Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Whoa. Landing an account this big will totally change my landscaping business. It's going to mean hiring more guys and more equipment and new trucks for the new guys to drive the new equipment in. I don't know if I'm ready. You can do this. And Ford Pro Fence Simple can help. Our experts are ready to make growing pains less painful for your business with flexible financing solutions that meet the needs of your business today when you need them. Get started at FordPro.com slash financing.
It's Saturday the 26th of August, 1944. We're in Paris. More than two million people have crammed into the centre of the French capital for the biggest street party in history. For 24 hours, church bells have pealed in celebration. After four long years, the city of light has been freed from Nazi rule. And Parisians have responded, engaging in an ecstatic outpouring of singing, dancing, drinking, revelry.
And, let's not be coy, a fair bit of l'amour. Along the Champs-Élysées, a victory parade is in progress. The French 2nd Armoured Division, led by General Philippe Leclerc, streams down the famous boulevard from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde. At the roadside, tricolour flags, hidden away since June 1940, are waved furiously. Mothers hoist excitable children for a glimpse of the passing warriors.
Great war veterans' chests awash with medals fight back tears of joy. Love-starved mademoiselles burst forth to bestow flowers and kisses upon the passing heroes. At the head of the parade walks a gangly man, six foot five inches tall. He has a prominent nose, a keppy hat, and a perennially pensive expression. He is General Charles de Gaulle, self-proclaimed leader of the new Free France.
But even on this day of celebration, of liberation, not everyone is content. When de Gaulle arrives at Notre Dame to attend a Thanksgiving mass, his entourage comes under fire. From the balcony of the cathedral, gunmen are taking potshots at the new French leader. De Gaulle appears unfazed. As his own men fire back at the would-be assassins, he saunters into the cathedral. Inside, the strains of the Magnificat mingle with sporadic gunfire.
De Gaulle's men pick off the gunman, while the new French leader walks stoically up the aisle. Later, he will blame the attack on local communists, for, despite the elation on the boulevard, there remains an uncomfortable truth: France is riven by factional infighting, teetering on anarchy. Meanwhile, rogue German units remain holed up across the city, but nothing, nothing is going to stop the party now.
It's been 11 weeks of brutal fighting since the Allies first landed on French soil. But now, finally, the battle for Normandy has won. Surely, it's only a matter of time before the Third Reich collapses altogether. And none of this could ever have happened without D-Day. From the Noiser Network, this is the final part of the D-Day story. Let's go back to where we left off 11 weeks earlier, the 6th of June 1944.
By midnight on D-Day, there are 134,000 Allied troops in Normandy. They've continued arriving throughout the day, each landing easier than the last. Huge ships now crunch right up onto the sand, disgorging men, supplies, and vehicles. A foothold in France has been achieved, at a cost of 9,000 casualties, maybe 4,000 dead, a mere fraction of what the Allies were expecting.
The amount of territory gained by the end of the day is less than the Overlord plans called for, though more than enough to call the operation a success. Historian and author Giles Milton. The plan for D-Day was extremely ambitious. The idea was for the Allied beachhead to have moved at least eight miles inland. So you imagine a sort of a large section of the Normandy coastline was intended to be under Allied control by the time dusk fell on D-Day.
Sir Anthony Beaver Montgomery had said, "We will capture Caen on the first day, in the first 24 hours," which was perhaps a ridiculous piece of optimism. Maybe he was trying to push his commanders and really fixing an objective too far.
I mean, on Omaha Beach, they only moved inland 2,000 metres. So they were scarcely off the beach itself by the time night fell on D-Day itself. Strictly speaking then, Overlord is already behind schedule. But there's a clear timeline for what happens next. Each day is classified in relation to the 6th of June. D-Day plus 1, D-Day plus 2, D-Day plus 3, and so on. Professor Geoff Warrow.
It wasn't just D-Day. D-Day was just getting a landing on the hostile shore. Then you had to sustain it. Then as it moved inland, you had to supply it and reinforce it. Maintaining an army on a hostile shore isn't easy, especially in Normandy, where there are no harbours. This is one reason the Germans were convinced the main attack would come elsewhere, because how could the Allies sustain a bridgehead without first seizing a port? Of course, they hadn't reckoned with the ingenious Mulberry Harbours.
