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It's just after midnight on Tuesday, June 6th, 1944. A US Air Force plane roars over the coast of Normandy. In the back, 18 men sit nervously in darkness, waiting. The air inside the plane is thick with nerves, as the air outside is thick with fog. The men have been offered drugs, puke pills they call them, to combat motion sickness. Most decide not to take them. They'll stick to what they know.
A carton of cigarettes. You need a clear head when jumping out of a plane behind enemy lines. These are the Pathfinders, the advance party for Operation Overlord. Their task is to covertly parachute into the French countryside, setting up lights and radar beacons for the subsequent wave of paratroopers, preparing the ground for the epochal event to come. First to jump is Captain Frank Lilliman of the 101st Airborne Division.
Lilliman is 28 years old, slight and wiry but tougher than he looks. A smart-mouthed, wisecracking thrill-seeker from upstate New York, he's known for being arrogant and argumentative, though tonight he's keeping quiet. Lilliman knows his chances of returning home aren't good. He wonders if he'll ever see his three-year-old daughter again. He chews on a cigar. The tessellated fields of Normandy race beneath his feet. A red light flashes.
That's the signal. The countdown begins. Four minutes to go. The men check their kit, ready their guns, and take long, deep breaths. The red light turns green. Lilliman jumps. One by one, his band of brothers follow him. They are the first American soldiers to touch French soil today. Over 200 more Pathfinders will soon follow. And after them will come a swarm of airborne troops.
18,000 within the next two hours, 13,000 Americans and 5,000 British and Canadians. As the last of the parachutists leaves the plane, the pilot takes note of the time. It's 12:15 AM and D-Day has finally begun. From the Noiser Network, this is D-Day. As Frank Lilliman and his team float down towards Terra Firma, there's still a good six hours to go until the beach landings begin.
Before then, he and his fellow paratroopers must carry out an audacious campaign behind the front lines. In the dead of night, waves of men and materiel are quietly dropping into France, hoping to catch the Nazis unaware. Their mission is complex and daring. It could make or break the entire invasion before a single vessel reaches the shore. Professor Jeremy Black, author of Strategy and the Second World War,
The key initial objectives for the Allied airborne forces were to try and seal the approaches to the Normandy beaches from east and west in order to make it harder for the Germans to bring up reinforcements to a support their forces in the coastal fortifications and b to try and drive in the Allied flanks. The western flank of the invasion zone is handled by American paratroopers.
the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions of the US Army. The eastern flank is the responsibility of the British 6th Airborne Division. I think I'm correct in saying it was the largest airborne operation that had yet existed in history, so that that had unprecedented issues of, as it were, getting it right. And, you know, the Allies were right to be concerned.
Frank Lilliman and his fellow pathfinders are lighting the way for two huge American missions. One is to capture a swathe of land behind Utah Beach, specifically bridges and locks on the River Douvres that lie between the towns of Carentin and the English Channel. The other is to seize bridges over the River Merneray, isolate the port of Cherbourg, and take control of the town of Sainte-Mère-Église. If both go smoothly,
The Allied soldiers who will land on the beaches after dawn will be able to quickly access the French interior and stop any German counter-attacks in their tracks. Meanwhile, 55 miles down the coast, the British are engaged in missions of their own. Author and historian Giles Milton
If one looks at the eastern end of the beachhead, there were two vital bridges that needed to be captured. There was a bridge at Benneville and there was a bridge at Ranville. Why did these need to be captured? For two reasons. One is to stop the Germans advancing into the Allied beachhead and fighting the men as they came ashore. But also, you needed to
have these bridges in your hands so that once the troops began to move out of their beachhead they could actually cross this major river and this major canal. So these bridges were vital. This is a job for Major John Howard and 180 elite airborne soldiers. But they're not parachuting into enemy territory from roaring aeroplanes. They are taking a much quieter approach.
They were to land by glider. So surprise was the most important element. They were to land at night by glider in total silence and in pitch darkness. Gliders are engineless planes built for stealth, but definitely not for safety. Constructed largely out of plywood and canvas, they're lightweight and flimsy, liable to break apart on landing.
