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Sixty years ago, on D-Day, the Allies invaded Nazi-occupied France. The invasion, involving more than 150,000 Allied troops, was the biggest undertaking in the history of Western civilisation.
The invasion was centred on five beaches, codenamed for the occasion. American forces were to land on Omaha and Utah beaches, the Canadians on Juno, and the British on Sword and Gold.
Almost half of the total troops were British, and among them were the 800 men of the 1st Dorset Regiment. They landed on Gold Beach at around 7.25am on 6 June 1944. Sixty years later, Time Team went to Normandy to try to recreate the story of their 'longest day'.
D-Day: 60 years on
This well-illustrated English Heritage leaflet, written by Roger J C Thomas, contains information about the D-Day landings and details about how to visit some of the more accessible D-Day sites in Britain.
Download D-Day: 60 years on as a pdf file
You may need a free Acrobat reader.
By 1944, almost five years after its invasion of Poland had triggered the second world war, 1944 Nazi Germany was under increasing pressure on two fronts. Its former ally, Italy, had surrendered and switched sides, and the armies of the Western Alliance were forcing their way up through northern Italy. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was inflicting huge losses on the German forces as the Red Army advanced steadily into eastern Europe. The last thing Hitler's Reich wanted was a third offensive coming from the Atlantic coast.
The pressure was also on the Western Allies. The Soviets were themselves suffering extremely high losses in their relentless push west and Stalin was eager for an offensive on France to relieve the pressure on the Red Army. The build up of troops and equipment in Britain in preparation for the coming invasion had continued through the spring. Everyone, including the Germans, knew the big offensive was going to happen soon.
The German Army of 1944 was not the highly mobile offensive force of 1939-41, which had ripped through Europe with such success. By 1944, with pressure building on each frontier, the Germans' military resources were stretched ever thinner. The Axis forces had been forced to change tactics to become a more defensive army.
And their fundamental problem was that they had conquered more than they could defend.
The German Army at this point of the war was also less well-trained and equipped than previously – and was often made up of less well committed troops. An increasing number of German soldiers were being replaced by Axis (or Axis-sympathetic) troops of other nationalities so that German soldiers could be redirected to the eastern front. By 1944 the German Army contained soldiers from more than 15 countries.
While Germany's factories struggled to maintain output in the face of daily bombing raids, the might of American manufacturing industry, safe on the other side of the Atlantic, piled massive quantities of arms and equipment into the Allied war effort. The British Army, having rebuilt itself after the Dunkirk debacle and proved its mettle in Africa and the Mediterranean, was once again a formidable force. Both the Royal Air Force and United States Air Force had developed massive fighter and bomber capabilities. The Royal Navy had virtual control of the war at sea. And though many of the American, Canadian, British and other Commonwealth troops preparing to fight the Germans were not battle tested, they were some of the best prepared of any invasion force ever known.
After all the preparations, Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, was to lead to the liberation of western Europe. Within a year, attacked by armies from both east and west, Nazi Germany would be no more.
The Allied invaders faced the formidable obstacles of an amphibious landing against well-designed and long-prepared fortifications: the Atlantic Wall. This was essentially a string of concrete and steel fortifications stretching along nearly 3,000 miles of European coastline. It was designed specifically to enable the defenders to throw any attacking force back into the sea.
The wall represented how far German tactics had changed during the course of the war. Instead of relying on flexible lines with defences in depth, combined with ruthless counter attacks on any breaches of the line, the German defences depended on static fortifications and the ability to defeat the attackers on the beaches.
The Atlantic Wall defences were made up of beach obstacles designed to hinder landing craft, infantry and vehicles, minefields, barbed wire and 'killing zones', where sectors of the beach were pre-sighted with weapons firing from the shore and further inland. The concrete bunkers placed at frequent intervals along the wall followed various designs depending on their purpose. These ranged from small open weapons pits and machine gun positions to massive command bunkers and artillery encasements or casemates.
If a soldier managed to get off the beach he was faced with the static bunkers, which were placed so that they covered each other with their weapons. This made breaching the wall and attacking individual strongholds extremely difficult. The chances of survival for the first waves of attacking infantry were very limited.
After nearly two years of detailed planning, the date for D-Day was finally set for 5 June 1944. Bad weather delayed the operation for a day, but on 6 June nearly 175,000 Allied troops and more than 50,000 vehicles were sent into action. This massive invasion force was carried across the Channel by some 5,000 ships, supported by around 11,000 aircraft. Winston Churchill called it 'the most difficult and complicated operation ever to take place'.