As early as D-Day +1, massive segments of concrete and steel are already being towed across the channel. A vast self-assembly kit, complete with docks, pontoons, causeway. There's one for the Americans at Saint Laurent and another for the Anglo-Canadian forces at Arromanches. The mulberries will be protected by a ring of breakwaters, old cargo ships towed into position and then scuttled. Together with the underwater oil pipeline, Pluto,
The artificial harbors mean the Allied beachhead in Normandy can adequately support the campaign that follows. Before long, temporary airstrips are laid too, so aircraft can also come and go. It was just such a sophisticated operation requiring so many moving parts and so much preparation and so much kind of underpinning infrastructure. And this staff work required to keep these echelons moving over, you know, D plus 1, D plus 2, D plus 3.
The sophistication was absolutely mind-boggling at the time. With the coast road secure and several villages in Allied hands, the immediate objective is to merge the five beachheads. But this turns out to be harder than it looks, because the German forces, having retreated from the Atlantic wall, now have another formidable structure on their side: the agricultural landscape of Normandy.
This rolling farmland is divided by narrow sunken lanes, bordered by steep banks and thick tall hedgerows known as bockage. Great for the defender, a nightmare for any attacker. The bockage were pretty much impenetrable even for tanks and so the men found themselves fighting a hit and run battle throughout Normandy.
The Battle of Normandy was far tougher than D-Day in fighting terms. And actually in terms of casualties on both sides, both German and Allied sides, it was actually worse than the average of the Eastern Front. It's a case of advancing yard by yard, hectare by hectare, field by field. But despite the challenges, within a week the five beaches have been folded into a single lodgement, 20 miles long and six miles deep.
with overwhelming air and naval cover. Essentially a giant Allied military base inside France. The feel-good factor is palpable. Before long, Prime Minister Winston Churchill joins the party. On the morning of D-Day plus six, he arrives in an amphibious duck landing craft. Churchill strides up Juno Beach, cigar in mouth, shaking hands, giving V-sign. The newsreel crews lap it up.
Two days later, General de Gaulle strolls into the historic town of Bayeux, the first time he has set foot on French soil for four years. But despite all the excitement among the invaders, the local response is variable, ranging from enthusiastic gratitude to shrugging insouciance.
The Norman farmers were not, shall we say, very emotional in their expression. And so they didn't actually welcome them. I mean, one of my favorite little stories is that the American tank commander arrives in a Norman farmyard and the Norman farmer comes out with crates of cider and Calvados or whatever. And the American tankers, the soldiers, sort of toast Vive la Libération and all the rest of it.
And then the normal farmer turns to the officer and said, "Right, that'll be 250 francs." And he said, "But hell, we've just liberated you." And he said, "Well, I didn't charge the Germans anymore." While the GIs knock back glasses of the local brandy, the byways of the Calvados region are gridlocked by the sheer weight of materiel now flooding in. 35,000 tons every 24 hours. Traffic jams extend 15 miles along the country lanes.
The Allies have become victims of their own success. This congestion is hampering the advance, and the enemy are beginning to recover. The fighting is starting to descend into what the veterans of 1918 have always dreaded: another war of attrition. On D-Day itself, the Atlantic wall defenders proved a mixed bag: Wehrmacht regulars in some places, press-ganged POWs in Eastern Europeans and others. And the Germans are still holding back.
Of ten Panzertank divisions, only three have so far been released, much to the frustration of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. In fact, the defense of Normandy is still being micromanaged by Hitler. From his Bavarian mountain retreat hundreds of miles away, it's good news for the Allies. But then, disaster. The unpredictable weather in the Channel, which caused D-Day to be postponed 24 hours, returns to scupper Allied plans once again.
On D-Day +13, unlucky for some, comes the worst storm in 40 years. The two Mulberry harbors are smashed to pieces. The crucial supply line is cut off. When the storm clears, the beaches are strewn with debris, a tangled mass of vehicles, equipment and wrecked superstructure. Allied engineers set to work at once. The Mulberry at Arromanches proves salvageable, but Saint Laurent is a write-off. The storm confirms what the planners knew all along.
The Mulberries were only ever a temporary solution. To maintain this new Western Front, the Allies must seize a working port. Their objective lies in Normandy's northwest corner, at the tip of the Cottontown Peninsula. Cherbourg. It's a job for the Americans. After all, the port city is less than 50 kilometers from Utah Beach. On paper, the operation looks straightforward. Cut off the Cottontown Peninsula and then steadily advance to the tip.
Two days after the wrecking of the Mulberries, Normandy is still being lashed by torrential rain. The Americans advancing northwards have reached the outskirts of the city, but inside, the Germans have battened down their hatches. It will take five more days of fighting, street by street, house by house, before the German garrison and its commander finally come out with their hands up. 25,000 new POWs.
Cherbourg is the first major objective to be taken in the Normandy campaign, but it's a qualified victory. By the time the Americans seize the harbour, the Germans have comprehensively trashed it. It'll be almost a month before it's fully functional again.