The variety most commonly used by the British can carry 30 men plus equipment, including in some cases a jeep or an anti-tank gun. Later even bigger gliders will be deployed, some of them large enough to transport tanks. But it's the smaller design that's the perfect choice for Major Howard's mission. Shortly before 11pm on Monday evening, he and his men squeeze on board the six gliders that will carry them across the sea. They were towed by Halifax tow planes across the channel
And then as they reached the coast of France, the Halifax tow plane would release its rope and the glider would be on its own. And from that point on, it was due to the skill of the pilot who had to try and land that glider as close to these bridges as possible, these two bridges that had to be captured. Such missions carry a huge degree of risk. Among paratroopers, the gliders are known as flying coffins. Sir Max Hastings...
When I write about D-Day, I'm still amazed by the courage of some of those guys. First of all, the courage of those who flew in the gliders, which were just enormous children's toys. And some of them, their toes broke and they just disappeared into the channel, and that was the last that was ever seen of these guys.
And all those thousands of men who flew into Normandy in gliders, I mean, if you or I saw a glider today, one of those constructions of wood and canvas, and we were asked, how would you like to take a flip in one of these gliders? We'd say, thanks, but no thanks. But those guys in their thousands, they did it. Landing a glider is a phenomenally risky business, especially in the dark.
The pilots are well trained and have studied their maps in advance. They know the terrain. But essentially what they're aiming for is a survivable crash landing. Severe damage is almost inevitable, both to the aircraft and to those inside. You've got to imagine how terrifying it is to be in a glider,
Crouched there with 30 of your fellow men with you, you know you're coming in to land in a field which might or might not have been studded with telegraph poles, which are going to rip off your wings as you come in to land. You've got no power at all. You're just dependent on the wing flaps to be able to slow you down. And you come in to land at vast speed. You crash land onto a field. And if you're unlucky, the Jeep at the back comes detached because of the force of the landing and plows into you at full speed.
and wipes you all out. And of course, you land, some of your equipment might be damaged, you know, let's say an anti-tank gun, that might be disrupted or broken. So you've got real problems. The first thing you have to do is whilst at the same time you're trying to move and get ready to fight, you've actually got to do with the literal banging your body has received.
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And with Bluehost Cloud, your sites can handle surges in traffic no matter how big. Plus, you automatically get daily backups and world-class security. Get started now at Bluehost.com. Major Howard is on board the first of six gliders on their way to the two key bridges, which, for the purposes of D-Day, have been codenamed Pegasus and Horsa. For much of the journey, his men are in a boisterous mood, singing at the top of their lungs.
At seven minutes past midnight, Howard's glider passes over the French coast and casts off from the tow plane. The glider judders in midair, and the singing stops immediately. Now the only sound is the air rushing over the glider's wings. Everyone knows there's just a few minutes until landing. Howard's glider descends, speeding towards its target, a spot of open land near Pegasus Bridge.
The nose hits the ground, the glider bounces up into the air and smashes down again. The men on board are thrown around, crashing into each other and the frame of the vehicle. Eventually the glider comes to a stop, then silence. Everybody, including the pilots and Major Howard, is dazed. Some have been knocked unconscious. Perhaps a couple of minutes pass. The men begin to come to.
It turns out that Howard's glider has had a miraculous landing. They're only fifty feet from Pegasus Bridge. Pushing through the pain and confusion, Howard's men leap from their seats. They charge towards the bridge, hurling grenades at German pillboxes as they go. The Germans, caught off guard, scramble to respond. They launch a shower of gunfire. Twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Den Brotheridge is hit. He falls to the ground, dead.
the first Allied soldier killed in action on D-Day. His wife, Maggie, back home in the West Midlands, is eight months pregnant. But overall, their mission is a success. Pegasus Bridge is taken within a matter of minutes. And before long, Howard receives word that the other bridge, Horsa, is also in Allied hands. Mission accomplished, and it's barely half past twelve. Howard grabs a radio receiver and shouts a message back home. Ham and Jam!
the code word to signal success. Well, almost. The Germans are feared for their vicious counterattacks. The British brace themselves for a reprisal. It comes in an unlikely form, in the person of Major Hans Schmidt, commander of a local infantry regiment. Schmidt isn't actually at his post when the invasion begins. He's with his French girlfriend, but when he hears the bridges are under attack, he rushes to the scene.
