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It's Tuesday June 6th 1944 a little after 1.30pm we are 6,000 feet in the air above the English Channel a pigeon called Gustav is on his way home his speckled wings beat furiously against the wind
He's been in the air for five hours now, and flying conditions aren't ideal. A steady headwind of 30 mph pushes against him. He's been battling it ever since he took off at 8:30 this morning from an LST anchored 20 miles off the Normandy coast. Attached to his leg is a very important message: the first official confirmation that Operation Overlord has begun. This isn't Gustav's first time as a courier.
Earlier in the war, he flew secret messages out of Nazi-controlled Belgium on behalf of the French Resistance. It's a precarious occupation. Third Reich marksmen scour the skies for birds like Gustav. They even train hawks to tear them down mid-air. Fortunately, there's no such threat above the Channel. Gustav is almost home, aloft at RAF Thorny Island just outside Chichester. At 1:46 PM, he swoops in for his landing.
His 150 mile journey is finally over. Gustav's RAF handler removes the bit of paper fastened to his leg. It's from Reuters, the international news agency. They've got half a dozen Air Force birds unknown for D-Day. And it's a message of world-changing significance. First assault troops landed 0750. Passage uneventful. Steaming steadily on. It's the first war report from the coast of Normandy.
confirming that D-Day has begun. But it certainly won't be the last. Because not only is D-Day a military operation like no other, it's also a groundbreaking media event. Right now in Normandy, hundreds of reporters are risking their lives, not fighting the enemy, but bringing the latest breaking news to the folks back home. From the Noiser Network, this is D-Day. D-Day
One of the great things about the Allied high command in World War II, they did understand that the people back home had got to be told what was going on. Historian and former war correspondent, Max Hastings.
So journalists like Winford Dawn Thomas and Richard Dimbleby, and for that matter, my father, were allowed to fly on bomber operations and do all sorts of other stuff. So there was an understanding by the generals that you couldn't tell people the whole truth. And above all, you couldn't show images of bodies that might be identifiable because it would upset people too much. But they were allowed to see what was going on up front. In the battle against Nazi Germany, basic freedoms are on the line.
One of the most precious is freedom of speech. In Britain, the war effort has hampered the press in all kinds of ways. Paper rationing, for instance, has seen newspapers shrink to a fraction of their pre-war size. Yet throughout they've maintained editorial independence. Professor Tim Lockhurst is a former war reporter and author of Reporting the Second World War: The Press and the People.
Copy was often censored by the Ministry of Information, but it didn't have to be. You could publish whatever you liked. It's just that if you published something that the government didn't like and you hadn't sent it for censorship, you were liable to be prosecuted.
If you wanted to be critical of the government, if you wanted to attack and criticize, you could. And many newspapers routinely did so because we had no policy censorship, just security censorship. So on issue after issue, air raid shelter, coverage, evacuation, the British bombing of German cities, etc., etc., the newspapers do their job of holding power to account, speaking truth to power, and doing their traditional democratic duty.
Such editorial robustness isn't always popular. In the early years of the war, the British Prime Minister is furious at the editorial line of some newspapers.
We must never forget attempts that the Prime Minister Winston Churchill made to ban the Daily Mirror and its Sunday sister, not because they were anti-British, not because they were pro-Nazi, on the contrary, because they were criticizing the way in which he was fighting the war and their failure to do their best on behalf of the readers of those two papers. But despite such moments of tension, the Allied leaders have come to realize the necessity of working with the press, not against them.
So they gave opportunities and facilities to journalists that they'd never done in the First World War. They spent all their time trying to keep journalists miles away from the front line because they didn't want anybody at home to be told how ghastly it was because the generals felt that if they were told how awful it was, that everybody would pack up and go home and the families would be forever in tears. In the Second World War, they did get the chances to do stuff.
One of the great correspondents in the field is American journalist Ernie Pyle. Born and raised in rural Indiana, Pyle speaks to the average person. His writing describes the visceral reality of the front line and lionizes American servicemen.
Ernie Pyle was always known as the G.I.'s journalist. He was the one who talked to them in the slip trenches and he wrote about them as they understood it. And the G.I.'s, the American soldiers, they loved Ernie Pyle's dispatches because he wrote about them as they saw themselves. "I love the infantry," writes Pyle in one of his reports. "They are the underdogs. They are the mud, rain, frost and wind boys.