For
$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Hi, listeners. Did you know that the team behind this show has other podcasts too? Discover them all at Noiser.com, home of the Noiser Network. You'll find hundreds of immersive true stories. There's a world of podcasts waiting for you. Take your pick. Listen at Noiser.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
A hundred kilometers away, in the Anglo-Canadian sector, lies another vital objective: Caen. This city's value is as a railway hub. It's a marshalling point for the vast numbers of German troops rushing towards the front lines. Montgomery tried to take it as early as D-Day plus three, but for three long weeks, Caen has continued to hold out. The Germans have dug themselves into a rabbit warren of tunnels, and they've moved up their Panzer tank divisions as well.
The only way to oust them, it's decided, is with a monumental aerial bombardment. On the 18th of July, six weeks after D-Day, the bombers go in. It's one for the record books, the most concentrated air attack ever launched in support of ground forces. That evening, the sky darkens as 2,000 bombers swarm on ahead. British soldier George Talbot is sheltering in a ruined farmhouse outside the city.
I'm looking over and I heard this noise, terrific noise, and I looked out and as far as you could see, it was aeroplanes. They passed over us. I thought, thank God they're ours, you know. And a few minutes later, no wonder than that, the ground was shaking. Dropping the bombs, it must have been terrific there in Cairns. Terrible thing, you know. When the dust clears, the Canadian 3rd Division enters the city.
It's like walking onto a moonscape, pocked with craters. There's barely a building left standing. The medieval university, the historic city center, obliterated. The stench of death will linger for weeks.
The Allies had attempted to drop leaflets from the sky, warning everyone, get out of your homes, move inland, go into the fields, just get out of the cities. But these had landed too late. People didn't take them seriously. They didn't realise what was going to happen. And the bombing of Caen remains, to this day, highly controversial. Was it really worth it? Did it actually achieve what it was meant to achieve? Well, not really. What it did achieve was killing huge numbers of civilians.
Of a population of 60,000, only 17,000 remain. The rest are either dead, wounded, or have been forced onto the road as refugees. And Caen is far from the only Norman city to be wrecked by Allied bombing. Professor Olivier Villaviorca
You have around 20 cities which were erased at 60, 70 or 80% by the Allied bombs. Generally, the French were very, very happy with their liberators. And these liberators were really, really welcomed.
In Normandy, you see, the feelings were mixed. On the one hand, Normans were very, very happy to be liberated. But on the other hand, the Allied made many, many bombings, too many bombings,
So there was also a feeling of resentment from the Normans because they suffered a lot. You had around 15,000 Normans who died in 1944 because of the Allies' operations. Their houses were destroyed. They lost everything. And we really have to understand this fact.
There is still bitterness to this day, there's no doubt about it. I think that the majority in Normandy realized that they actually were bound to be the sacrifice for the rest of France. With Cherbourg and Caen both taken, the Allied advance now looks unstoppable. Seven weeks in, the breakout begins. The Americans branch into Brittany in the west. To the south, they capture Saint-Lô.
Looping under the German forces, they push east to Argentin, 50 miles inland. With the British, Canadians and Poles bearing down from the north, the two allied armies converge on the town of Falaise. By the 12th of August, they virtually encircle the German 7th Army, kettled into a tight area of 15 divisions of fighting men. Closing the gap, tying off the neck of the sack becomes a matter of urgency.
But a lack of coordination leads to the first major strategic bust-up of the campaign. The Americans believe Montgomery is too cautious. The Brits claim the Yanks are reckless. Either way, the victory isn't pressed home. 40,000 enemy troops sneak through the gap. Dennis Bowen served in the East Yorkshire Regiment. The gap was closed.
two or three days later than it should have been closed. But we advanced into that and some of the Germans escaped through this little gap that had been left at Phalae, although they were beaten up is a good way of saying that, as they scrambled to get through this gap. For the Germans, the Battle of the Phalae's Pocket is a bloodbath. The Americans call it a turkey shoot. RAF Typhoons swoop low, launching rockets at the enemy.
After ten days of fighting, 10,000 Germans lie dead. Another 50,000 are captured. When the Allies enter the town, they find a scene of utter carnage. Falaise marks the end of effective German resistance in Normandy. Once that had been taken, Normandy was secured. So the advance was to continue across France. Dr. Tessa Dunlop.
Something like this hasn't happened since 1940 and then it happened in reverse. People have lived through 1940 when the exact opposite happened. Belgium's down, the Netherlands are down, France is occupied, etc. And now we're seeing that in slow motion happen in reverse. Meanwhile, far away in Germany, the Allied invasion is still being spun as no big deal. Famously, the Normandy landings were not enough to get Hitler out of bed.
