war pass through it.
You'd have to go back a few hundred years, but during the medieval period, or even the dark ages or the ancient world, The Normandy, Picardy, northern, northwestern France region, seen loads of war over the centuries, loads.
So, yeah.
Okay, so going on, talking specifically then a bit more about the airborne stuff.
So they had lots and lots of different objectives, lots and lots of different things they had to achieve because they were dropped in the night before and the wee hours, starting from...
And they've got until dawn, well, until half six, seven, half seven, to achieve lots and lots of different things before the actual landings happen.
All sorts of targets they want to destroy or take out.
But broadly speaking, the broadest thing, the most important thing, was to take out gun emplacements, particularly big, heavy gun emplacements that could rain shells down on the beaches themselves, Supplier lines or roads and bridges to stop German reinforcements.
Because the Allies need, absolutely crucial need, a few hours to establish some sort of foothold.
And if the Germans counter-attack immediately Then the whole thing U-Kort flat-footed and back into a sea.
And we knew, everyone knew, that the 7th Army was defending the Normandy region, but a much...
We could not allow that to happen.
Of course.
So on the eastern side of the area was the British and Canadian side, and more west, more towards Cherbourg, is the American side.
So, arguably, one of the most important things was for the paratroopers during the night, or the wee hours of the 6th, to cause havoc and destruction on all the roads and bridges that lead from the east, from the Paris-Calais area into Normandy.
That was just of key importance.
So, one of the big things was that there was this big gun battery at Meurville.
And this is very well documented.
So that's why I'm only picking and choosing some of the most famous things here.
Sure.
There's an image of it afterwards.
You can see how peppered it was.
All those shells, yeah.
And the idea was that something in the order of 700 odd paratroopers were meant to attack it all at once from four directions.
And the idea that you all drop and you all team up, it doesn't work like that.
It's just so chaotic.
So in the end, the guy had something in the order of 150, 160 odd guys instead of 700 odd.
So that's in the quarter of what you'd anticipated having.
Yeah, yeah.
To attack this very heavily defended gun battery, which had heavy guns on it.
Turns out in the end the guns weren't quite as heavy as we thought they were going to be, but they were still heavy enough with ranging in the order of eight miles, plenty to hit the beaches still.
So we had to take out the Merville battery, otherwise loads more men would have died on the beaches, loads more.
I mean, there's a picture of it these days.
And even now you can see, I mean, if you can imagine, the whole area around it was mined, heavily mined, loads of barbed wire, machine gun nests, all sorts of things.
There's something like 200 odd German defenders, but when you're dug in, even 700 versus 200 is close.
Oh, yeah.
So 150, 60 odd versus 200, it seemed...
There it is, sort of, at the time.
And, again, the plan had been that they'd have some guys that had those Bangalores and had wire cutting, special wire cutting and mine clearing troops with the equipment.
They didn't have hardly any of it.
Right.
Because so many of those people that they'd anticipated having didn't make it.
That equipment didn't turn up either.
Scattered over a vast distance.
Scattered all over the place.
Some landing 20 miles back.
Some landing in the sea.
It was haphazard, to say the least.
So they had to do that thing where you crawl forward inch by inch with a knife and prod the ground to find mines.
And like hand cut the wire and yeah, it was far from ideal.
And the idea was that also during the night another three gliders would come in and drop like during the attack and drop inside the battery, land inside the battery.
To help out.
But they could only do that if a particular flare was shot up.
The commander didn't have the flare.
So that wasn't coming in.
Yeah, that was not happening then.
And then at a certain point in the morning, once the sun had come up, if another signal hadn't been sent, then the big guns from the battleships were going to open up on it.
They would assume that they'd failed.
Yes.
And because we simply couldn't have the guns at Merville firing on the beaches, if a certain signal wasn't sent, they were going to try and wipe it off the map just with the big naval guns.
Because most casualties in war, certainly in war, were from artillery, weren't they?
And so, yeah, if those guns aren't taken out, then it makes everything dramatically harder.
Well, they would have been able to rain down...
Yes.
If it wasn't taken out.
It just had to be taken out.
So they decide to attack with only 150 odd guys through the night, which is what they did.
And they took it remarkably.
I mean, it's a real true act of heroism.
They lost half their guys doing it.
Nearly all the Germans were killed.
I think they took 20, 23 odd prisoners by the end of it.
The Germans put up a stiff defence.
Actually, a couple of times they forgot to shut and lock the doors in their bunkers.
Really?
Come straight in.
But no, there was heavy fighting at Merville and gallant actions were made.
So yeah, that's one of the highlights from the airborne side of things.
To already be against the odds and to already have the plan go that far awry and still manage to pull victory back from that is, yeah, as you say, truly heroic.
And with 15 minutes to go before the big guns out of sea were going to open up on it, he was able to shoot up the signal, which was seen.
Wow.
Yeah.
So yeah That's a bit of a win For us on that day Luckily Another sort of Quite famous thing There's a couple of bridges Over And a man built canal running parallel with it.
We had to take out those bridges, the Pegasus Bridge, and we called it the Pegasus Bridge, and the Horsa Bridge, Ranville and Bonneville, but we called them Pegasus.
There's a film, isn't there, about Pegasus Bridge?
If there is, I'm not familiar with it, but I'll take your word.
That went really quite well.
The gliders happened to land without completely annihilating themselves, or most of them, really close.
One, its nose sort of touched the barbed wire of the German defences, so it couldn't have been any closer sort of thing.
Wow.
And we stormed it successfully.
A few casualties, a few casualties, but we essentially stormed those two bridges really successfully, basically before the Germans knew what was happening.
So again, I was about to say lucky.
Perhaps lucky isn't the word.
But it was a great success because, yeah, panzer divisions could have just rolled straight across those bridges and we couldn't have that.
So, again, a touch of luck.
All these little victories growing into the larger victory.
Yeah.
I mean, some have said just a general point about the airborne side of the invasion.
Looking back on it, some historians say the whole thing was a complete shambles and embarrassment and should never have been done.
Others have said, considering they did brilliantly, considering everything, you couldn't have asked for a great deal more.
I think overall, well, the invasion was a success in the end.
Those beaches didn't become actual...
the Germans didn't counterattack with armour and kill and push us back into the sea.
So by that metric...
The tanks did not come across a Pegasus bridge.
Well, actually, yeah, for a while.