In a vain attempt to assert his authority, Schmidt plows his open-top car through a roadblock the British have set up. He's swiftly apprehended, wailing that he's failed the fatherland. He then issues a warning: "You British are going to be thrown back. My Fuhrer will see to that." To shut him up, one of Howard's men gives him a shot of morphine. Soon though, a more serious threat emerges. This first daring operation has succeeded. Now,
Will the Germans counterattack? They fear that they will and within a matter of about half an hour, they hear the rattling of a tank coming towards them. One of the men, who's known as Wager Thornton, he pulls out a Piet anti-tank gun. He fires at the first German tank coming towards the bridge, knocks it out in a massive fireball. Everyone inside is incinerated and at which point all the other German tanks that are coming towards the bridge turn in their tracks and flee.
Pegasus and Horsa are a huge boost to Allied morale, as well as a key strategic victory. The bridge over the Corn Canal was an absolutely vital objective because it was vital that the guys coming in from the sea on Sword Beach were able to link up. And these bridges were the only way they could link up. And they got these bridges in the first few minutes after D-Day began on June the 6th. And it was a fantastic feat. And it was the glider pilots who really did brilliantly there.
It's now 1:30 AM and the Great Descent is underway. At the western end of the invasion zone, behind Utah Beach, thousands of American paratroopers are dropping to the ground. But there's a problem, one that could undo so much painstaking planning. Remember that troublesome weather blowing in from the Atlantic? It's caked the Normandy skies with cloud and a band of fog that the weather forecasters hadn't foreseen, but which is severely hampering the parachute missions.
The poor visibility only exacerbates a key weakness of Operation Overlord. Less than half the US planes have a trained navigator on board. Finding drop zones in these conditions, and in total darkness, is all but impossible. There's also anti-aircraft fire to contend with. For the Pathfinders, this wasn't such a concern. As the first men across the channel, they operated in relative secrecy,
But now, the Germans have clocked the Allied activity above their heads. Pilots have to dodge and weave. You know, this was very dangerous. Often the planes were flying far too high, so they were dropped at too great a height, which meant that many of them broke legs and ankles. And many of them, the planes were going too fast when the men were released as well. So their parachutes were ripped to shreds as they left the plane.
I read many, many accounts of men who luckily survived these operations and it's absolutely terrifying to jump out of a plane at high speed, at great height, at night when you know there is machine gun fire coming up to meet you. The paratroopers are scattered across Normandy. 90% are landing outside their intended drop zones, in some cases by many miles. Missions already laden with peril have become even more challenging.
The Allies had done an enormous amount of intelligence operative work by using French resistance, using aerial photography, using people that had landed, you know, very bravely on the beaches to reconnoiter these places. And they'd established quite accurate maps. They were very good what are known as going maps.
There was 3D maps which gave some idea of it. No, they knew what they were going to be up against. But of course, one of the great problems if you're a parachutist is you don't know precisely where you're going to land on the terrain. And indeed, the American parachute landing behind Utah is much more dispersed than they would have liked it to have been. Plus, as soon becomes clear, the enemy have laid traps for the paratroopers.
One of the key defenses of Normandy, and this was the idea of Rommel himself, was to flood all the low-lying marshland that lies just inland from the coast. And this was an absolute disaster for the parachutists because if you land in water, which is deeper than your height,
You drown because you're carrying a massive great pack and there's absolutely no way you're going to get out of that water. And it was a sad, tragic fact that on D-Day, huge numbers of these Allied paratroopists drowned before they even got a chance to fight. British paratrooper Fred Millwood is a member of the 9th Parachute Battalion. Their mission is to take control of the Merville gun battery six miles behind Sword Beach. The battery contains four huge wheeled howitzers.
each one more than capable of making mincemeat out of the British soldiers who will soon be coming ashore. Millward is the first in line to jump from his plane. Shortly before 1:00 AM, the red light comes on. He braces himself. The four-minute countdown begins. Then comes a volley of anti-aircraft fire. The plane is hit. Years later, Millward recalls what happened next.
I went to the door and was standing with my hands on the edge, my feet on the thing, ready to kick my kickbag out and go. And suddenly there was a bang and a thump outside, the old aircraft reared up and I was out. I had a hell of a crack on the back of my head which took my army down. And that was it. Being blown out the aircraft like that, I thought, where am I going to land? Because the green light hadn't come on. Next thing I knew, I sort of got up
and sort of brushed myself down and there was a bomb crater in the moonlight and a parachute hanging over the edge. And I went over to this parachute and called down, "Is that you, Sid?" And he said, "Yes, Fred." And it was Sid who was jump number two. And we were the only two that actually arrived from that aircraft. The rest of them went down in the water, in the floods. There was 192 lost there. Just went straight in.
