Original subtitles

GEOFFREY BATEMAN: It was the turning point of World War Two -

three million soldiers,

hundreds of thousands of ships, planes and tanks,

a logistical complexity unprecedented

in a military operation.

This was the Battle of Normandy.

More than 75 years since the end of the war,

certain details of this tremendous battle have gone untold.

Very few people could tell you what happens in June and July and August

and how the battle for Normandy actually ended.

Now unpublished archives, 20 years of research,

experts from the United States, the UK and Canada

bring to life the boots-on-the-ground reality

of Normandy's 85 days of hell.

Liberation has come to Normandy but so has war.

Three months of savage combat...

If we can destroy the German army in Normandy,

then the rest of France will be saved.

..during which, the Allies and the Germans will fight mercilessly.

It's a battlefield where they live and they die

and where they fight and where they kill.

From the average soldier's point of view,

this just seems to be a hopeless situation.

It was a very dirty battle.

The "schmutziger Buschkrieg", a "dirty bush war".

Everyone paid a heck of a price for this.

D-Day was just the beginning.

Early morning, thousands of boats embarked from England,

headed to the French coast of Normandy.

Two years in the making,

it's an Allied operation to take back France from the Germans.

They call it "Overlord".

Rarely in history will you find a time where these major powers

are all mobilised, almost to the full extent of their strength,

to have this confrontation over what is to happen

with the Normandy invasion.

Allied soldiers will face a territory

that the Germans have occupied for four years.

All the great cities of Normandy are under Nazi control.

The landing zone chosen is 80km long,

placed under the command of US General Eisenhower.

The troops will land on five sectors.

To the west, the Utah and Omaha beaches

will be taken by the Americans.

To the east, the Gold, Juno and Sword beaches

by the British and Canadians.

Around 6.30am, the first waves of Allied soldiers land on French soil.

The Allies suffer heavy losses from the entrenched German defences

during the first hours of the landing.

But soldiers and armoured vehicles continue to land,

putting pressure on the enemy.

The vital part

of any seaborne invasion like Operation Overlord

was to get ground rapidly

because only then could you start to push back the enemy

so that they could not keep firing at the beaches.

After just one day,

thousands of Allied soldiers have already been killed.

But the wide scope of the landing has been fatal to the Germans.

The first phase of Operation Overlord is completed.

Scattered throughout the landing zones,

the Allies must now regroup the different units on the ground.

You gotta link up those five beaches as quickly as you can.

If they're not linked up, then the Germans can fill the gaps

and can begin attacking the Allies from any direction they want,

from what military people call the flanks.

TIM SCOTT: Eisenhower and his generals

needed to create a buffer zone

to protect against the German counterattack that would come.

And in fact, they prepared for that.

The day before D-Day,

more than 12,000 paratroopers embarked from England

aboard 432 aircraft.

On the night of June 5th and 6th,

these thousands of Canadian, British and American soldiers

were dropped near the landing zone.

At the same time, hundreds of gliders transporting troops

have also crossed the Channel in great secrecy.

This joint operation has already created confusion

within the enemy forces.

In the early morning, when the first soldiers arrived from the sea,

the next phase could then start...

..a large air operation

to prevent German reinforcements reaching the five beaches.

The plan for sealing off Normandy was called Transportation,

and this meant bombing all of the bridges

over the River Seine to the east

and over the River Loire to the south

so that the whole of the Norman area was completely cut off.

But also, it meant smashing houses and towns and villages

at crucial crossroads and places

to prevent the Germans bringing up reinforcements and supplies.

The American phrase, which had been invented in Italy,

was called "putting the city in the street",

which basically meant simply blocking the roads

so that traffic could not get through.

Even before the fighting starts inland,

Normandy is partially destroyed -

no water, no electricity, no phone lines.

And now, after taking the five landing beaches,

the Allies must advance, whatever the cost,

to push the Germans back little by little

and occupy enemy territory.

On the east flank of the beachhead,

the first objective of General Montgomery,

commander of the British and Canadian forces,

is to seize the city of Caen,

located nearly 20km from Sword and Juno beaches.

On day two, Montgomery is convinced

that he will succeed in rapidly capturing Caen.