Facing the Allied forces was the German 7th Army, complete with a mobile armoured panzer division in reserve; and to the west the German 15th Army, with five panzer divisions in support. Added to these were a large number of Kriegsmarine (navy) units on the shore and a range of specialist anti-aircraft and anti-tank groups.
The Germans were handicapped by the fact that they didn't know where any Allied landings would take place. Indeed, as a result of elaborate Allied deceptions, Hitler himself was convinced that the main attack would be at the Pas-de-Calais, the narrowest crossing between England and France. Consequently, some of the best German forces were deployed with this in mind.
Early on the morning of 6 June, the invasion began along a 50-mile stretch of Normandy coast. While paratroopers and glider forces secured key roads and bridges behind the main defensive lines, Allied landing craft approached the five beaches (codenamed Utah, Omaha, Juno, Sword and Gold) that had been chosen as the main landing points.
The US 4th Division landed at Utah Beach and the 1st and 29th Divisions at Omaha Beach. The 2nd and 5th US Rangers were given the task of taking the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, between Utah and Omaha, while the Canadian forces landed at Juno Beach. The British landed at Sword and Gold Beaches.
Time Team focused its attention for its D-Day Special on the stories of some of the troops who fought their way ashore at Gold Beach.
On landing at Gold Beach, the British immediately came under heavy machine gun and small arms fire, together with a sustained mortar and artillery bombardment. After taking heavy casualties they cleared the beach and forged forward. Two of their initial objectives, Point 54 and Puits d'Herode, provided the focus for some of Time Team's excavations.
The sites are situated on either side of a wide valley leading inland from the sea. Allied intelligence had indicated that Point 54 held a machine gun post, while Puits d'Herode was the site of an observation post (OP) and contained a number of small bunkers and a network of trenches.
On approaching Point 54, the British came under heavy fire from a nearby copse. It transpired that the copse was a well-prepared and heavily manned defensive position containing a 75mm field gun and an associated trench system, apparently missed by the intelligence. The position was taken as a result of daring action and at the cost of significant casualties. Later in the day, further advances and hard fighting resulted in the capture of the OP at Puits d'Herode, which turned out to be held by two complete German platoons.
Today the copse at Point 54 still remains and the trench lines can still be determined. Puits d'Herode exists as a few concrete patches showing through the grass in a field.
As the trench systems at the Puits d'Herode site are not as clear as at Point 54, the geophysics team of John Gater, Chris Gaffney and Jimmy Adcock were kept busy surveying the surrounding fields.
'We mostly used the magnetometry on this site,' says Chris. 'The soil is so full of clay that it's not ideal for radar. We've also done some resistivity work and generally I'd say the results were pretty good. We could see where trenches were and also outline some areas that the digging team was particularly interested in, like bunkers.'
Chris was happy that the prospecting gear didn't risk setting off any unexploded munitions in the ground. 'The resistivity set-up does pass an electrical current through the soil, but it is very small,' he says. 'Our main concern was that the area would have been so plastered with shells that geophysical prospecting would have been pointless because of all the interference from the fragments. That wasn't the case.'
Trenches were put in at Point 54 to get cross sections of the defences and command post. A section was also dug across what appeared to be an anti-tank gun platform. Various rounds of ammunition were found belonging to British, German and French weapons, together with fragments of mortar ammunition and some communications cable.
Further behind Point 54, Time Team supervisor Kerry Ely unearthed a post-battle dump of mixed ammunition which had been buried in the field. 'This is what they called battlefield clear-up,' said Kerry. 'All the material left lying around would be rounded up and buried.'
The Puits d'Herode excavations uncovered a network of communication trenches linking the small concrete bunker sections. Particularly nasty looking 'close knot' barbed wire was also uncovered, which would have constituted part of the position's defences.
A second area was opened up further down the slope by Phil Harding over a geophysics anomaly thought to be the site of another anti-tank gun. Pre-formed concrete blocks, the foundation base for a sizable concrete casemate for a large-calibre 88mm gun, indicated that the site had been found.
It appears that just prior to D-Day extra troops were brought into the valley at St Come du Fresne and a programme of strengthening and consolidation was under way but interrupted by the events of 6 June. The positions of the guns and emplacements turned the valley, a natural route inland from the sea, into a killing zone. Each emplacement, able to cover each other with fields of fire, would have been able to completely control access to and through the valley.
Given a few extra weeks of preparation – or, even more so, a winter to consolidate – the story of this site may have been different. Fortunately for the Allies, and for the soldiers whose job it was to take these positions, D-Day arrived not a moment too soon.