They fought hard, eaten little, washed none. From early on, the planning for D-Day includes giving carefully selected reporters like Pyle direct access to the invasion force. I think there's great credit due to one man here. The Ministry of Information's chief press censor was Rear Admiral George Thompson. And Thompson was amongst those who made it absolutely clear to those planning D-Day that he thought newspaper journalists could and should be trusted.
And that coincided with the interests, particularly of the British government and the British armed forces, that this should not be depicted as an overwhelmingly US-led invasion. As with everything concerning D-Day, the media strategy is a work of great ambition and meticulous planning. In total, 558 accredited journalists, photographers and broadcasters are to embed with the invasion force.
Some flying on bombing raids, others dropping from the sky with paratroopers, or sailing across the channel with the Allied Armada and then following the soldiers ashore. Almost every angle of the invasion will be covered. For the journalists, it's an unprecedented opportunity, the chance to report on history being made in real time. Unsurprisingly, competition is fierce.
In the months before D-Day, while all the soldiers and sailors and airmen were preparing for this great moment, there was also a terrific fight among all the greatest journalists in the European theatre, British and American and Canadian, to be the ones who were allowed to land with the armies because they knew that this was going to be one of the greatest stories of the Second World War.
American journalist Martha Gellhorn can barely contain her excitement. Her vivid reports for the American magazine Colliers have seen her become one of the most respected reporters of the war. This despite huge obstacles placed in the way of female journalists. Author Claire Mollie
All the war reporters at this time were really expected to be male. And at the outbreak of the Second World War, female correspondents were actually prohibited from the combat zones. They could write about, you know, war fashion, that sort of thing. And women were denied, you know, the female journalists were denied a lot of the things to make their work work.
So they couldn't use official transportation. They had to have secondary sleeping arrangements. They weren't entitled to go to the military briefings. They didn't have the use of the official sensors or the radio transmitters or the teletypists to help them get their stories filed. But this is one of those things that sometimes you have to turn to your advantage. When it comes to D-Day, Colliers is awarded one press pass.
As the magazine's star reporter, Gellhorn naturally assumes the gig is hers. She arranges an RAF flight to England, but at the last minute she receives some infuriating news.
She was an accredited war correspondent for Colliers, but just before D-Day, her husband, the famous American writer Ernest Hemingway, with whom she had fallen out at this point, he rang up Colliers and said, you know, I'm the big name, hire me, which they immediately did to replace Martha, who's then left without any accreditation at all. An experienced journalist, Gellhorn is used to this kind of treatment, though not ordinarily from her own husband. In any case, she won't let it hold her back.
Determined to get her story, she travels to England anyway. Once there, she reckons she'll find a way of getting accredited. But her hopes are dashed. Schaaf has a strict policy of prohibiting female journalists from the front line. One of the world's top war reporters is poised to miss out on the biggest story of the war. Perhaps the biggest story of any war.
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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. Gelhorn is left with no option but to kick her heels in London, while 500 fellow journalists, all male, prepare for departure. At a briefing on the 16th of May, General Montgomery tells them they have scored an invite to a real first-class party.
But as with any top event, there are strict rules. All copy must go through a team of censors, who will also be joining the invasion party. Stick to description and colour, the reporters are warned, not analysis. General Eisenhower considers the journalists an essential part of the expedition. They are, he says, quasi-staff officers, issued in military uniforms and accorded officer-level privileges. But it's a double-edged sword.
Thanks to their status, the reporters are granted extraordinary access to the military operation. But at the same time, the clear implication is that they are part of it. Editorial independence has gone out of the window.
This was the most controlled media coverage of the war, and it was successfully controlled. It is journalism which is designed to depict the very best of the Allied achievement. It is not typical of the journalism of the Second World War, which at many points is doing precisely what journalism should do, and pointing out the failings of the wartime government and seeking to hold that wartime government to account.
But those correspondents who covered D-Day, the 500 accredited correspondents, were essentially in uniform doing the bidding of those who had allowed them to travel with them. Indeed, I would treat D-Day as an absolutely unique moment in the Second World War.
It can be very tough as a war correspondent. I've been a war correspondent and I know how tough it is to get it right. My own father, MacDonald Hastings, was one of the correspondents who went into Normandy. And many years afterwards, when I was a teenager, I was reading some of his dispatches
And I said, you know, Daddy, when I read this stuff, it seems to me that you make all the guys who were doing all these things, flying the bombers, landing on the beaches, you make them sound so gung-ho. I don't believe they were that keen. And I said this to him when I was about 16. My father said, boy, don't you understand? What I was doing was part of the war effort.