But facing him is General Erwin Rommel,

known for his feats in Africa and nicknamed "the Desert Fox".

Rommel mobilises his most powerful armoured divisions

to meet the British-Canadian forces advancing towards Caen

and block Montgomery's Allied offensive.

When the British and the Canadians begin to fight around Caen,

they are doing massive tank assaults.

They're trying to steamroll over the Germans.

They have more tanks.

They have more troops. They have air power.

But the Germans were fighting on the defensive.

And if Normandy had shown anything, is it's fighting on the defensive -

in dug-in positions, with anti-tank guns,

with mortars and mines...

..and a single 88 gun,

that tears apart 15 Sherman tanks, will stop a column of troops.

The first days of fighting north of Caen are devastating.

The perfectly organised German defences invariably repel

all English and Canadian attempts.

Facing the German Mark IV, Mark V and Tiger tanks,

the American Sherman tanks used by the Allies

are just not up to the mark.

JOHN: What we have to remember is every American Sherman tank

has to be shipped to the battlefield.

So it means you have to produce something

that's reasonably light enough to be able to ship

and small enough that you can get it on the ship.

It's a reasonably good tank,

but you don't want to be in a toe-to-toe battle

with a German tank head-on.

33 tonnes for the Sherman, over 43 tonnes for the German tanks,

more robust with armour superior to the Americans

and delivering devastating cannon power.

The muzzle velocity of those tanks meant that if it hit you,

that shell was gonna penetrate your armour, probably, you know,

especially along the sides, and either go straight through,

or worse, rattle around inside and explode.

While the British and the Canadians are defeated on the east flank,

the Americans start advancing on the other side.

General Bradley commands the troops.

Their first objective is 17km from the coast -

the small town of Carentan and its network of roads and railways.

Carentan is really the key to seal off the Cotentin Peninsula

and then capture Cherbourg,

which is, you know, the greatest harbour in Normandy.

But also, in tandem with that,

you're gonna start moving southward towards the town of Saint-Lo.

The 101st American Airborne Division surround Carentan on June 9th, 1944.

The fighting, ruthless and savage,

would last four days and four nights.

On June 12th, Carentan falls into American hands

with heavy losses on both sides.

But the Allies have achieved their goal.

Six days after the landings,

all the coalition forces are finally linked up.

The troops occupy a beachhead 80km long,

reaching at certain points ten to 30km deep.

While on the west side,

the Americans advance towards Cherbourg and Saint-Lo,

on the east side,

the British and Canadians still clashed with the Germans,

who maintained their positions around Caen.

These repeated defeats put Montgomery

in a difficult position with the US command.

He's desperate to win the first irrefutable victory

on the battlefield.

On June 12th, he attempts an encirclement manoeuvre

by skirting Caen from the west to trap the German divisions.

The 7th British Armoured Division

is sent to the small town of Villers-Bocage.

But the Germans anticipate the move and ambush the British

with a Tiger tank battalion commanded by Michael Wittmann,

the most impressive tank commander of World War Two.

One by one, the British tanks are destroyed.

ANTONY BEEVOR: The failure to capture Villers-Bocage

by the 7th Armoured Division and XXX Corps

did impact badly on morale.

They just realised that it was going to be a far tougher job

than they had thought about or imagined when they set sail.

The operation designed by the Allies for two years

is not going as planned.

Even worse, a terrible storm falls on Normandy for three days.

The two artificial harbours

installed to unload troops and equipment are badly affected.

The one on Omaha Beach is totally destroyed.

The supply of soldiers is considerably slowed down.

In these conditions, taking the port of Cherbourg

becomes an absolute priority for the Allies.

After capturing Carentan,

the Americans take ten days to travel 50km and reach Cherbourg.

The 4th, 9th and 79th US Divisions

finally reached the city on June 21st.

They launched the attack the following day.

Three US divisions are all just advancing north towards Cherbourg

and trying to get into the town as quickly as they can.

The city is defended by 30,000 troops trapped by the Allies.

They're doomed because the Allied navy,

from the seaward side, compound them.

And then the American Army coming from the landward side

can kind of just catch them in a vice.

So the whole thing kind of just devolves

into this sort of block-by-block fight.