Eleven years of Nazi rule have made the minds of the populace exceptionally malleable. Josef Goebbels and his ministry of propaganda are used to presenting their defeats as glorious failures, epic sagas of heroic sacrifice for the fatherland. Ordinary Germans have been drip-fed warnings that a Western invasion would come. It was just a question of where and when. And now it is here. It's presented to them as a relief, a case of bring it on in this ultimate showdown.
Good versus evil. The Third Reich versus the decadent Jewish capitalists. A duel for the soul not just of Germany, but of Europe. Professor Thomas Weber. When D-Day finally happened, there was a lot of confusion and panic in military circles. And in hindsight, we now really focus on kind of the panic and fusion of the day, the
the fact that Hitler was still in bed, that no one wanted to wake him up, that he thought, is this the real thing and so on. But in a way, that's kind of a distraction from looking at the broader picture of how Hitler and his inner circle perceived the invasion and how German population at large perceived the invasion.
I mean, they thought this was now inevitable, and they thought the invasion would bring finally a resolution to the war. It would bring the war to an end. They actually thought that this is the moment that Germany will strike back. In one sense, at least, they're right. Because Hitler has something nasty up his sleeve. His new Wunderwaffen, wonder weapons, are expected to turn warfare on its head.
In the early hours of the 13th of June, a week after D-Day, the first of them goes into action. Launched from a base in the Pas de Calais, an unmanned cruise missile rattles through the sky above the Channel, across southern England, all the way to Bow in East London. Here the power cuts out and it crashes down to Earth. This new menace is known as the V-1. The V loosely translated stands for "vengeance".
In effect, it's a prototype drone, a flying bomb, which can travel 150 miles without a pilot. Thanks to the distinctive sound it makes before it drops, it soon acquires a nickname: the "Buzz Bomb" or "Doodle Bug". Over the next six months, until their launch sites in Europe are discovered, 10,000 V1s will be fired at South-East England. They're deployed not as tactical weapons, but as instruments of terror.
Hitler is less concerned with defeating the enemy in the field than he is with breaking their will. In fact, the Fuhrer seems remarkably unconcerned when it comes to the actual battle taking place in northern France. It's not until the 17th of June, D-Day plus 11, that he pays the new Western Front a visit. As far as many in the German military are concerned, it's an astonishing act of absenteeism by their commander-in-chief. To them, the Normandy invasion signals only one thing:
The beginning of the end for the Third Reich. They're fighting losing battles on two fronts now. The only question is who makes it to Berlin first? The Anglo-Americans or the Soviets? And there's no doubt which will be worse for Germany. Maybe, just maybe, there's a way out. Sue for peace with the Western Allies and then throw everything they have at the Russians. Perhaps even a fanciful notion. Persuade the Brits and the Americans to join them.
By the way, no serious German military thinker believes that peace, let alone victory, can be achieved with Hitler at the helm. The Fuhrer needs to go, by hook or by crook. On the 20th of July, as the Battle of Caen is reaching its bloody conclusion, Hitler is targeted for assassination. His so-called Wolf's Lair, the eastern campaign headquarters in the forests of East Prussia, is blown up by a suitcase bomb.
planted by a young officer, Claus von Stauffenberg. The Fuhrer narrowly escapes with his life. In the aftermath of the bombing, high-ranking plotters are swiftly rounded up. Von Stauffenberg is executed by firing squad before dawn breaks the following day. But gradually the net of suspicion is cast wider. One of those caught in it is Field Marshal Rommel, the famous Desert Fox, charged with defending Normandy.
His own links to the plot are tenuous, but they're enough to seal his fate. Rommel is visited at home by two generals, who offer him a choice: a show trial in front of a kangaroo court, which will undoubtedly lead to his execution, or a discreet suicide, followed by a hero's funeral. The two generals, it turns out, have helpfully brought a cyanide capsule with them. It is, quite literally, a bitter pill to swallow. Reluctantly, Rommel bites down,
And within a matter of minutes, he's gone. As successful as Operation Overlord has proved, it's only one part of a truly global picture. The New Western Front is the latest theatre of operations, in a war that's taking place across three continents.
D-Day is attended at the same time by this massive Russian operation, Operation Bagration on the Eastern Front, when this huge Soviet army attacks through Belarus, pinning down massive numbers of first-line German troops that would otherwise have been focused on the Atlantic wall, right?
And D-Day also coincides with the Battle of Saipan in the Pacific, where you have this massive American landing on the island of Saipan to start bringing American forces into bomber range of the Japanese home islands and start breaching and collapsing this outer ring of Japanese defenses.