Oh, right.
To mention, at Merville, within 48 hours, the Germans had recaptured it.
Because after we'd taken them out, all the paratroopers moved on to other targets.
There was like a radio thing they wanted to take out.
They moved on to other objectives.
Anyway, actually, within 48 hours, the Germans had retaken it and were firing from it again.
But anyway, for those crucial few hours on the morning of the 6th, the Merville gun battery was silent.
There's an aerial view of the Pegasus and Horsa bridge.
Again, sort of the stuff of legend, almost.
But yeah, I think so about the Pathfinders.
So before the actual paratroopers came down, we dropped or landed what were called Pathfinders.
And they're, you know, airborne troops.
But their job was to not fight necessarily, although they did.
In the first instance, their job was to be sneaky.
Quite often if they came across any Germans they'd run away or if they're fired upon by the Germans they wouldn't fire back.
They'd disappear into the night because their job was to light the way for the next lot.
Yes, okay.
And also other things like make contact with some of the French civilians and various things.
Their job wasn't to just shoot the first Nazi you can find.
And they're all blacked up, actual blackface.
Oh, right, yeah.
Not like a little bit of camo on the cheekbones, no, the full black.
Yeah.
And to be sneaky bastards.
Not to just start killing anything and everything, not just demolish the first thing you find.
But they were all volunteers.
Remarkable.
You know, it's almost like a suicidal thing, isn't it?
You can expect it to be a one-way ticket, deep behind enemy lines and all that sort of thing.
So the Pathfinders, got to give a shout out to them.
Very brave young men.
Yeah, that's remarkable.
Very, very brave.
Do you know how many?
Oh, how many Pathfinders?
I haven't got an exact number for you, but it was in the hundreds.
Yes.
It would be in the low hundreds.
And also, from the French point of view, this is like the first, for a lot of people, that aren't in the know.
That aren't actually in the French Resistance.
This is the first inclination they've got that anything's happening.
At like midnight or 1am, some big American, or to them, some big American burly 20-year-old falls out of the sky into their pea patch or into a tree in their garden or something.
And he's like covered in grenades and ammo, in blackface.
Yeah.
Oh, mohawk, a lot of them shave their head in mohawk fashion.
Right.
Blackfaced, covered in knives, grenades, bullets, and they're physically big, a lot of the accounts are, and sort of a terrifying prospect.
Very quickly, you know, within seconds or at least minutes, you realise that they're an Ameri.
An American or a Brit.
And that they're there to help.
It's part of the landings.
Or the French would call it the debarquement.
That's what the French always called it.
It's happening.
Again, they'd been waiting for it since 1940.
They'd hoped that it was coming ages ago, a year ago or more.
And a lot of the French accounts that they couldn't believe it's happening.
It's actually happening.
Yeah, must have been a remarkable moment of hope.
And also, another thing from the French point of view, you would have thought that if you lived quite close to the sea, or you lived within the region where paratroops were dropping, you think, oh, we're going to be liberated within hours or a day or two at most.
Not always the case at all.
No, it might be.
If you live five, ten miles back from the beaches, no, that's where some of the heaviest fighting will be.
You might not be liberated for a few weeks.
Your village might change hands a dozen times.
So you think, oh, the Americans are here, the Brits are here, we're safe, it's all over.
Not necessarily at all.
In fact, you're probably in for some of the worst fighting, or among the worst fighting in France, maybe.
Okay, so talk about Saint-Mère-Eglise, or as the French would call it, Saint-Mère.
A lot of the time they just call it Saint-Mère.
Loads of fighting.
Went on there.
It's sort of famous.
It's famous to the point of cliché almost.
The fighting that went on in and around St. Mary's.
Because again, it's just one of the more well-documented things.
A lot of the people that survived it wrote memoirs and things.
So it just happens to be among the more documented flashpoints.
So let's talk about Samer for a bit.
So that night...
She says she's laying in bed and she notices that outside, out the window, it's been lit up by all different colours, though.
They're used to bombing raids.
Sure.
But there's all different colours of flares and tracer going up.
Even for...
And then exactly that happened to her.
An American paratroop falls in her garden.
And anyway, one of the houses around the square, the central square at St. Maryglise, there was a big fire broke out.
One of the big townhouses was completely ablaze.
And so loads of the townsfolk, because there was a curfew, not allowed out at night, they had formally asked the Germans, the relatively small garrison of Germans in the village, I think it's only in the order of 30 or 40 or 50 Germans, they'd ask them, can we break the curfew and put the fire out?
We need every hand in the village, almost passing buckets, hand-to-hand stuff, to put this out.
And so they do.
So loads of the townsfolk, village folk, are congregated in the square.
And most of the German garrison are there as well, just basically watching them, probably having a cigarette, smoke if you've got them, just to make sure they're not going to do anything other than put this fire out.
Sure, yes.
And then suddenly loads of marines, not marines, paratroopers, are falling out of the sky all around.
And the Germans weren't supposed to sort of be there ready with their guns, but they were.
So, loads of them were shot out of the sky.
And one guy, actually, fell directly on the church.
Oh.
His name was John Steele.
And he was shot through the foot.
He was shot through the foot.
As he was falling.
As he was falling.
And then his parachute got caught up.
Yes.
It's not a real human dare.
A cruel practical joke, wouldn't it?
He looks a bit like an action man figure.
It might be a bit before your time, but 1970s-era action man figure, complete with parachute.
And he just played dead, because he couldn't get himself down.
And he played there for hours until eventually the Germans cut him down.
He was taken prisoner, but he lived.
But loads of different people, both...
In fact, he wasn't actually dead.
So there was fighting all throughout the next day, over the various days in and around San Mariglis.
So again, it's sort of something to mention.
Do you know if, did he survive the war?
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, I want to play this little clip because the Germans were quite ruthless.
I mean, both sides were ruthless.
It's war.
It's war, but it's a very famous opening to the world at war, the 70s world at war.
I want to talk a little bit about the French experience.
The Germans did sometimes, often, maybe not often, but sometimes on their retreat, the type of revenge would pass through places and kill everyone there.
There's a bitter animosity between the Germans and the French.
Right, yeah.
Going back to time immemorial.
Yeah, but also just within living memory of those people.
World War I was French revenge for the Franco-Prussian War.
And then in turn, you know, World War II was revenge from Germany for World War I. Yeah, I mean, well, you can go all the way back to the ancient world.