And of course, all the correspondents in those days, never mind censorship, they were rooting for our team, for the Allies. So they didn't say that some of these guys were throwing up their guts in the landing craft, not just because they were sick, but because also they were absolutely terrified. And with good reason. Any of us would have been terrified.
One always, all the time when you were doing this stuff, you always remembered that this was part of the war effort. That you had to cheer up the people back home. You had to make them feel that our guys were the right guys and they were doing terrifically well. Among those covering the D-Day story is Dune Campbell, a 24-year-old reporter for the Reuters news agency. Campbell is issued with a military uniform and a steel helmet.
In late May, along with many other journalists, he is sent to Wentworth Golf Club, sealed off from the outside world. Thirty-six hours before D-Day, he is briefed on his assignment. He is to embed with the Marine Commandos, landing on Sword Beach at nine o'clock on D-Day morning. He is ecstatic. Other journalists are beside themselves with envy. At six p.m. on the fifth of June, Campbell's ship sets sail from Southampton.
Lying on the cramped deck, he's too excited to sleep or eat. He can only think about how to capture his story. In his pack is a portable typewriter, cumbersome undoubtedly, but it's cutting edge, the best way of getting clean copy back home. At 9.06am, the landing craft bears down on Sword Beach. The ramp goes down. Commandos hurl themselves forward. Campbell slips.
He falls chest deep into the water. The weight of his pack roots him to the spot. A nearby commando pushes him forward. At last he's moving. Campbell hauls himself to the end of the beach and takes shelter in a waterlogged ditch. He yanks the typewriter from his pack. But every time he starts to type, a mortar explodes. Dirt and debris clog the keys. So he takes a pencil and scribbles a few lines instead.
A sketch of the madness from his vantage point. This ditch 200 yards inside Normandy. But that's the easy bit. He now has to get his copy to London. Back to the beach he goes, crawling, scurrying. Every few steps he throws himself to the ground, avoiding a flurry of gunfire. He looks for a sensor, but he can't see one. Instead he presses his dispatch into the hands of a naval officer, soon to shuttle back to England.
Campbell throws in a £5 note to sweeten the deal, and the sailor promises to do his best. It's probably the first British report to leave the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, but it never finds its way to Reuters. Campbell won't see the naval officer or his five quid ever again. And as it turns out, he's far from the only journalist whose efforts to capture the Normandy landings are thwarted.
One of the things extraordinary about D-Day is how few really good pictures the landings will work. And the answer, of course, is with the technology they then had, it was fantastically difficult to take pictures in action. One of the greatest photographers of all time, Robert Capa, who landed with the Americans on Omaha Beach, took some fabulous images
and only a handful of them survived because the technician who was handling them in the lab afterwards when they got back to England, he screwed up. He ruined an awful lot of these images. He inflicted a tragedy on us all by screwing up so many of Robert Cabot's pictures. So we've only got this sort of 15, 20 wonderful images that he took. Fortunately, other technology proves more reliable, notably the moving image.
There were film crews there on D-Day and one of the most vivid films is of the Canadians going ashore on Juneau Beach. And it's remarkable, it's terrifying just to watch it because it's filmed from the perspective of being inside one of these landing craft. And you actually see the ramp go down and the cameraman runs ashore across the beach while there's still live fire coming towards him.
And although that was filmed later in the day on the 6th of June, when most of the German bunkers had been knocked out, it nevertheless gives a real vivid impression of just how horrific it was to land that morning. But it's in the medium of radio that the D-Day coverage finally comes into its own.
"This is Robert St. John in the NBC newsroom in New York. Ladies and gentlemen, we may be approaching a fateful hour. All night long, bulletins have been pouring in from Berlin claiming that D-Day is here, claiming that the invasion of Western Europe has begun." It's half past midnight, New York time, when American radio stations pick up the first reports from Germany announcing that the invasion has started.
At first, they're hesitant to go on air with the breaking news. Just three days earlier, they broadcast the very same thing, only to discover it was a false alarm. Such is the reach of radio that the "fake" news rapidly spread across the country. Church bells were rung and impromptu minute silences observed, including at a baseball game between the New York Giants and the Pittsburgh Pirates. This time, though, the reports are confirmed.
At 12:41 AM, NBC is the first US network to announce that D-Day has begun. Three and a half hours later, they're broadcasting eyewitness reports from the front lines. Across the pond, news filters out more slowly. It's not until three hours later that the BBC broadcasts the official announcement. Newsreader John Snagg is the lynchpin of the media operation. He's been preparing for his role for days now.