And the trouble was, the actual drainage ditches round the actual edges of the floods were about 12 feet deep and the Germans had coiled barbed wire right round the place. So if you went in it, that was it. Ironically, the anti-aircraft fire that knocked Millward out of his aircraft almost certainly saved his life. We sort of got ourselves together, looked round and we were 100 yards from the actual rendezvous point.
which was absolutely out of this world really considering the way we'd come out the aircraft i mean if we'd waited till um the green light came on we'd been in the water milwood's lucky escape is a reminder of the thin line between life and death on d-day and it's not just the allied soldiers who are taking their lives in their hands the people of normandy also show their metal
The French civilians had been waiting for the liberation of their country ever since the Nazis had occupied it. So when they hear the planes coming over and they see the airborne troops tipping out of the planes and these parachutes coming down, they can't quite believe their eyes with a sense of elation that at last D-Day is happening. But I should say elation mixed with real fear.
because there was every chance that this operation was going to fail. And if they were seen to be hiding paratroopers, to be helping paratroopers, giving them directions, etc., if they were to be seen doing that by the Germans, they were certain to be executed. It's a risk that some are prepared to take. Railway worker Maurice Dubosc is one of them. Early that morning, around 1am, he realises that American paratroopers are landing in a flooded area nearby. Maurice takes decisive action.
He and a friend venture out into the floods in a little rowing boat. They pull men out of the water and ferry them to his home. Then they return to rescue more American soldiers, over and over again. By daybreak, the Dubosk family home is packed with paratroopers. Maurice consults a map and leads them to a safe route away from the Germans. Thanks to his help, the Americans are soon back on track.
By 2:30 a.m., Normandy is littered with thousands of displaced soldiers, just like those the Dubosks are rescuing. Their immediate objective is to work out where they are and how to complete their missions. That's no easy task, given that every Wehrmacht soldier in France is now on high alert. The Allied troops are weighed down by up to 60 pounds of kit, guns, knives, emergency supplies. Many of them land in cow pastures.
Normandy, after all, is a hub of dairy farming. But it's not just the lowing of cattle that breaks the still night. Listen carefully and you can hear another sound carrying across the field. Those aren't crickets chirping. It's the noise made by tiny clickers given to US paratroopers. Kids' toys, essentially, that make a clicking sound when pressed. They're a safe way of distinguishing friend from foe in the dark. Click once to identify yourself.
If two clicks come back, you know there's an ally nearby. Some paratroopers prefer a different system, the good old-fashioned sign and countersign, in this case, Flash and Thunder. Whatever the method, the paratroopers of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions soon begin to find one another. Months of intensive preparation, map study, orienteering, night training, haven't been for nothing.
They'd been landed miles and miles from their objectives. So it was a disaster in one sense. However, these men had been highly trained. They knew what they were doing. And what they did, they formed themselves into little impromptu groups of men, little platoons, if you like. And they began moving as best they could towards their objectives. For the All-Americans of the 82nd Airborne, that's the town of St. Mary Glees. ♪
The glittering prize in this first wave of Operation Overlord. Now, the man who was put in charge of capturing St. Meriglies was this extraordinarily tough paratrooper called Edward Cannonball Kraus. And Cannonball Kraus gave a talk to his men on the night before D-Day and he said to them, tomorrow morning I will be sitting in the mayor's office of St. Meriglies and the stars and stripes will be flying on the flagpole above me.
It's a bold claim, and one that's looking increasingly improbable. Kraus' men are spread far and wide across the fields of Normandy. But strategically, taking St. Mary's is vital. Whoever holds it has access to the port of Cherbourg, as well as to Utah Beach, just three miles to the east. There's also a huge symbolic value to liberating the first French town from the Germans.
In normal times, St. Mary's is a quiet place, a small rural settlement of a couple of thousand people. But at 1:00 a.m. on D-Day, it's unusually lively. Not because the townsfolk are expecting an invasion, but because a house in the center of the town is on fire. And with the blustery wind that's swirling around this morning, the flames are spreading quickly. Locals gather in the town square to fight the blaze. A few Germans mill around, watching.
The heat is intense. The light of the flames illuminates the dark sky. Around 1:40 AM, Allied planes rumble overhead, low enough that some people on the ground can see their doors are open. They know what that means. But while many paratroopers have landed far from their targets this morning, these men have the opposite problem. They drop right on top of the town square, lit up clearly by the roaring conflagration below.