Well, yes, of course you can, but within living memory, people would have...
And yeah, that feeling would have been very strong.
I was reading just recently a little aside about Charlemagne massacring Saxons.
Oh yes.
Tens of thousands of Saxons executed in one day and stuff.
So yeah, the animosity.
Fantastic Sir Christopher Lee heavy metal song about that.
Oh, is there?
Oh yes.
Oh, I don't know that.
Oh, I'll send it to you.
Oh, okay.
But no, yeah, the animosity between the French and the Germans.
So let me play this.
It's Laurence Olivier.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
This is Oredour-sur-Glane in France.
The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together.
The men were taken to garages and barns.
The women and children as their men were shot.
Then they were killed too.
A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead in battle.
They never rebuilt Ordu.
Its ruins are a memorial.
Its martyrdom stands for thousand upon thousand of other martyrdoms in Poland.
In Russia, in Burma, in China, in a world at war.
The End Classic world at war documentary.
Compared to the Eastern Front or some other places in World War II, it's not as brutal.
the numbers of casualties are much smaller.
You know, like the Battle of the Bulge, one of the biggest battles on the Western Front in World War II, is dwarfed by some Battles that happened on the Eastern Front that no one's ever really heard of Right But nonetheless Still heart-rending And bloody And if you lived through it Horrific.
And you can understand why the French wouldn't want to rebuild after that.
You know, the place is just marred forever by the psychic horror of what happened there.
You'd feel it in the air.
It would cling to the air.
The memory of it would have been, yeah, so horrible.
Well, like a lot of big wars like this, big total wars, the people that suffer the most, arguably.
Are civilians.
So a few more minutes about the French side of it.
Not only did the Germans sort of brutalise them on the way out, but they were brutalised by the Allies.
And there's nothing we could do about it, really, in a way, because it was just the way war was done at that point.
Collateral damage, we call it now.
Yeah.
Right.
So, for example, in the few weeks it took to sweep through Normandy and Picardy, something in the order of 18, 20,000 French civilians were killed.
Mostly by Allied air forces.
We say something like the commanders, the planners, we need to make sure that Caen is destroyed.
We can't have the Germans regrouping in Caen or anything.
It needs to be destroyed.
Yeah, it's full of civilians though It's like, hmm We'll send in light bombers at like a thousand feet to try and do some sort of precision bombing, but the heavy bombers at like 16,000 feet, it's basically indiscriminate.
Yes, of course.
It's basically indiscriminate.
I mean, so, yeah, there was quite a few what they called martyred towns or martyred cities.
Like Khan was, three quarters of it was flattened.
Most of the people left homeless.
Thousands and thousands of them killed.
You know, women and children and stuff.
Le Havre was annihilated, essentially.
And loads of places, just loads of places.
The top brass would see it on the map and say, like, this needs to be completely swept out of any sort of German military assets.
No, destroy it.
For the larger cause of French liberation.
Yeah.
It's interesting that the French, largely, by and large, Accepted it.
There wasn't, like, a giant movement of, you're committing war crimes against us.
They were like, no, yeah, we get it.
This needs to be done.
We've had enough of German occupation.
if this is what it takes then so be it it's quite a sang-froid quite a noble way to Yeah, very stoic.
Take it on the chin, yeah.
Big time.
Big time.
Remarkable, really.
You know, like British or American planes just killed all your family, but you survived, and you're like, well, it's better that than being ruled by a Mr. Hitler in Berlin.
Forever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's funny, funny, interesting, not funny, ha-ha.
Funny, interesting, the odd things that bombs and ballistics do sometimes, stranger than fiction things.
Right.
There's one account I was reading just the other day.
Where this house got blown up.
And the remnants of the house, where the house once was.
And in the basement, they found nine civilians huddling there.
And they hadn't been blown apart, but they were all dead from the concussion.
But in what was left of the kitchen, there was a basket full of eggs, and none of the eggs were broken.
That's bizarre.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Another account, there was a guy in his attic, looking out the window.
A bomb comes in.
You can only imagine it at an oblique angle, not straight through the top.
Blows the house up entirely.
The entire house is gone, apart from the roof and the attic that he's in.
And he just finds himself at ground level, and he's okay.
Well, he's got scratches and cuts.
He's essentially fine.
Astonishing.
And the house under him is annihilated, and the room he's in is still intact.
He's just at ground level now.
He's just a few metres.
It's odd, isn't it?
It's funny what things do.
I mean, even bullets can do weird things.
Like they're into someone's hip and come out their ear and stuff Yeah it's just Horrible stuff, but interesting, I suppose, nonetheless.
I want to say a quick word about Hitler and the German response, because Cornelius Ryan says that the German response was quite slow, really.
I mean, thank God it was quite slow.
I think, I can't remember the exact wording, but he said something like, it was as if a patient coming round from a general anaesthetic, sort of slowly, groggily coming round to the realisation that this is the real invasion.
Because there'd been quite a few false dawns before, and everyone thought it'd be at Calais.
And loads of people, loads of the German High Command thought this was a diversion.
It was still coming to Calais.
This is just a diversion.
People that were actually on the beaches looking out to sea, seeing the Armada, knew it wasn't.
Yes.
But their words didn't get to the right people quickly enough.
I talked about it last time.
Hitler didn't get up until midday almost.
Well, no one woke him.
Yeah.
Well, let me read this quick paragraph.
And it is from Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day.
It says, So this is still in the middle of the night, this would have been.
Jodel was asleep and his staff believed that the situation had not developed sufficiently enough yet for his sleep to be disturbed.
The message could wait until later.
Not more than three miles away at Hitler's mountain retreat, the Fuhrer and his mistress, Eva Braun, were also asleep.
Hitler had retired as usual at 4am and his personal physician, Dr. Morrell, had given him a sleeping draft as he was unable to sleep now without it.
At about 5am, Hitler's naval aide, Admiral Karl von Puttkamer, was awakened by a call from Yodel's headquarters.
Putkama recalled, he could not now recall who it was, said that there had been some sort of landings in France.
Nothing precise was known as yet.
In fact, Puttkama was told that the first messages were extremely vague.
Did Puttkama think that the Fuhrer should be informed?
Both men hashed it over, then decided not to wake Hitler.
Puttkama remembered that there wasn't much to tell him anyway, and we both feared that if I woke him at this time, he might start one of his endless nervous scenes, which often led to the wildest decisions.