So all of these are arguably decisive moments, turning points, right? And it's the fact that they're all synchronized and they're all striking the Axis coalition at the same time that makes all of this so extremely difficult and ultimately fatal for the Germans. On the 15th of August comes yet another blow to the Axis armor, a series of Allied landings on France's Mediterranean coast, known as Operation Dragoon.
From Marseille to Cannes, this southern incursion will lead to a rapid advance up the Rhone valley. The so-called D-Day in the south is the less celebrated sequel to the Normandy landings of the 6th of June. But like its northern counterpart, it's a testament to cooperation, coordination and bravery on the part of the allied forces, including those bold men and women working undercover in France. Claire Mollet
Biographer of SOE agent Christina Skarbek. She's Polish. She is an aristocrat. She didn't want to go dancing the Polonaise or whatever. She grew up riding horses and her father taught her how to shoot a gun. And this was the life she wanted at the centre of the action.
And she single-handedly secured the defection of an entire Nazi German garrison on a strategic pass in the Alps in preparation for D-Day in the south. But when she came down from the mountain, having coordinated the defection, she discovered that Francis Komertz, who was the SOE agent and two of his colleagues, had been arrested.
So she begged the French Resistance Circuit she was working with to come and help rescue these three men. And they actually refused. So she just went off on her own and discovered they were being held in Din prison. And she actually marched in and said that she was a female special agent. She proved it because she had a wireless crystal. It's basically a SIM card of your 1940s wireless transmitter set, which proved that she had some connection to the British. It was a broken one, so they couldn't have used it.
But then she went a bit further. She claimed to be General Montgomery's niece. And she said that the American forces would be there within hours and basically terrified the captain of this prison and said, if you work with me to deliver me these three men, I will speak for you. Otherwise, you know, you're probably going to be hanging from a lamppost by tomorrow morning.
Apparently he met her with his gun on her and by the end of it he was shaking, spilling his coffee into his cup and all those three men were marched out of the cells towards the football ground which was known as the site of execution and then moved on into a car and at the next farm building they met Christina. It was only then they realised that this was a rescue job. D-Day in the South adds yet another front to the increasingly complex map of World War II. But for the Germans, it's affairs in the East that remain the biggest concern.
Sir Max Hastings. My father's generation and grandfather's generation honestly believed that the British won the Second World War with the Americans providing the chewing gums and the Russians out there doing heaven knows what. Well, today we have a much clearer understanding of sort of global story that the Russians did most of the fighting that was necessary to destroy Hitler's armies. And they took stupendous casualties in order to do that.
To put things in context, while the landings in Normandy are underway, bringing hundreds of thousands of men to fight in France, six million Soviet soldiers are engaged on the Eastern Front, a 1,500-mile combat zone that stretches from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Dr. John Curatola.
I still cannot wrap my head around the scale and scope of the Eastern Front. How big, how massive the casualties, the manpower, the material, it staggers the imagination. Just to give you a figure to kind of compare, the Americans and the British for the war in total lose about a half a million men, ballpark figure, 400,000, 500,000 people. The Russians will lose 25 million.
And that's only an estimate because Stalin was doing his Stalin thing in the 30s. Some estimates are as high as 45 million. So again, when you look at the scale and the scope of what happens on the Eastern Front, it is massive. Another statistic for you, roughly, for every 10 dead Germans, seven were killed by a Russian bullet. Right now, events in the East are unfolding at such a pace that it's hard to keep up. On the 23rd of August, after the collapse of the Romanian Front,
A coup in Bucharest overthrows the pro-Nazi government. Days later, the Soviets march into Bulgaria and turf out the Hitlerite administration there. Just like that, two Axis allies gone. Stalin now has an open road to Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and beyond.
Soviet forces move forward and with really lightning speed and there is then this expectation: "Hang on, this looks like Blitzkrieg, but Blitzkrieg not by us, but by the Soviet Union." For the Allies, the starting pistol has been fired on the race to Berlin. Roosevelt and Churchill are no longer focused on simply defeating Germany. They want to get there first and prevent the whole of Europe from falling to communism.
The Cold War, in effect, was already begun, and for the West, D-Day was its first major engagement.
There are many turning points in the war. D-Day was, in many ways, the turning point for the potential Cold War coming later. Because if D-Day had failed, and there was that possibility, then what would have been the outline, what would have been the geopolitical status of Europe if the Allies had failed to get ashore in the summer of 1944?
and how far would the Red Army have got by 1945? So all of these are what-if questions, kind of factual questions, but they're worth posing. With this bigger picture in mind, liberating France is little more than a means to an end. And Paris, the jewel in the crown of German-occupied Europe, begins to look increasingly irrelevant. In the words of US General Omar Bradley...