In fact, Snag has been on lockdown in Broadcasting House since Sunday afternoon, on orders from the BBC's Director General. His script has been carefully vetted. At 9:32am, double British Summer Time, Snag's voice rings out over the airways: D-Day has come. Snag goes on to read a press release from Schaaf, known as Communiqué No. 1, under the command of General Eisenhower.
Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France. Meanwhile, at a top-secret press conference in the Ministry of Information, more than a hundred international journalists are being briefed on Operation Overload. The doors of the Ministry are locked until Snag's official broadcast has gone out. For the Allies, news has become a matter of military precision.
In both Britain and America, radio has transformed the way the public learn about war. It is intimate and immediate, in a way that newspapers never can be. The BBC have been planning for D-Day almost as long as the generals and politicians. As early as 1943, their War Reporting Unit began identifying reporters to cover the event. Those chosen have been trained by the British Army in core military skills, such as gunnery, reconnaissance and signals.
then sent on military exercises, writing reports as though the mock battles were real ones. They've learned to colour within the censor's lines, remaining truthful but never revealing secret information. "Let pride in the achievement of our armies come through," the head of BBC News has told them, "but never jazz up a plain story." Broadcasting teams learn to do each other's jobs, reporters learn the rudiments of sound engineering, and vice versa.
They rehearse parachuting from planes and survival skills. They even go through interrogation training to make sure they can be trusted with military secrets. When D-Day arrives, the BBC's top reporters are in place to document the invasion up close. Richard Dimbleby is with the RAF, watching the first planes take off from an airbase in Oxfordshire. Howard Marshall sails with the Armada and reports on landing craft sinking in the Channel.
It's a cast of exceptional broadcasters doing things that no radio audience has ever heard. For me, the greatest one was the Australian Chester Wilmot of the BBC.
And the courage that they displayed, Chester Wilmot flew into Normandy on the early hours of D-Day in a glider. It was a terrifying experience just flying in a glider, never mind facing the enemy. The paratroopers who he was with in the hours after the landings, they just were amazed how cool and calm, popping away at these big pipes. And he not only delivered some great broadcasts for the BBC, but he wrote some of the great dispatches.
And afterwards, Wilmot wrote one of the classic histories of the Second World War, The Struggle for Europe. This mosaic of eyewitness accounts is a pioneering feat of reportage. Made possible by brand new technology, reporters carry with them so-called midget recording devices. Each weighs 40 pounds, astonishingly sleek and lightweight for the time. Along with the record is the 12 double-sided discs, capable of recording more than an hour of material.
The result is War Report, a new series of programs bringing Operation Overlord into ordinary homes. The first edition is broadcast on the evening of D-Day, immediately after the 9:00 PM news bulletin. Every night from now until VE Day, War Report will update listeners on the latest news from the front lines, often from a previously unknown perspective. In total, the program puts out 235 separate editions,
to an audience of 10 to 15 million listeners. All the BBC's top reporters are involved: Richard Dimbleby, Chester Wilmot, Howard Marshall, as well as some younger, less experienced voices. One of those reporting on D-Day itself is Guy Byam. He's young, just 26, a former Navy man. Earlier in the war, Byam lost the sight in his right eye when the ship he served on was sunk in the North Atlantic.
After being demobbed, he turned his talents to journalism. Embedded with the paratroopers for D-Day, Byam's description of the nighttime drop into Normandy is a highlight of the first installment of War Report.
We're over the enemy coast now, and the running has started. One minute, 30 seconds, red light, green light, and out, out, get on, get out, get out! Out fast into the cool night. Out, out into the air over France. And we know that the dropping zone is obstructed. We're dropping, in fact, into fields covered with poles.
But I hit my chute and lower my kit bag which suspends on the end of a 40-foot rope from my harness. And then the ground comes up to hit me and I find myself in the middle of a cornfield." Byam's reports are perfectly in line with the Allied commander's wishes. Vivid, intimate narrative description. No hard-hitting questions, no testing analysis. Nevertheless, it's a crucial source of information for the public and exceptionally dangerous.
During the liberation of Europe, Bayern becomes a star BBC reporter, but he dies in the line of service. On the 3rd of February 1945, his plane is shot down while reporting on a bombing raid on Berlin. A lot of journalists got killed in the Second World War because they were allowed to go up front. But that's where they wanted to be. And some of them ended up doing amazing things. But journalists were right up there at the front. And yes, a lot of them paid the price.