Puttkama decided that the morning would be time enough to give Hitler the news.
He switched off the light and went back to sleep.
I don't know how he went back to sleep after hearing that.
Yeah.
Oh, it's probably just a diversion.
Anyway, I've done that.
Yeah, it's weird, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, kind of odd.
That's remarkable.
How long was it after the initial land invasion that the German side actually, you know, realised that, well, now you've got Stalin in the east, you've got the Allies landed, and obviously you said as well they'd taken Rome by that point as well.
Yeah, Rome fell the day before.
Yeah.
So at what point was it?
The case of realising that this was not looking like victory.
You know, like they couldn't possibly win it now.
Well, I mean, it depends who you would ask.
Many thought that the war was on the German side.
Some thought the war was unwinnable by February 1943.
Others thought even when the Allies were deep into France, they thought we could still...
Even some after Operation Market Guard.
So it's not over yet.
It's still good.
Right.
So it depends who you are.
I see.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, that is the answer.
All right, so this giant armada, the biggest naval armada ever put together, something in the order of 5,000 ships, 700 of which are big.
Ships of war.
Cruisers, destroyers, even some big battleships.
Nevada was there.
But all in all, something in the order of 5,000 craft.
Sort of filling the sea all the way from the English south coast.
Must have been the most astonishing sight.
Yeah, it would have been.
Absolutely.
And the air cover and everything going on.
I did describe a paragraph or two of the Armada last time, but I've got another paragraph here, which I think is good, again from Ryan.
He says, quote, Never had there been a dawn like this.
In the murky grey light, in majestic fearful grandeur, the great Allied fleet lay off Normandy's five invasion beaches.
The sea teemed with ships.
Battle ensigns snapped in the wind all the way to the horizon.
From the edge of the Utah area on the Cherbourg Peninsula, To Sword Beach near the mouth of the Orn.
Outlined against the sky were the big battle wagons, the menacing cruisers, the whippet-like destroyers.
Behind them were the squat command ships, sprouting their forests of antennae.
And behind them came the convoys of troop-filled transports and landing ships, lying low and sluggish in the water.
Circling the lead transports, waiting for the signal to head for the beaches, were swarms of bobbing landing craft, jam-packed with men who would land in the first waves.
The great spreading mass of ships seethed with noise and activity.
Engines throbbed and whined as patrol boats dashed back and forth through the milling assault craft.
So yeah, again, just what a sight it would have been.
And the defence is...
And the real answer is it's sort of both.
In places, it's a bit patchy.
In places, they really were formidable defences.
In other places, not very much at all.
So, I mean...
Juno was the Canadian one, although there were British Marines there as well.
Particularly on the British beaches, he called it spotty.
So in some places, there was heavy fighting, and in other places, hardly any.
Like on the American beaches, Utah and Omaha were very different prospects.
Not that Utah was a pushover, but The last thing mainly I'll talk about is Omaha Beach, where the vast majority of casualties, on the beach anyway, were taken at Omaha.
Bloody Omaha.
Because it was one of the most impenetrable parts.
Yeah.
Something like 2,400-odd guys were killed there.
And on the other beaches, it was in the hundreds, usually.
So, alright, so Rommel's defence is not just sort of on the land where there's gun emplacements and machine gun nests, but also out to sea, lots and lots of baffles, lots and lots of mines, sea mines, an unbelievable amount.
Yeah, the Germans hadn't neglected Normandy.
It was much more heavily defended around the Pas de Calais, but they're far from neglected the Norman area.
So there's sort of a classic little map, high-level map of what's going on.
So Sword, Juno Gold.
Because what we really needed, after you've actually got the toehold, the beachhead, we need a deepwater harbour.
Now Cherbourg's got a deepwater harbour.
Dieppe is one.
You know, Calais is one.
But until we actually liberated those, Well, just a man-made harbour.
Yes.
Constructed a little way out to sea, a few hundred yards off the coast, so we can get the big ships to disembark all the materiel, further men and materiel we need, everything we need, to invade Hitler's Europe until it actually took Cherbourg or somewhere like that, or Dieppe or something.
So again, a wonder of engineering the Mulberry, the Mulberry thing, there's another, There you go.
Here's a map of sort of zoomed in a bit more on the British and Canadian ones.
And so you can see why Khan got peppered big time.
Why it was wiped off the map almost.
Because, well, there were Germans there and later they could bring up reserves from Paris or from Calais.
Divisions of tanks, and we're talking.
Tens of thousands more guys.
They would come through Caen.
So, we have to destroy it.
Forgive me if I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but what did happen with the case of the Calais garrison?
Did they move down?
Yeah, yeah.
The Allies didn't stop them from advancing.
Oh, well...
Yeah, they came down and joined battle.
So it took a while.
Hitler didn't really get the news until about midday.
And even then, it was a few hours before the couple of heavy panzer divisions were dispatched from the Paris and Calais region.
And then they didn't get there until either the evening of the 6th or the next day.
And that was all the time.
It was just about the time the Allies needed to get the toehold on the beaches and push just a mile or two inland so that we weren't ever rolled into the sea.
So the Germans effectively dropped the ball there.
Their strategy had been, Rommel had decided that they would try and meet us on the beaches wherever possible.
They failed to do it.
He'd said, I want every single tank in the whole of France dug in.
Into sort of redoubts overlooking the beaches.
If I had my way, that's what I'd be doing.
He didn't get his way.
And then when it finally came on the 6th, they weren't quick enough to react.
So there you go.
And all these places you can see, they were all fought over.
All the names you can see there.
They've all got their own story.
Of various things that went down.
I mean, like I say, I'm not exaggerating that we could do an hour, an hour and a half on one village.
Any one of those places.
One town.
Again, some of them changed hands half a dozen times, a dozen times, two dozen times.
So, again, it's sort of like in a lot of wars.
It's kind of just potluck whether the war comes to you or not.
Yes.
One village over barely sees any action, but your village...
Gets annihilated, yeah.
And there's sort of no way to survive it, almost.
Okay, so quick rundown of the various beaches.
Bloody hell, we've already been going for 50 minutes.
Okay.
So, first of all then, Sword Beach, British Beach, one of the biggest amount of...
Anyway, we suffered something in the order of 600 to 700 odd casualties on Sword Beach.
again nothing like Omaha but if you were there it's not nothing I think that quite often a Yeah.