Paris represented nothing more than an ink spot on our maps, to be bypassed as we headed towards the Rhine. Taking the city and without unleashing a bloodbath on the civilian population is going to be a major headache, to be followed by a logistical migraine. Four million people in need of food, supplies and security. Better surely to bypass Paris altogether and let the Germans worry about all that.
But there is war, and there is also politics. At the heart of the latter sits France's self-appointed leader, General Charles de Gaulle. There has always been tension between de Gaulle and the Allies. A notoriously stubborn man, the French general isn't much of a team player. The Americans in particular can't stand him, and the feeling is clearly mutual. De Gaulle is horrified at the prospect of American soldiers occupying French territory.
In the run-up to D-Day, he even takes offence at the use of the term 'invasion'. For the French, the invasion was 1940. They always refer to the 'débakemant', the landings. As far as they're concerned, invasion is the occupation of enemy territory. And this was the one thing that de Gaulle was furious about, was the idea that France might be labelled 'enemy territory'.
And what he was appalled and horrified was that Roosevelt insisted on AMGOT, which was the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, which basically implied that France, by its surrender and by its armistice, had therefore become enemy territory. So far, it's been left to Winston Churchill to build bridges between de Gaulle and the Americans. He was the one who recognized the symbolic value of including French soldiers on D-Day.
and who later insisted that General Leclerc's French 2nd Armoured Division, veterans of the North Africa campaign, be shipped up from Algiers to take part in the battle for Normandy. But politically and strategically, there's also something to be said for taking control of events before they take control of you. It's the early hours of the 21st of August. We're in a field HQ at Troyes, 60 miles west of Paris.
"The commander in this area is none other than General George S. Patton, as brilliant a tactician as he is an infamous loose cannon. Miffed at his exclusion from the D-Day landings when he was assigned to command the decoy ghost army in Kent, Patton has been making up for lost time since arriving in Normandy. I'm proud to be here to fight beside you," he addressed his men on arrival. "Now let's cut the guts out of those krauts and get the hell onto Berlin."
But Patton's night has just been rudely interrupted by an unexpected arrival in his camp. A French civilian is brought in front of him, bearing an armband stamped with the initials FFI, the French Forces of the Interior. He is snuck out of Paris, he says, hoping to speak with an American general. By the light of a hurricane lamp, Patton hears the visitor's story. His name is Roger Galois, and he is here as an emissary of Henri Roltonge,
aka Roll, a former Union agitator and leader of the local communist resistance network. From his underground command center, Roll has organized a general strike. Metro workers, the gendarmerie, the police, postal workers, and more have downed tools and paralyzed the city. Now Roll has sent Galois to beg the Americans for help. An uprising has already begun, and the lives of thousands are at stake. Paris must be liberated post-haste.
It's an awe-inspiring story, but General Patton is not exactly impressed. In fact, he's furious. As far as he's concerned, these goddamn Parisians will rise up when he tells them to. The General rants and raves, doing his best to tear Galois off a strip, like he would with one of his own men. But Galois doesn't recognize Patton, and he knows nothing of his fearsome reputation. His ignorance serves him well.
Impressed by the man's nerve, Patton leaves him to make a few phone calls. Like it or not, the Americans can see which way the wind is blowing. Roll and Galois aren't the only Frenchmen with big plans for Paris. General Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division is nominally under American command, but he's been flagrantly defying his orders, inching his units ever closer to the outskirts of the city, while stealing as much armour and ammo as he can.
The Americans know better than to try to stop a runaway train. When Patton returns, he bears good news, as well as a bottle of the finest French champagne. He pours out two glasses and hands one of them to Galois. The higher-ups have had a change of heart, he explains. It's on. Over the next four days, as the US Third Army approaches Paris, the city shuts down. People come out onto the streets, armed with whatever they can get hold of,
They block roads, man barricades. Officially, the Free French Army and the disparate resistance cells have been unified under the banner of the French Forces of the Interior, the FFI. But the truth is, with the blood up and guns now freely available, Paris is a powder keg. Roll is an extraordinary man, and a brave one. He fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. But he is, at the end of the day, a communist.
And the Communists detest the Gaullists almost as much as they do the Nazis. For the Americans, it's a case of better the devil you know. Reluctantly, they're forced to accept that the Gaul must be installed as leader. Author, Sean Rees.