The most horrific sights imaginable. Limbs flying everywhere, blood everywhere.
Literally, you saw before your eyes men's arms and legs disappearing. And that's something it's incredibly difficult to prepare yourself for. And I always remember one day when I was a correspondent in Vietnam, one day after a battle early in the morning, I was standing on a road and I saw a Vietnamese soldier dragging the body of an enemy Viet Cong across the road. And this guy's intestines had fallen out so that they were trailing about 10 feet behind him in the dust.
And I remember thinking so clearly, if I got hit in the stomach like that, that's how my intestines would look. Now on D-Day, thousands of men saw people's intestines hanging out. Thousands of men saw people missing not only limbs, but sometimes heads. It happened again and again. Those listening back home are spared the most visceral horrors of the battlefield. But that doesn't mean the D-Day reporting is lightweight.
The BBC's War Report is an immediate success. And not just in Britain. More than 700 American radio stations broadcast it too. It has impact because it's very good reporting. It's eyewitness reporting. It's colourful. It's bringing real voices into the homes of American listeners. But it's also about the BBC's sophistication compared with American network radio. American network radio essentially doesn't trust recording.
So they tended to stick almost entirely to live broadcasting from great names like Ed Murrow. War Report was enormously popular across the United States, although I do recall that there was some confusion about some of the British accents they heard. Cockney was okay, Glaswegia was a bit more complicated, Liverpool was incomprehensible, according to one report I saw. As the first edition of War Report rings out across the airwaves, Martha Gellhorn is busy pulling off the greatest coup of her journalistic career.
After news of the invasion breaks on the morning of D-Day, she makes a decision. She has to get to the heart of the action, come what may. So she travels south, to the docks. She never reveals exactly where. She spots a hospital ship, gleaming white with red crosses. She manages to smooth talk her way past military police. Tells them she's here to interview some of the nurses. Woman to woman, the guards let her on board.
Gellhorn finds her way to the nearest toilet and locks herself in. She's got nothing to lose now, so she actually hid in the toilets and it was only when they were part way across the channel that she revealed herself. She waits patiently, counting down the hours, until finally, on the evening of D-Day, she can feel the ship begin to move. Once at sea, Gellhorn emerges to explore the rest of the ship. Nobody pays her much attention,
It's not as if they can turn back now, stowaway or no. At dawn, on D-Day plus one, the ship approaches the Normandy coastline. For the next several hours, Gellhorn assists as wounded men are lifted off the beaches and onto the hospital ship. She gapes at the number of dead bodies still floating in the water, what she later describes as "like swollen, greyish sacks." As the wounded are hauled on board the hospital ship,
She makes herself useful, fetching water and corned beef sandwiches for those who are conscious. That evening, she is allowed to go ashore on Omaha Beach and help with the recovery of the bodies. She turns her experience into a searing article for Collier's magazine, one of the most memorable accounts of the invasion. Gellhorn writes about the nurses from Michigan and Wisconsin
The wounded soldiers and their mountains of cigarette butts. The plasma bottles, the surgical instruments, the broken bones. The young men who groaned and called out in pain and those who couldn't sleep and lay in silence. It's an extraordinary, very humanising essay. I mean, the first casualty they brought back was a German prisoner of war.
So we must remember they're taking the enemy as well as the Allied wounded. And then she comes back with the ship and she talks about the conversations that the men had, the wounded had on the ship on the way back. Back in England, Martha Gellhorn will pay for her flouting of the rules, but she isn't deterred.
When she gets back to Britain, she's actually arrested by the British military police and her journalism credentials are stripped from her. But she does eventually regain her military permission to cover the war. She goes right back out and follows the Allied troops as they march towards Berlin. And her copy is remarkable. Gellhorn's unauthorised reporting from Normandy eclipses the efforts of many of her officially sanctioned colleagues, including her estranged husband.
Ernest Hemingway might get the cover of the July edition of Colliers, but Gellhorn's essay, consigned to a single page, is the one that stood the test of time. You know, all these decades later, we're reading her copy. That's the immediate, just really immediate story of what's happening on the beaches. In the next episode, the first women arrive on the Normandy beaches, officially at least. Thousands of nurses begin landing in France, some of them never to return.
As the Allied invasion force presses onwards, all three women's services will send female volunteers across the channel. They will follow in the footsteps of the male soldiers, all the way to Paris and beyond. That's next time.