One of the many evocative pieces of evidence uncovered during Time Team's excavations was the piece of decaying communications cable found in a trench at Point 54. One can only imagine what messages were shouted down that cable 60 years ago, in the early hours of 6 June 1944, when the soldiers in their positions first recognised the massive armada of Allied ships on the horizon.
Vivid memories
The 1st Battalion Dorset Regiment, 231st Infantry Brigade veteran Michael Brennen, travelled to France with Time Team to recall his experiences of D-Day and help the Team rebuild a picture of events. Still robust and sprightly, despite his advancing years, Michael has vivid memories of both the D-Day landings and numerous actions he witnessed thereafter.
As a soldier 'hurled into the cauldron' he faced an array of experiences that few people living in western Europe today can imagine. Just 19 years old in 1944, he was trained as a crack assault troop for D-Day, survived longer than many of his fellow soldiers from the landings, endured more than six months of continued front line fighting, and eventually saw his war ended by wounds received from an enemy sniper. Here he tells us about his memories of D-Day.
Building up to invade
'We knew we were building up to invade Europe. We had lots of weapons training and also manoeuvres where we would charge out of landing craft and up beaches. Eventually we were stationed just outside Southampton. We used to regularly get off trucks and march through the centre of the city, down to the docks to board our liberty ship, the HMS Empire Spearhead. Then we'd be off on exercise again. We did that for months.
'Then, a full week before D-Day, we were shown detailed plans of our objectives and immediately sent to the docks in darkness under covered lorries straight onto the ship. No marching through town, we just knew this was it. We set sail and they kept us at sea for a week, tucked away near the Isle of Wight.'
High-risk role
With the weather too bad for the originally scheduled landing date of 5 June, the Normandy invasion took place a day later on 6 June. Michael's unit was one of the first to land on Gold Beach in the early hours. His job: a message runner between the units, one of the most high-risk roles in an extremely high-risk situation.
'We were all apprehensive. We came off the liberty ship at about 5.30am and lowered ourselves into landing craft. It took two hours for the landing craft to reach shore. As soon as the German positions could see us they started opening up with everything they had. We were lucky. Ours wasn't hit, but I know others were hit with all aboard killed.'
All hell let loose
'We hit the beach at 7.25am. Off the platform, it was chest deep in water. I got onto the beach and all hell was let loose. Machine gun fire, mortars, small arms and artillery all raked the whole beach. Once I'd got some cover I had to start running around again to deliver messages to the various platoons.
'We were pinned down on the beach for about an hour and we were losing men at about two a minute. We were out of position and needed to get ourselves together to attack our first pillbox objective.
'I ran, zig-zagging between the units, delivering a message that must have been the order to move at a set time because at one point we all got up and charged. The pillbox position was knocked out and we made it through the other defences and off the beach.
'I think it must have been about 6pm in the evening after a full day of fighting when we actually managed to dig in a slit trench to sleep in for the night. We were all completely exhausted. D-Day was over.'
Combined effort
'Really the point I'd like to make is that it was a combined effort by all of us in each arm of the services from all of the Allied forces that made it what it was,' concludes Michael. 'Yes as infantry we were on the ground at the front, but we all had to do our bit and we did it together, we all needed each other.'
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
Contrary to popular mythology, the D in D-Day has nothing to do with Doomsday or Deliverance Day. Nor does the D stand for 'disembarkation' or 'debarkation'. If it stands for anything at all, it is 'day'. This is because D-Day, in military terminology, is simply the day on which an operation is planned to begin.
The D-Day Museum at Portsmouth explains:
'When a military operation is being planned, its actual date and time is not always known exactly. The term "D-Day" was therefore used to mean the date on which operations would begin, whenever that was to be. The day before D-Day was known as "D-1", while the day after D-Day was "D+1", and so on. This meant that if the projected date of an operation changed, all the dates in the plan did not also need to be changed. This actually happened in the case of the Normandy Landings. D-Day in Normandy was originally intended to be on 5 June 1944, but at the last minute bad weather delayed it until the following day. The armed forces also used the expression "H-Hour" for the time during the day at which operations were to begin.'
The Normandy invasion on 6 June 1944 was not the first D-Day. The US Army first employed the term for the battle of St Mihiel on 20 September 1918.
Nor was it the only D-Day of the second world war: in fact, there were many others. Operation Torch, the invasion of north Africa, starting on 8 November 1942, was the first; the Pacific war against Japan saw the last.