I think particularly because a lot of the narrative is dominated by the United States and by, like, Saving Private Ryan or whatever.
So it's like Omaha was the main thing that happened and everything else is a sideshow.
I mean, that's just not what it was.
That's not how it was.
Salt Beach would have been for a while anyway.
Only a few hours.
Only two or three hours.
Once again, it's a long front.
Like from the easternmost end of Sword Beach to the westernmost end of Utah.
It's like 50 miles.
Right?
Omaha Beach alone is the best part of four miles.
So it's miles along.
It's not like a little cove of a beach.
It's really quite a big area.
So there, there were...
And there's another bit more in depth.
All the different sectors are given their names and things.
There's some great stories of beach masters.
Once you get on the beach, it would be some sort of Sergeant Major's job to just make sure that no one dallies on the beach.
No dallying on the beach.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no slacking.
And even senior officers would...
And the beach master comes up and is just like, get off the beach!
There's one famous story a lot of people remembered of a guy who somehow had an Alsatian with him.
And he just wouldn't take any crap from anyone.
It was his job to get people off the beach and inland, off the dunes and keep going.
And just wouldn't take any crap from anyone under any circumstances.
And even like colonels and generals are like, okay, I get it.
I get it, okay.
I'll do as I'm told, fine.
Am I right in thinking it was D-Day with that story of that man, I can't remember if it was American or British, who had a longbow?
There was one guy who had a longbow on the beach.
I don't know.
I don't know.
There was John Churchill.
There's various accounts of people doing weird all sorts of things like that.
There's one guy who had a golf club.
Or a cricket bat with him.
And there's all sorts of stories like that.
Excentric people.
There's the bagpipers on the beach.
There's an anecdote of a bagpiper standing up playing the pipes.
And people all around him, while the fighting's going on, with their heads down, hoping for dear life not to catch a bullet.
They can't believe there's this Highlander there playing the pipes.
Loads of stories like that.
Again, sort of almost stranger than fiction.
Sort of unbelievable.
Quite literally unbelievable, but it happened.
Quite often, there'll be some senior officer walking along under fire, just slowly walking along with his pipe in his mouth.
All sorts of crazy things.
Some men are fearless, or at least affect fearlessness when it matters.
Yes.
Right?
I'm not sure I wouldn't be one of those men.
No, I wouldn't be one of those people.
I know it.
Yeah Yeah I like to think I would Yeah In daydreams But in reality I'll be If I'm being peppered By machine gun fire Yeah.
I don't think I could do that.
An M42 Hitler's buzzsaw is barking at me from relatively close range.
Yeah, I'm going to hit the deck.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm not standing up playing the bagpaps for love nor money.
These men were remarkable.
So I wanted to show people some pictures of, you know, what it was really like.
This is Sword Beach.
And this is obviously a little bit later in the morning.
And you can see.
And there's loads of sandbanks as well.
Often you think there's just the sea.
And then a sandy beach, and that's it.
But no, it was, because it's like quite an open flat, you actually have, and the tide was half in, half out, you had sort of sandbanks, and then trenches where there's a bit more sea, and so on.
So, yeah, there's another, this again is sword.
So how long did it take to storm sword?
A few hours.
They were off the beach within a few hours.
Two or three hours, I think.
Something in that ballpark.
So relatively quickly, we were lucky.
If the Germans had more time and men and materiel and hadn't been a bit unlucky from their point of view in a few different ways, it could have been a hell of a lot worse.
It could have been a hell of a lot worse.
And if Romain would have had his tanks as he wanted.
I mentioned Salerno and Anzio.
Earlier, I mean, those were much more fiercely fought over landings.
I mean, even in ancient times, even at like Marathon, it's difficult to fight up a beach when the defenders don't want you to.
It's very difficult.
Anyway, that's what SWORD looks like these days.
There's still those casements from the Mulberry, what was supposed to be temporary harbours.
But the remnants of them are still there.
You can see how the sea is peppered with Rommel's defences.
A lot of those baffles were also mined.
Yeah, because men would naturally be inclined to go towards them to get cover, so you mine them too.
Or if your landing craft accidentally nudges one, it blows up, yeah.
There is an aerial view.
Oh, yes.
Okay, Gold Beach.
At Gold Beach, there was about 350 killed, about 1,100 casualties and 350-odd killed.
So once again, it seems like small potatoes.
When you look at the siege of Kiev or something, you think, well, that's sort of nothing.
But once again, if you were there on that day, I'm sure it wouldn't have seemed like nothing.
Yeah, I don't think that would comfort you.
Yeah, right, yeah, that's no comfort.
And there was a 30 Corps, went ashore there, the famous 30 Corps of Market Garden fame, with the backbone of which was the 8th Armoured Division, also the 50th Infantry and the 56th Infantry Brigade, so a purely British beach there.
Oh, and 4-7 Commander as well, Royal Marines.
And again, all those places you can see on the map.
All sites of fighting going down.
There's a bit more of a better, more detailed map of it anyway.
There's some pictures.
Some actual pictures.
You see bigger and smaller types of landing craft.
A guy blacked up there for camo.
Because these guys, of course, getting off the beach is only the first.
It's only the first few hours of their weeks or months long fight.
Oh God, yeah.
They're expecting to fight all the way to Berlin, potentially.
Yes.
Right, so this is only the very, very opening gambit of their torment.
They've got bicycles.
It's funny all the different things they would bring ashore, not just men and eventually armour, but like bulldozers, just everything.
Anything and everything you think you might need.
Yeah, a bunch of bicycles you've got there.
That's what it looks like today.
Again, it's very open.
Yeah, phenomenally.
If it was your job to sweep that with a machine gun, perfect.
In a diabolical way.
Yes, yes.
Horrible, really horrible.
There again, the remnants of what was once there.
Okay, Juno.
Juno Beach, it was Canadian and British, but mainly Canadian.
Incidentally, just to mention, at one point during the planning phase, it was considering whether there'll be three entirely separate operations, a British, a Canadian and a US thing.
They'd all do it on the same day, but essentially completely three different things.
That was actually in the offing at one point, and they decided, no, we need an overall combined, joined-up operation.
Yes.
So anyway, the Canadians go ashore at Juneau, the 3rd Infantry, 3rd Canadian Infantry, and 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade, and 4-8 Commando as well, obviously British Marines.