For the German soldiers on the ground, it's a duck hunt. One where the ducks don't even have a chance to fly away. Some of the parachutists get tangled in trees, picked off by the enemy. Their bodies hang limply in the branches. Others fall on the roofs of nearby buildings. Some are even sucked into the fire. One soldier, Private John Steele, finds himself suspended in midair at the highest point in town. His parachute is caught on the church spire.
From this vantage point, he has a bird's eye view of the mayhem below. A tiny ordinary town stricken by fire, gunshots, street fighting. Unable to get off the roof, Steel does the only thing he can. He plays dead. It's a ploy that will see him through the battle with no more than a minor foot injury. In years to come, an effigy of Steel in his uniform will be affixed to this very spot on the church spire.
Right now though, nobody is thinking about how the attack on St. Mary Eglise will be remembered. What matters is whether the Allies can take control of the town before the Germans are able to strike back. One man who can't do much to help at the moment is Edward "Cannonball" Kraus. He's landed in a field nearby. He's lucky he made it at all. The appalling fog has seen pilots flying blind, and as Kraus was preparing to jump,
His plane almost collided with three others. Then, as he drifted down towards the ground, he counted four more aircraft swooping beneath him. Miraculously, Kraus has landed almost exactly where he meant to, but his men are scattered and many of their radios are broken. But Kraus isn't a man to sweat the details.
He was the sort of guy that got things done. And so he lands by parachute, astonishingly dangerous drop, which was even he said was a pretty terrifying experience. Lands on the ground, finds all his men have been scattered widely, but he gathers together some sort of 200 men and they go into the town and they successfully drive the Germans out of the town.
Sure enough, as Cannonball Kraus promised, by dawn, he was sitting in the mayor's office and the Stars and Stripes was flying above the mayor's office. The Allied victory at St Mary Glees is replicated throughout the invasion zone by a combination of British, American and Canadian soldiers. It was chaos that night drop. It was absolutely amazing how well they did. Most of those soldiers, wherever they found themselves, they just set about attacking the Germans wherever they were.
who was a Royal Engineer Major, who was supposed to blow some bridges further east. And he found he'd lost most of his explosives and hadn't got his Jeep and hadn't all the rest of it. He commandeered a Jeep and he loaded it down with guys and a trailer and loaded it down with explosives and drove hell for leather 10 miles across Normandy in the middle of the night, shooting up Germans whenever he met them. They got to the vital bridge, laid the explosives, set them off,
All over Normandy that night, people were doing things like that on their own initiative. One such man is Lieutenant Malcolm Brannan from Massachusetts. While Cannonball Kraus is busy taking charge of St. Mary Glees, Brannan is still trying to get there. He's landed southwest of his intended drop zone and is now moving purposefully northeast, collecting a dozen fellow paratroopers as he goes. But Brannan's makeshift platoon aren't exactly sure where they are.
Around 3.30 a.m., they come upon a farmhouse. They wake the owners, who are naturally startled to see a band of American soldiers on their doorstep. Brannon notices the wide-eyed faces of the children staring down at him from the upstairs windows. With the help of a French phrasebook, he asks the farmer to lend him a map. It looks as if they are still about five miles from St. Mary's, halfway between Picotville and Etienneville. But before he can ask his new friends for directions…
Brannon's attention is caught by a noise outside. "That's a car," Brannon tells his men. "They need to stop it." He steps out into the road, shouting and waving his arms to get the driver's attention. But as the vehicle approaches, he realizes this is no ordinary car. It's a Mercedes, and it isn't slowing down. Inside is a very distinguished passenger, Lieutenant General Wilhelm Fahle, holder of an iron cross.
and right now he's distinctly agitated. Farley had intended to spend the day at a war games exercise in Wren, 100 miles away. In fact, he was already on his way there when the first reports of Allied airdrops began coming in. The news worried him enough that he turned straight back. Except now there's a group of American soldiers in his way, and one of them seems to be waving at him. Farley's driver presses hard on the accelerator. Lieutenant Brannan and his men react as one,
The car swerves and smashes into a wall. The driver is killed instantly. General Farley is thrown from the vehicle. He flails, searching for his pistol. Lieutenant Brannan takes no chances. He shoots Farley straight in the forehead. He was quite a catch for the Americans. He was the first German general to be killed on D-Day. At around 4am, the same time as Brannan's deadly encounter with General Farley,
Reinforcements begin arriving in the nearby fields, swooping down from the sky in gliders. The new men bring new material: jeeps, radios, machine guns, explosives, everything the soldiers need to take further targets before the beach landings begin in the morning. For men who've been fighting tooth and nail the past few hours just to keep their missions alive, it's like a gift from the gods. But the reinforcements don't arrive everywhere.