The Allies, obviously, the first goal was to get the Nazis out of France. But the second, almost more important goal after that was to shape post-war France, because the Allies, including de Gaulle, did not want it to go communist. What de Gaulle wanted was that the resistance, the resistances, acknowledged him as leader and an awful lot of the resistance who'd been doing the hard work on
on the ground in conditions of extreme danger did not want de Gaulle's sort of bunch of Ruperts strolling back in and saying, "Well done chaps, good work, but we'll take it from here." Inside the city, the German military governor, Dietrich von Koltitz, is caught between a rock and a hard place. He would much rather surrender with honour to an enemy army than find himself at the mercy of a baying mob. Koltitz has 25,000 men at his disposal, but they aren't combat troops.
The fittest of those have already been called away to the front. He prepares for a strategic withdrawal, but as the Germans begin implementing their exit strategy, posters are going up all around the city, calling on able-bodied Frenchmen to join the struggle against the invader. By now there are 7,000 armed men on the streets, and they're looking for a fight, a bloody catharsis, after four long years of humiliation. After all,
Don't they say revenge is a dish best served cold? Now it falls on the former occupiers and on their collaborators too, including those French women believed to have been sleeping with the enemy. Before he departs, von Coltitz has been given one final order, direct from the Fuhrer's lips. Hitler orders him to reduce Paris to a massive rubble.
He repeats the command several times, urging him to blow up bridges and destroy iconic landmarks. "Is Paris burning?" he demands, when they speak on the phone for the last time. But the answer is no. Von Koltitz has disobeyed his Fuhrer. After the war, a myth will develop that he simply couldn't bring himself to do it. But Von Koltitz is no sentimentalist. His war record speaks for itself, murdering Jews with abandon on the Eastern Front.
The truth is, right now, he doesn't have enough explosives. Plus, he's probably already thinking about how this will play in court. Allied judges won't look favourably on a man who turned gay Paris into another Warsaw. It takes six days of urban fighting for Paris to be brought under control, by which time von Koltitz has given up his Luger. Damage to the city is light. On the evening of the 24th of August,
Defying direct orders from their exasperated US superiors, an advance party of General Leclerc's army arrives in Paris. The next morning come more French troops, accompanied by the US 4th Infantry Division. That afternoon, Charles de Gaulle is rushed to the Hotel de Ville as the new head of state. It is, as the French say, a fait accompli. The following day's victory parade is a party for the ages, but it's a purely French affair.
Nor are any of the allied countries name-checked in de Gaulle's victorious radio broadcast. The city, he declares, has been liberated by the people of Paris with the help from the armies of France. Symbolically, the liberation of Paris is a huge moment, the climax of the Battle of Normandy.
But it's not quite the end of Operation Overlord. That will come a week later on September 1st, when General Eisenhower arrives in France to take direct, hands-on control of the ground forces. It has been one of the greatest military operations in history, a truly international effort, and one that succeeded thanks to the combined efforts of what are already being referred to as the United Nations.
men and women from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Poland, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. By the end of August, there are 2 million Allied troops in Western Europe. Sadly, many of them will become casualties, around 227,000 in total.
Not to mention the 30 to 40 thousand French civilians killed during the Battle of Normandy. And all of this is but an overture. As the net closes in on Germany, the final year of the war will prove its bloodiest.
We tend to forget. We think, oh, hey, D-Day happened, and then the next thing you knew it was May, and the Germans surrendered in 1945, you know, and that's not what happened. By the end of June, the Wehrmacht is starting to look, you know, pretty paltry, and now you have to fight your way across France into Germany proper. But that doesn't mean that this is a done deal. It doesn't mean that the Germans are a defeated force.
There are good reasons why Hitler and his inner circle initially were not that concerned about D-Day. Hitler thinks that Germans will fight
just totally differently once this becomes literally for them war for survival. And whatever other miscalculations Hitler made, he was absolutely right on that. Hitler foresaw that D-Day would not be the end, but would be the beginning of the bloodiest phase of the Second World War.
The Allied reaction was that any army which tries to blow up their own commander-in-chief must be on the brink of collapse. And actually what they got wrong was that the very fact that Hitler survived the attempt to blow him up meant that the German army was going to fight on to the bitter end because it would be totally controlled by the Nazis.
By the fall of 1944, the United States Army is running out of infantrymen. And the war is going to get bloodier as we get into 1945. You're going to see an exponential rise in casualties for the Allies as they push into Germany proper. And so while we do have a success on D-Day, again, this thing is far from over. And the Germans are fighting tooth and nail with whatever forces they have left.
It will be a long road to Hitler's suicide in the Chancellery bunker, another eight months of bitter fighting. But it was the 6th of June 1944, D-Day, that made ultimate victory possible. D-Day is hugely important because it's the turning point when the Western Allies come back on to occupied continental Europe. And from that point on, they are pushing all the way through Afghanistan.