And they had about 1,000 casualties, about 340-odd killed, so similar-ish to Gold Beach.
Once again, not to labour the point, When they push inland, each one of these places has got its own little story of heroism and tragedy.
Okay, there you can see.
I mean, all this stuff is documented to a remarkable degree.
Yes.
Yeah, gosh.
So when I say I'm only ever giving a high overview in these, yeah, big time.
Big time.
Barely scratching the surface.
Barely scratching the surface.
That's what it looked like at the time.
Wading through.
Sometimes people would just wade down if they came in a bit too deep, could just drown.
Or you come in on a sandbar, I think you'll find that there's actually another deeper bit of sea in front of you and you wade into it and drown.
All sorts of horrible things.
There you go.
I mean, remarkable stuff.
Remarkable photos.
Yeah, some iconic images of people from the perspective of the landing craft.
Yeah, because you said there was some journalists in the landing crafts as well, didn't you?
In the first wave or whatever.
There was something in the order of 200-odd journalists embedded.
Some in gliders, some in aeroplanes, some in the armadas, some on landing craft, yeah.
Going onto the beach.
Wild.
Yeah.
Yeah, really wild.
They're very, very brave men.
Again, all volunteers.
Yes.
And the accounts are like they were dying to.
There's way more volunteers than Ike let go.
So again, I'm admitting to being a bit of a coward, but I wouldn't have volunteered.
I'm a correspondent for the BBC.
Do you want to go in the first wave on Sword Beach?
No, pass, actually.
Pass.
I'll do the weather report.
How about that?
I'll go in the next day and talk and describe the horror, but actually...
No.
I'd rather not, if that's alright.
But sir, I don't want to.
Leave me, darling.
I know.
I know.
Don't slouch, darling.
And that's what Juno looks like today.
Yeah, Samson, our producer, is there at the moment.
He is, isn't he?
He goes every year.
He showed us some photos, didn't he?
He sent them through this morning.
I would really like to go there.
I'd like to go there not in early June.
I'd like to go there in an off...
And see it sort of when it's not crowded and things.
I would like to do that too.
Yeah, definitely.
Okay, again, that's Juno.
Oh yeah, there's a picture of one section, one of the casements of the Mulberry.
We built loads of these back in Britain.
Loads and loads and loads of them.
Again, sort of an engineering feat.
Just essentially a concrete block, really.
Get a tug to take it out to where it needs to be.
Just off the Normandy coast.
Sink it.
Fill it with concrete.
Do that over and over again.
And you've built a harbour.
Remarkable.
And that harbour became for a while the busiest harbour in the world.
Until we captured Dieppe or Schauberg or something.
Yes.
Yeah, quite incredible.
There you go.
There's a picture of it.
That's astonishing.
With all the turrets on the top.
Yeah, all sorts of things.
Incredible.
There's, again, remnants of them still.
I mean, giant concrete blocks like that don't just disappear, really.
No.
It's more hassle than it's worth to actually remove them.
So a lot of them, or the remnants of them, are still there.
It becomes part of the history, doesn't it?
Yeah So something else Before I move on To talk about Point du Hoc.
So between the two beaches, there's this point.
Well, you can see here where it's a promontory that sticks out.
And the Germans had a big battery on the top there.
It's at the top of cliffs, nine-story high cliffs.
And they would have heavy guns, which would just be like shooting fish in a barrel.
They just looked down almost on the beaches.
So, again, it sort of had to be taken.
The Americans, it was in the American sector, it's between Utah and Omaha Beach, and they sent a bunch of rangers, because even back then, rangers were among the most gung-ho, badass sort of dudes.
So they were sent there to the foot of, their landing craft went into the foot of Pointe du Coq, and they were charged with just scaling these cliffs and taking the German positions at the top.
And they lost like half their guys doing it.
Anyway, heavy heavy casualties.
They got up there and there were no German guns.
The Germans hadn't put the guns there.
Oh.
Yeah.
Whoa.
Classic war story of sort of the futility of the pointlessness of certain things.
My God.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, that's the correct response.
Good God.
Can you imagine them going up there?
And it's like, oh, that was pointless.
There's where they'd scale it.
I think I've got some other pictures.
There were heavy sort of concrete reinforced position there that we knew about and could see, and we assumed.
Well, they did have some guns not very far away.
Right.
Like, one mile away, they had their heavy guns.
Just on that day, they hadn't moved them into place.
Well, they were about to move them into place, but hadn't.
They weren't there right on that point.
But we didn't know that.
No.
But there were German soldiers at the top of those cliffs who shot down at the Americans and dropped grenades down on them.
But, yeah, that position didn't need to be taken...
Well, it didn't need to be taken as...
Put it that way.
It's sort of a modern recreation.
It doesn't look that big, but it is nine stories tall.
Yeah, no, I believe it.
I believe it.
If you fell off the top, you'd die.
There's loads of stories of guys getting halfway up and then getting shot off the cliff.
Yeah.
Rangers.
We peppered it from the sea, from the air and from naval guns.
I mean, that tells a story, doesn't it, right there?
It does.
That tells you everything you need to know about how much the Allied planners feared Pointe du Hoc.
That they did that to it and sent a bunch of rangers to take it.
Anyway.
Anyway.
Yeah, I'd like to visit there.
I'd like to go there and see that with my own two eyes.
Again, the acts of heroism, the dash shown in the face of the enemy by those rangers.
Yeah, unbelievable.
What is that up there?
Is that a museum on top of it these days?
I don't know, yeah.
some sort of, well, I think it's the part of what was the original German Nazi emplacement.
But now, yeah, it looks like something sort of...
I don't actually know for sure.
I've not been there.
I've not been there.
As I say, I'd like to visit it.
Yes.
But there you go.
OK, I would like to let a veteran, if we could hear the actual words of a veteran, a couple of minutes worth, because it's one thing to read lots of books about it and watch some of the original footage.
But there's, from a historian's point of view, good solid primary evidence, an eyewitness account is...
No, definitely not.
I thought maybe we could hear a few words from this chap who's actually there.
In fact, he was one of the first ashore on Omaha Beach.
he was one of the guys whose job it was to clear the barbed wire.
So he actually went in even before, The quote-unquote first wave of regular infantrymen, because his job was to clear wire.
So it's like the first dudes.
OK, let's hear from him.