It will take a few days before the American soldiers

drive out all pockets of resistance in the city.

GEOFFREY BATEMAN: On June 26th, the Germans surrender.

Thousands of soldiers are taken prisoner.

After four long years of occupation,

Cherbourg finally tastes freedom once again.

Cherbourg is certainly the biggest city at that point

that is liberated.

There is this larger German surrender,

and the Allies then have it.

As an average soldier, that still wasn't necessarily your typical day.

So those who were there, say, at Cherbourg

tended to remember that.

Despite this first victory in Cherbourg,

the total casualties after three weeks of fighting is immense.

Thousands of soldiers have already been killed or wounded.

On the battlefield,

the medical teams try to intervene as quickly as possible.

Transporting blood, field hospitals,

a complex organisation is set up

to follow the troops as they advance.

But in spite of the losses, the Allies keep moving forward

day after day after day.

After the Americans take Cherbourg, they head south.

The next Allied target

is less than 90km away,

the city of Saint-Lo.

But the American soldiers face one of the most dangerous regions

for infantry and tanks - the Normandy Bocage.

The Bocage -

cultivated fields separated by ditches and embankments,

canopied by hedgerows several metres high.

It's basically a maze of these hedgerows,

most of which are about 8ft- to 13ft-high.

That thick Norman soil, clay-like soil,

packed around fences and stones

that, certainly, individual soldiers can't get through.

So the hedgerow opening becomes a kill zone.

The Germans had four years to prepare their defence.

Heavy machine guns were positioned in the corners of each field.

Mortars target every spot the Allies might cross.

And mines hide in their pathways.

With a visibility no more than a couple of metres,

the Americans advance blindly.

You had no idea when you were suddenly

gonna get brewed up by a German soldier

with a Panzerfaust shoulder-fired, rocket-propelled grenade...

..or an 88-millimetre gun, maybe a whole mile away.

Up against the Germans,

several dozen Allied soldiers die taking back a mere meadow...

..or a single hedge.

The US Army finds itself in Normandy

in the middle of a bloodbath, absolute bloodbath,

day by day, hedgerow by hedgerow,

choke-point town by choke-point town.

Every one of them where you fight, they're gonna suffer casualties.

From the average soldier's point of view,

this just seems to be a hopeless situation.

You just know that this seems to be

kind of the road to nowhere in Normandy.

As the Americans try to navigate the Normandy hedgerows,

the British and Canadians are still attempting

to break the German stronghold around the city of Caen.

The British General Montgomery decides to change his offensive.

He launches Operation Charnwood.

On July 7th,

467 Allied planes dropped more than 2,500 tonnes of bombs

on enemy-occupied areas around Caen.

After having already been heavily bombed on June 6th,

the city of Caen is decimated.

On July 9th, the British and Canadian soldiers

finally enter the city from the north.

As the Canadians and British fought into Caen through the rubble,

they saw French civilians who had survived the bombing

but whose family members had been killed.

They talked about hearing the screams

of the French civilians who were trapped.

The scene was a real nightmare, a scene of devastation.

Many of the ancient buildings had been smashed to pieces.

There was complete clouds of dust in all directions.

It was impossible even to find your way through the city

because, obviously, there were no street signs or anything left.

In fact, it was hard to tell where the streets were,

the destruction had been so great.

Under these conditions, even after four years of occupation,

it's difficult for residents to appreciate

the long-awaited liberation of their city.

I think some of those French civilians

understood the cost of battle.

They understood the nature of the fighting.

But at the same time, they were watching their friends,

their family members being killed in this liberation.

But for the Allied command,

the annihilation of Caen and the thousands of civilians killed

under the American and British bombs was a necessary evil,

the price to pay in winning the battle.

It's always hard talking about ends and means

and what justifies what in warfare.

A moral decision would be that the killing of civilians is,

almost by definition, a war crime.

But you're not gonna be able to avoid it in reality.

The priority was we've got to defeat the Germans because,

in a way, we accept that Normandy is going to be, really,

the sacrificial lamb for the whole of France.

If we can destroy the German Army in Normandy,

then the rest of France will be saved.

While the British and Canadian troops

gradually liberate the city of Caen,

the Americans continue to struggle

against a strong German resistance on their way to Saint-Lo.