There are hugely important battles. Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes, you know, there are huge numbers of losses. But it is from D-Day onwards that they are moving towards Berlin. What the D-Day landings did was they changed the narrative.
It felt like the Allies had taken control, that we were now dictating the agenda, not the Nazis. This feels like a watershed. It is a watershed. We are now dictating to the Germans on the continent and pushing them back. Day by day, the colour of the map of Europe is changing.
80 years on, it's almost impossible to comprehend the bravery, the sacrifice and the youth of those who fought in Operation Overlord. What's most moving to me is an awful lot of men who did wonderful things in the war and very brave things. They used themselves up so that by the time it was over in 1945, there wasn't much left of them to get through the rest of their lives. They weren't in those days diagnosed with post-traumatic stress.
I always remember interviewing a World War II bomber pilot many, many years after the event. And he'd been very brave. He'd won a lot of decorations. Very nice guy. Then he'd become a teacher. And he said he found young teachers in the school where he was saying, how could you have done it? How could you have gone out there every night and bombed innocent women and children?
And he said he never thought about it at all. And then when he did start to think about it, he found it brought back terrible memories. And he said, "I became a remedial teacher for handicapped children." And he said, "That's what I've been doing ever since, because I was trying to atone for what I did."
And I told him what I really believed. I said, you mustn't feel like that. I said, you were 21 or 22 years old and you did the stuff that you were told was necessary for freedom and for the future of our country and for civilization. And you mustn't let anybody bully you into thinking that you did something wicked, what you did under orders when you were 21 or 22.
You should go on being proud of the courage you showed and the number of people who died with you, rather than feeling shame. To the generations that have followed, the meaning of D-Day has been interrogated, contested, even to some extent politicized. The way we are commemorating D-Day nowadays has no relationship with the way we commemorated D-Day before. Until 1984,
D-Day is first of all a British-American ceremony where militaries are in fact dominant. In 1984, François Mitterrand had a splendid idea.
He invited civilians, chief of state, especially for example Queen Elizabeth, and he made the 6th of June a day of peace and a day for Europe. That means that we were not commemorating a victory, we were commemorating the first step of the European construction and the first step on the way of peace.
Every D-Day anniversary, you know, the 40th in 1984 when Ronald Reagan was over there, then the 50th, the 60th, now we're up to the 80th this year. They've all been very devoutly observed. You know, unity was a vital element. And yes, it was a propaganda element during the Cold War of trying to emphasize how important
the Anglo-American alliance, but above all the NATO alliance, was when it came to facing the Soviet Union during the Cold War period. It will be used again as a symbol of European and transatlantic unity, the focus of the need for democratic solidarity in the face of autocratic aggression.
President Macron is determined to make a big sort of splash with it to emphasize the fact that a coalition of democratic countries can defeat a dictatorship and of course this is very much a signal to Putin. For those who took part and those who followed D-Day is a huge source of pride and wonderment that something so big, so complex, so risky was ultimately a success.
It may not have been the definitive turning point of World War II, but it was perhaps the most important symbolic victory. So why are we commemorating D-Day? First because of course it's an operation very very impressive. You have a lot of boats, you have a lot of armours, you have a lot of planes and so on. The second element which is very important is that D-Day is a marvellous
and joyful story. D-Day has not been a bloodbath. France has been liberated quite quickly and with them, the British and the American soldiers brought freedom and so to a certain extent also happiness and joy. You cannot commemorate, for example, the liberation of Auschwitz in the same way because it's an awful story.
And the D-Day in Normandy is not an awful story. On the contrary. So all these reasons explain that D-Day is still striking the imaginations. What it tells me, D-Day, because it's such an important memory and an important touchstone of the war, is that democracies require defending. Democracies have to be fought for.
Democracies are fragile and they require what I will colloquially say, care and feeding. That's how I think it resonates. For the British and the Americans, D-Day was by far the greatest event of the war in the West. And also it was something we did terribly well and we got right. The good guys won. Now that doesn't always happen. And the good guys often also screw up.
Well, sure there were screw-ups on D-Day, but it was one of the greatest feats of planning and organisation and logistics ever known, even before you started on the fighting.
And we're right to look back today and say, yes, this was the moment of rehabilitation, if you like, after all the tragedies and defeats that Britain had suffered since the war began, after all the memories of Dunkirk and all those defeats in the desert and so on. Here at last was something we really got right or our forefathers got right. And I think it's absolutely right to take enormous pride in that achievement.
It was genuinely one of Britain's finest arts.