Can you turn this up a little bit, please?
Because I was in the wire cutting section.
I was the leader of the wire cutters.
And that's the reason that I know what to cross the beach first.
I got off of the boat first with five men behind me.
We was all carrying what they called Bangalore tarpedas.
And when I went across the beach carrying it, I was loaded.
Had it, my pack, my rifle, enough rations for three days.
And when I got to the sand going across the beach, There was a machine gun hitting the ground right in front of me, kicking up dirt about three foot in front of me.
And I couldn't go back.
I had to go forward.
There wasn't no place else to go.
But he never did raise it high enough to hit me.
And when we got across the sand then, why?
We kind of got down behind that.
And the pillboxes were shooting at us.
And we had nothing to come out with.
All we had was an M1 rifle and a few hand grenades.
And we throwed the hand grenades trying to throw them into the pillboxes, but little old holes you had to throw through.
We didn't get many of them in there.
So anyway, we were pretty well hung up.
We fought the Germans on the bank, and we had them whipped, but we couldn't go on account of the pillboxes.
The boat that I landed on, the landing craft, There was five men got off of it, and a shell hit it and killed the rest of them.
We were the only five that got off of it.
A lot of us didn't land where we were supposed to, and we were one of them.
But anyway, there wasn't anything to get behind, but where this water had lapped up against it had about a foot.
And we were down behind that, laying on our bellies in the water, shooting at these soldiers on the bank.
And that's just the way it happened.
What we didn't kill, we run off.
And I'm not going to tell you I killed any because I don't talk about that.
But I will tell you this.
I was a good soldier, and I could hit what I shot at, and I shot a brush tub full of ammunition.
Well, there you go.
These accounts are unbelievable, really.
It reminds me of Grandpa Simpson, in a way, that guy.
A real veteran who was actually there.
Yes.
Just purely from the historian's point of view, it's remarkable.
And I'm glad, because there's not many of these guys left now, it's great that we've got a lot of their accounts.
So he said later that when they took the position behind the dunes, he went into the position or the pillbox, wherever it was, of the machine gun that was shooting just in front of him.
And he said that on the wall was marked out ranges.
And he said that whoever was shooting at, the German that was shooting at him, was just shooting by numbers.
He wasn't even aiming at him.
If he wanted to aim at him and shoot him, he could have.
But he was just following the numbers of the range for the elevation.
That was the only thing that saved him.
And he said, I couldn't go back, I could only go forwards.
Says it all, doesn't it?
You can't go back.
So you've got to go into a machine gun fire, or mortar fire, or whatever it is.
I mean, it's so brave.
Yeah, it is.
Okay, Cornelius Ryan said about Omaha Beach.
There were eight concrete bunkers with guns of 75mm or larger calibre, 35 pillboxes with artillery pieces of various sizes and or automatic weapons, four batteries of artillery, 18 anti-tank guns, six mortar pits, 35 rocket launching sites, each with four 38mm rocket tubes and no less than 85 machine gun nests.
Nearly all of which hadn't been knocked out by naval bombardment.
Nearly all of it was still there ready to rock and roll when the guys rocked up.
So no wonder there were 90% casualties of some of the waves.
No wonder the best part of 2,000 men died there.
Horrible.
Horrible, terrible stuff.
So there's a picture.
Some of the worst stuff took place at Dog Green.
Dog White.
But nowhere was Easy on Omaha.
I mean, Easy Red was terrible.
But Dog Green is where Tom Hanks goes ashore on Save and Private Ryan.
Some of the worst stuff was at Dog Green.
But none of it was Easy on Omaha.
I was going to play a bit of Saving Private Ryan, but I don't think we've really got time.
I think a good drama, a good movie or TV, if it's done right, if it's done well and it's authentically done, can really give you a feel for what it's really like.
A lot of veterans that lived long enough to see Saving Private Ryan said, this was the most realistic thing I've ever seen.
I've heard that too, yeah.
So anyone who hasn't seen it...
I was just going to say, there's certain things about the opening to this film that just really stick in my head.
One was where there's a shot from a turret and it grazes a guy's helmet.
And you're like, oh God, you know, lucky son of a, another bullet gets him yeah it's like just that level of There's loads and loads of accounts.
Because the sea was rough.
Really rough.
The roughest for that part of the year, in 20 years.
Loads of guys were seasick.
And obviously not even to mention being scared out of your wits because they were told that The planners did think.
Well, there were some in the Navy, particularly in the British Navy, thought that it might be a failure.
The whole operation.
Yeah.
There was a couple of guys that thought, this is just not a good idea yet.
This isn't the right time, the right moment, all sorts of things.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, loads of guys just getting...
As soon as the front of the landing craft comes down, the MG42s light them up and it's...
That's brutal.
Yeah, terrible stuff.
Terrible, terrible stuff.
Alright, I won't play that.
Don't want to get a copyright strike anyway.
So we need a few minutes at the end for comments and things.
So I'll start to wrap it up there.
But a few things to mention about Omaha Beach is that a few of the waves stalled and you can't blame them.
I said this last year as well.
Not blaming anyone because the first wave comes, gets 90, 100% casualties.
Second wave comes in, not much better.
Third wave comes in, you come into a charnel house and you're under fire still and you just get...
And it just takes a few kind of crazy guys saying, "No, stand up, move forward." And there are accounts at Omaha Beach, if you sometimes have really seen, there was one, there was a general, was on the beach, saying, Don't die here.
Let's go.
Let's do it.
Perhaps next time I can spend a full hour and 20 talking about just Omaha.
Yeah.
Because enough men did survive and talk about it that we know, minute by minute, exactly what happened.
Sure.
it's just perfect for defending.
It would just be the easiest thing just to sweep around and kill everything in front of you.
A terrible place to have to attack.
And there's a few inlets or drawers, sort of natural breaks in the cliffs.
Five of them on Omaha Beach.
And it's obvious, kind of obvious, that that's where you've got, if you're going to go inland, get off the beach and go inland, that's the exit.
But the Germans know that as well.
So you put one gun at the top of that, or more than one gun.
You put something heavy at the top of that.
Anyone trying to storm up here.
Filter through, get shredded.
Yeah, it's like you funnel yourself into their guns.
Terrible.
I want to give the last word to another veteran who makes a really important point.
I think one of the most important points about it.
I'll let him speak.