Thousands of soldiers are trapped in the Normandy Bocage.

The incessant rain and mud slow their progress even more.

To escape this fatal labyrinth,

the Allies try an ingenious strategy.

We've got to create a new opening through the hedgerows

because the main one, the Germans have covered,

and they're gonna kill everybody who moves through there.

So they begin to weld, ironically enough,

the remnants of German beach obstacles, the metal,

onto the front of tanks with prongs...

..and begin to use the tanks then

to punch a new opening through the hedgerow.

With these so-called "Rhino tanks",

the Allies take the Germans by surprise.

But for every hedge crossed,

they remain at the mercy of the enemy soldiers.

As the Germans have in the ditches beyond the hedgerow

a lot of Panzerfaust gunners,

it's a one-time, one-shot kind of anti-tank weapon

that could blow up your tank.

So the infantrymen have to move very close to the tank

and basically, what the military calls,

"clean out" the Germans and the ditches.

That basically means kill them, and very close,

face to face quite often.

And then the tankers will lay down what's called white phosphorus fire.

And white phosphorus is a terrible weapon.

It's basically a chemical that will just burn through you

as long as it has oxygen.

It was a very dirty battle.

I mean, the Germans themselves

described it as a "schmutziger Buschkrieg", a "dirty bush war".

And General Collins,

who'd been fighting in the Far East, said this was worse than the jungle.

The town of La Haye-du-Puits, liberated on July 9th,

will remain the symbol of this battle of unimaginable violence.

Within the area,

the fighting will cost the lives of 10,000 American soldiers

while advancing the front only 12km.

GEOFFREY BATEMAN: On July 18th,

after three weeks of relentless fighting

since the capturing of Cherbourg,

the Allied soldiers finally enter the city of Saint-Lo.

But upon arrival, not much remains.

The soldiers have to advance extremely slowly

as the Germans mined the entire city.

A few civilians emerge from their shelters

to search the rubble for objects that might have survived

the onslaught of Allied bombs.

After Cherbourg,

Saint-Lo is the second great victory for the Allied command.

But the state of the city,

which is later nicknamed "Capital of the Ruins",

exemplifies the high price of liberating Normandy.

After a month and a half of fighting,

the troops' morale is at an all-time low.

Every foot gained against the Germans

comes at the cost of intense and merciless combat.

There's the stress of not knowing

when the next German shell is gonna come in

and whether it's gonna hit near you or not.

They see a very limited battlefield.

It's a battlefield where they live and they die

and where they fight and where they kill.

By mid-July, tens of thousands of Americans, Brits and Canadians

have already died in combat.

Soldiers still fighting on the ground

no longer have illusions about what awaits them.

Eventually, the day comes

when there aren't that many people you know in your unit any more

and you're a fugitive from the law of averages.

And over time, the mindset changes to,

"If I'm here long enough, this is gonna happen to me."

Between combat, life is monotonous.

Soldiers constantly check and clean their weapons

to keep them from jamming.

Meals are usually cold.

Hygiene is bad, and the wait for orders seems endless.

Very soon, they were crawling with lice.

They were always short of water.

They developed various forms of stomach bugs.

In effect, everyone had diarrhoea.

And all of this strain is happening

in an environment of death and destruction.

For the soldiers, the warm welcome of the locals

reminds them why they came here to risk their lives.

A little alcohol, cigarettes,

simple gifts that lift the men's spirits before the next advancement,

the next mortar fire, the next dead.

Over time, many of them realise

that the only way out was to be killed or wounded,

even as reinforcements came behind them.

Their world became very small.

Battle stress became a tremendous problem in the fighting in Normandy.

And in July and in August, as the strain continued,

between about 20 and 30% of the casualties were combat stress.

They had gone weeks and weeks without proper sleep,

terrible food, all of these conditions.

The strain had been too much, and it broke them.

To compensate for losses,

reinforcements land daily on the Normandy beaches

and are immediately sent to the front line.

After a month and a half of intense fighting,

the main cities of Normandy had been taken from the hands of the Germans.

But the battle is far from over.

To pierce the German defences and accelerate the troops' movement,

the Allied command launches Operation Cobra.