We last saw 20-year-old Fred Millward from the 9th Parachute Battalion falling out of his plane at 12:50 AM, an accident that saved his life. Soon after 1 o'clock he arrives at his designated rendezvous point. He waits there for the other 650 men from his battalion to turn up and for their mission to destroy the Merville gun battery to begin. "But there are only a few dozen men at the rendezvous. Where is everyone?" he wonders.
At 1:30 AM the boss arrives, Colonel Terence Otway. He is a cold, standoffish type, not exactly popular with his men. But after his own terrifying landing, Milward is relieved to see the commander still in one piece. Another hour passes, and now Otway too is getting worried. By this point, all 650 men should have arrived at the rendezvous, but only 110 have made it.
Milward and his comrades are due at the gun battery just after 4am, and they can't afford to be late. At the same time, three gliders will crash land on the site, the trigger for the men to storm the battery. If they don't start moving soon, they risk missing the gliders and ruining the entire mission. After another 15 minutes, 40 more men have drifted in. That's 150 in total, still less than a quarter of the battalion. The mood is tense.
Millward doubts whether the mission is even possible, but Colonel Otway is unwavering. The Merville gun battery must be destroyed. At 2:50 AM, the men begin trekking towards their target. For more than an hour, they trudge through mud, bomb craters, shell holes. Eventually, they reach the battery's barbed wire perimeter. From here, Millward can distinguish the four concrete casements that house the giant guns. It's gone 4 AM now,
Millward crouches, waiting for the arrival of the gliders. He watches expectantly as the first one swoops into sight, and then swoops right out again, seemingly lost. Then he sees the second glider appear in the sky. Unfortunately, the Germans spot it too. Under fire, it veers off into a nearby orchard, smashes into the ground, and catches fire. The third glider, well, that never shows up at all.
It's become detached from its tow plane somewhere over the channel. Remarkably, the pilots manage to turn the aircraft around and drift back to England. They land at an airfield in West Sussex, but the soldiers in the back are none the wiser. They leap out of the glider and head straight for the control tower, convinced they've just landed in Normandy. Guns drawn, they storm the tower, demanding those inside surrender in the name of the King. It doesn't take long for the penny to drop.
Someone puts the kettle on and makes them a cup of tea. Fred Millwood and Colonel Otway know nothing of the farce playing out back home in Sussex. All that concerns them is the fact that of the three gliders intended to support their mission, not a single one has landed on target. They're 500 men down, with no glider support and no escape strategy. But there's nothing else for it. Otway issues the command. It's time for the men to charge the lion's den.
If nothing else, Fred Millwood now has total clarity. A complex plan has suddenly become very simple. Strangely enough, I felt outside myself as I was running. I don't think I really had any fear because I didn't... I got this feeling it wasn't me. I know it sounds stupid, but that's what it was like. When we got to the casemate who went in and shot up some... in one room, and the...
Sergeant said, "Give me your explosive and get out." So that's what I did. I put the explosive on the gun and blew it, and that was it. The frenzy of violence is over almost as suddenly as it began. Somehow, the British troops have taken the battery. But victory comes at a terrible price. When we got together, and then we knew how many were left, there was only about 150 went in, and about 65 came out.
One of our chaps said afterwards they should have annihilated us. It's like the mayor of Merrville said at some of the reunions there. They didn't know it was impossible, so they just did it. It's 5am, just enough time to fire a yellow flare into the sky, a signal to the Allied ships in the channel that the Merrville guns have been successfully destroyed. Out at sea, HMS Arethusa receives the message loud and clear.
For the last hour or so, tens of thousands of men have been boarding the flat-bottomed vessels that will soon begin to land them on the beaches. As dawn breaks, people all along the Normandy coast witness an extraordinary sight: a swarming mass of black shapes inching towards the shore. In the next episode, an armada of 7,000 ships takes to the seas. The King intervenes to prevent Churchill crossing the Channel.
And the first Allied landing craft make their way to the shore. That's next time.