You know, a lot of people don't realise.
D-Day, they wrote a lot of books and a lot of movies about it.
The whole D-Day was only 18 hours.
We dropped the boats at 4 o 'clock in the morning, and 10 o 'clock at night the beach was ours.
It was only 18 hours, the whole thing.
People make a big speck at the valley, you know, D-Day, D-Day.
It was 18 hours, that's all it was.
But we did lose 2,000 men on the beach.
I said men, I shouldn't say men.
2,000 kids.
We were all kids.
We were all kids.
We were too young to drink.
We were too young to vote.
We weren't too young to die.
18 years old, 19, 20 years old, they were kids.
Some of them didn't even shave.
Never shaved.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, that makes you emotional.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A terrible and somehow simultaneously glorious thing.
I mean, a crazy, crazy thing.
Heroism and sorrow just all mixed in there together.
Our generations are not used to this sort of thing.
No.
All right, well, we'll have to leave it there.
But hopefully I've...
And I'll do it again next year if we're all still here.
Yes, thank you.
Shall I go?
Yes, okay.
I'll go through some comments.
Some super chats first.
Oh, sorry, yes.
So, DragonLadyChris says, Excellent presentation, gentlemen.
on behalf of the history nerds in the chat, thank you.
That's a random name, so some of the French villages were so thoroughly obliterated that you'd think the Yanks had dropped...
Juno was a majority Canadian beach because the Allies needed more war crimes there.
I'm not sure.
And Flavius Magnus says, Jack McNasty McNee was one of the more famous American pathfinders and paratroopers on D-Day.
Check out the Fat Electrician video on him.
Okay, I definitely will.
Thank you.
To the comments, you've got AZ Desert Rap says, Did you guys know that D-Day was almost cancelled because crossword puzzles made by kids attended elementary school near a military base?
The kids were using words spoken by military officers that they heard on the public bus going to and from the school.
After an investigation, it was determined that the operation had not been compromised.
Well, that's interesting.
Okay, I didn't know that it was anything to do with school kids.
But again, in Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, he talks about how there was, I think it was either the Telegraph or the Times, the crossword puzzle.
It was compiled by two old school teachers.
They weren't school kids.
They were old men.
And they'd been doing, compiling the crossword for years, years and years.
and he had a cult following back in the day.
Thousands and thousands of people every single day Yes.
And over the last few weeks, he'd used words like Omaha and Overlord and Neptune and quite a few words that were secret words.
Yes.
And they'd appeared in the crossword in, I think it was the Telegraph.
Might be in the Times.
And yeah, at the time of the actual beach landings, once the trigger had been pulled and it was all happening, MI5 visited him.
Oh, right.
And said, can you explain yourself?
Like, how is this?
This is really sus.
And he said, I've got no explanation.
It's pure chance.
I don't know what else to tell you.
And he wasn't aspiring.
No, no, it was remarkable.
It was just some sort of crazy coincidence.
That is crazy.
I mean, a word like Neptune isn't, like, that obscure, but still, you know.
So I knew that, but I didn't know the school kid angle of it.
That's interesting, if true.
Zesty King says, I was lucky enough to go on a trip last April to each beach, stormed on D-Day, as well as Pegasus Bridge, St. Marie Eglise and various museums.
I would highly recommend going.
There's nothing like seeing it all in person.
I should go there.
I need to visit it there.
Yeah, I should too.
Bleach Demon says, I cannot express enough how fascinating it is to visit Normandy.
Not only humbling, but the interesting little museums make it worth a meander through the countryside.
There's other things in Normandy I'd want to visit as well.
Anyway, I'd like to visit Rouen.
I was going to say Rouen, yeah.
Or Bayeux.
I think the Bayeux tapestry is still in Bayeux.
I really want to see that with my own two eyes.
There's loads of castles.
There's loads of, like, Norman-era castles and things I really want to visit.
Is there the castle where Richard the Lionheart was shot in Normandy?
I thought it was.
It was North France, I think.
It's in the region.
I don't know if it's actually in Normandy.
It might be.
Federal agent, they expected one-third of parachutists to become casualties on the drop.
Yeah, right, yeah.
Some people, some of the planners thought we might basically lose all the paratroopers.
Or 90% might get killed here.
Because it happened in the past that when the Germans dropped loads of paratroopers on Crete, they nearly all got killed, or a massive majority of them anyway.
When the Germans dropped loads of paratroopers into Holland, loads of them got killed.
We dropped paratroopers in Sicily and Italy.
didn't go well.
So, yeah, Well, he says as well, he goes on to say, paratroopers were 19 years old, on average.
Often, young.
The officers are obviously older, but often, yeah.
Because you have to be absolutely peak fitness.
And that's when you're like 19, 20, under 25, usually.
It goes back to what that gentleman there was saying about them being boys and kids.
Because that sort of thing, when I was 20, when I was 25, that sort of testimony...
Now I'm knocking my mid-40s early to mid-40s.
That hits harder than it used to.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Domnonia Woodsman says, I came here for the normal news.
However, the podcast today is fantastic.
Thank you, gents.
Well, very glad.
You've been doing the heavy lifting with this.
It's been wonderful to listen to you talk about it.
Thank you.
Yeah, no worries.
No, thank you.
I say this often when I do an EPOC, especially one that's a bit more pertinent or a bit closer to our times.
I hope I've done it some justice.
Once or twice I've done stuff where people have gone...
And some people thought I was being a bit glib.
I didn't mean to be.
I certainly wasn't trying to be.
So I hope I've done it some justice and I hope, Only going to scratch the surface.
Thank you guys for listening.
Letting me drone on about it.
Well, Russian Garbage Humans says, you did this last year too, I love it.
I know there's been so much happening last night in both America and Britain, but this is important.
We can look at the chaos on Monday.
We will do, on Monday.
Which is very true, on Monday we'll come back with all that news.
Yeah, those explosions of news that happened just the other day.
We thought we'd actually, it might even be worth letting things play out for a bit.
Yeah.
Let the smoke clear on these things, and then we'll talk about it on Monday.
With greater information behind us.
So we're at half past two now, so I suppose that's all there is for today.
Thank you so much to everyone for listening.
You can join us in half an hour if you'd like for Lad's Hour, where we're going to be playing a game called Jackbox, which I've never heard of, but it sounds like it'll be a laugh.
And if not, then have a very pleasant weekend.
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