Cobra is conceived around the idea of,

"Gosh, we have all these great bombers,

"all this airpower we've been using to pummel German cities.

"What if we carpet-bombed a part of the German lines in these hedgerows

"to punch a hole and have an opening now for our armour

"and all of our other troops to get through here very quickly?"

It makes a great deal of sense on paper.

It's in the implementation that it creates some serious problems.

Why? Because the bombers are not that accurate.

You're asking them to do something

they're not really capable of doing, which is to bomb close -

within about 1,000 to 2,000m of their own ground troops.

They're lucky to hit a target within three miles or so.

For two days, thousands of bombs hit the front line west of Saint-Lo.

Over the course of two days, July 24th and 25th, 1944,

the heavy bombers come over from England

and they bomb in front of the US Assault Division.

They bomb short, and they kill several hundred Americans.

This is, I believe,

the greatest friendly fire incident in the history of the United States.

But also, the good news is it does tremendous damage, of course,

to the Panzer-Lehr-Division,

the Germans who are on the wrong side of this.

And so Cobra does what it's designed for.

The Panzer-Lehr-Division of the German divisions

were so badly thrown by the heavy bombing

that they were in a completely dazed state

when the Americans got to them.

Within two days, the real breakthrough had been achieved.

In just a few days, thousands of Germans are taken prisoner.

The Reich forces have suffered one of their heaviest defeats

since the beginning of the war.

Despite the collateral damage,

the military success of Operation Cobra

brings the Battle of Normandy into a new phase.

GEOFFREY BATEMAN: On July 28th,

the town of Coutances is captured by the Allies.

The same day, a new commander arrives, General Patton.

Famous for his feats in North Africa and Sicily,

Patton has just taken the lead of the Third US Army.

His mission - make a breakthrough to the south of Normandy.

The Germans feared Patton more than any other Allied general.

Patton's new job, which he was extremely excited about,

was the prospect of taking over, having his own army,

whence the break-out came from Normandy.

In just four days, Patton's troops will retake the cities

between Coutances and Avranches

and advance more than 50km to the south

at a pace not yet seen in this battle.

As they progress, thousands of German soldiers are taken captive.

This really took the Americans all the way through,

down past Avranches and out of Normandy,

even into northern Brittany.

It was a spectacular smashing of the German armies in Normandy.

This was definitely the start of taking the fight

right the way through into France.

On July 31st,

Patton and his troops reclaimed the Pontaubault Bridge

that crosses the Selune River.

They gained direct access to the west of France and to Brittany.

The following day, the Americans arrive at Mont Saint-Michel,

completely abandoned by the enemy.

Patton's breakthrough is a serious setback for the German Army.

The Germans are in an existential situation in Normandy.

And the logical thing to do

would be to simply retreat eastward and get out of there

and fight somewhere else.

We're not talking about logic

when we're talking about someone like Adolf Hitler.

Instead of ordering his troops to retreat,

Hitler decides to counterattack.

His plan sent his tanks to the town of Mortain,

close to where several American units have joined up.

The goal is to create a breach

in the Allied configuration meant to reach Avranches

by cutting the American army in two and regaining control of the area.

Reluctantly, the German generals on the ground

prepare the counteroffensive.

They had these firm orders from Hitler,

even though most of the commanders of the German Panzer units

were dubious about this particular operation.

But they had no option, but they had to go ahead and attack.

On August 7th, 1944, the Germans launch a counterattack in Mortain.

Codename, Operation Luttich.

Columns of Panzers attack the 30th US Infantry Division

with full force.

The GIs resist the powerful German tanks

and manage to slow down the Nazi troops' progress,

giving time for reinforcements to arrive.

Within a few days, the massive influx of Allied forces

pushes back the German counteroffensive.

Hitler's Operation Luttich is a total failure.

The Germans suffer at least 50% casualties,

particularly along the roads

that kind of envelop on either side of Mortain.

It's really a disaster for the Germans.

By mid-August, the German forces are defeated.

On August 15th, 1944, Hitler throws in the towel

and orders his troops to flee Normandy.

The German Operation Luttich was a desperate gamble,

and it looked like that this German force was ripe to be annihilated.

Arriving from the west,

the Americans advance at full speed towards Argentan

to join forces with the British and Canadians.

Village after village, one by one, they occupy enemy positions.

They annihilate the areas of German resistance.

The small village of Ranes,

tirelessly held by the Wehrmacht and an SS unit,

is reduced to rubble.

Dozens of civilians are killed.

But now is the time to expel

every last standing German soldier in Normandy.

Bradley and Montgomery coordinate the Allied troops' movement.

In the west, the Americans advance towards the Seine.

In the north, the British and Canadians

increase their pressure on Falaise.

In the south, the French armoured division of General Leclerc,

along with the Americans, head back up to Argentan.

Between the cities of Falaise and Chambois,

a pocket starts to form,

trapping nearly 100,000 German soldiers.

If the Allies managed to close the gap on the east side,

they will cut off any chance for escape.

Bradley boasted to visitors, to headquarters,

"Never does a general get an opportunity

"like we have now to close this gap and basically to seal them off."

The Battle of Normandy had been fought

over hundreds of square miles,

but it seemed to funnel at the Falaise gap.

And this enormous battlefield of hundreds of miles

gets focused down to a very small, deadly place.

To weaken the enemy's final defences,

the Allied Air Forces hammer the German positions.

On the ground, the fighting is unprecedented.

The Canadians take Falaise on August 17th, Trun the 18th.

Little by little, the vice tightens on the Germans,

who have a corridor of no more than 7km wide

to flee to the east.

It becomes known as "Death Row".

The massacre inside the pocket at Falaise was horrific.

The fighter bombers kept on coming in.

All of the German transport horses,

dragging field hospitals or guns or whatever,

were just simply machine-gunned in their traces.

The smell, the stench of corpses

for weeks afterwards was simply appalling.

It was a turkey shoot, as the Americans would have called it.

On August 21st,

the Falaise pocket is closed once and for all in Chambois.

Tens of thousands of Germans are taken prisoner,

and thousands lay dead.

The battle will later be known as the Stalingrad of Normandy.

You have thousands of dead bodies, animals and humans,

that are in that area.

Eisenhower will later walk it, famously,

and say it was possible to walk from one side of a field to another

without ever stepping on anything but dead flesh.

I think that is something to try to imagine today -

that Falaise gap filled with corpses and wounded, screaming men...

..and that was the price of victory.

In the city of Argentan,

liberated the day before by the 80th US Infantry Division,

cameras immortalise the meeting

between the soldiers and the city's mayor.

In the middle of the rubble,

some civilians finally dare to emerge from their shelters.

The Falaise-Chambois battle will be the last one

in these three months of fighting in Normandy.

On the Allied side, 220,000 soldiers were killed or wounded

and 20,000 civilians killed.

On the German side, the Reich Army lost more than 200,000 men

and 200,000 were taken prisoner.

On average, a battalion and a half were being ground down or destroyed

roughly every single week.

In many cases, a division would last no longer than, say, two weeks.

Well, this gives one an idea of how much Normandy contributed,

I think, to the overall Allied victory,

just purely in the case of the destruction of German formations.

By the end of August,

hordes of soldiers and vehicles land at Cherbourg

and head east to eradicate the rest of the Nazi army.

While the final great battles of World War Two

will take place in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany,

Normandy must start to rebuild.

Normandy really becomes the first place in Western Europe

in which a lot of the future policies,

the new Allied governments, the de Gaulle government,

will eventually come to fruition.

What about reconstruction?

Who's gonna pay for it, and how are we gonna do it?

Normandy kind of sets the tone for so many other places,

not just in France but in Western Europe,

that the armies are gonna have to rebuild.

Everybody knows about the landings on the 6th of June.

Very few people could tell you what happens in June and July and August

and how the battle for Normandy actually ended.

And I think, to this day, we are still dealing

with those battles, that war,

trying to come to grips with it, trying to make sense of it,

trying to understand the ruins of Normandy 75 years ago.

As few as 50 cameramen tirelessly shot each day

of this historic battle.

They left behind hundreds of hours of footage,

some of which only surfaced decades later.

For future generations,

these images will remain the final witnesses

of Normandy's 85 days of hell.