Today, most people think of D-Day as referring only to the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944. Perhaps for this reason, the phrase has gone out of use for recent military operations. The invasion of Iraq had 'A-Day' and 'G-Day' (for Air and Ground respectively), for example, rather than a traditional D-Day.
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
It is estimated that Allied casualties on D-Day totalled around 10,000, including 2,500 dead. German casualties are thought to have been between 4,000 and 9,000.
According to the D-Day Museum at Portsmouth, US casualties totalled 6,603; the Canadians suffered 946 casualties, including 340 dead; and British casualties were approximately 2,700. The British suffered about 1,000 casualties on Gold Beach and a similar number on Sword Beach. The US casualties included 1,465 dead, 3,184 wounded, 1,928 missing and 26 captured, most of them at Utah Beach, where German resistance was particularly fierce.
Altogether, more than 425,000 Allied and German troops were killed, wounded or went missing during the Battle of Normandy. Allied casualties totalled around 209,000, including 37,000 dead from the ground forces and almost 17,000 from the airborne forces.
The Allied casualties included 83,045 from 21st Army Group (British, Canadian and Polish ground forces) and 125,847 from the US ground forces. Around 200,000 German troops were killed or wounded and a similar number captured. Normandy's war cemeteries contain the graves of some 110,000 soldiers, including 77,866 Germans, 9,386 Americans, 17,769 British, 5,002 Canadians and 650 Poles. Additionally, an estimated 15-20,000 French civilians were killed, mainly by Allied bombing.
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
Major Tim Saunders, of the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment, is a respected military historian who has written several accounts of D-Day actions. As a specialist on this programme he brought with him a selection of original D-Day infantry weapons to illustrate some of the guns that would have fired the various spent cartridge cases that Time Team uncovered across the sites.
Rifles
The standard British rifle was the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE). Like its German counterpart, the Mauser Gewehr 98, it's a bolt-action firearm. This means that unlike an automatic weapon, each bullet (or more correctly, round) has to be chambered manually by drawing back and pushing forward a bolt after each shot. The Lee-Enfield weighs in at nearly 9lbs (4.1kg) when fully loaded with its 10-round magazine. Likewise, the German five-shot Gewehr 98 had a nearly identical hefty weight. The British rifle fired a .303-inch round compared with the German 7.92mm. Again they were relatively similar calibres. 'The Lee-Enfield was a heavy and very accurate rifle,' says Major Saunders. 'The second world war version was updated from an earlier model, so it was a tried and tested, reliable piece of equipment.'
Submachine guns
Both British and German submachine guns used the same 9mm calibre ammunition, but there the similarity ends. The British Sten Gun was cheaply and simply made from pressed steel parts and was prone to jamming and inconsistent performance. Opposed to this was the German MP40. Often incorrectly known as the Schmeisser (Hugo Schmeisser was a small-arms designer who designed the earlier MP18 SMG and had a hand in the manufacture of the MP40), the MP40 was expensive and highly machined from top specification materials. Both guns carried a 32-round magazine and fired at the staccato rate of around 500 rounds per minute.
Machine guns
Supporting the highly mobile infantry with their rifles and submachine guns were the larger machine guns, which squads would rely on for supporting and suppressing fire. The British version was the .303-calibre Bren Gun. The Bren was fed from a top magazine, which held 30 rounds. Based on an earlier Czech design (the ZB26), the Bren proved to be reliable and possibly the best-performing light machine gun of the war.
Opposed to the Bren was the 7.92-calibre German MG34 (often nicknamed a Spandau because of a manufacturing base there). This general-purpose machine gun was fed by a belt of interlinked rounds, which were fired at the incredible rate of 800-900 rounds per minute. Highly machined out of quality materials, the MG34 was accurate up to 4,000 yards (3,650m). 'The Bren has a steady thumping rate of fire,' says Major Saunders, 'but the MG34 sounds more like a chainsaw, absolutely devastating.'
There is a huge range of books about D-Day and the Normandy campaign, and even more about the second world war in general, with new ones being published all the time. These are just a few of special interest to Time Team's visit to Gold Beach.
Gold Beach Jig Sector and West (Battleground Europe S) by Tim Saunders (Pen & Sword Books, 2002) paperback £19.99.
Normandy: Gold Beach: Inland from King, June 1944 (Battleground Europe S) by Christopher Dunphie and Gary Johnson (Pen & Sword Books, 1999) paperback £9.99.
Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy by Max Hastings (Pan Grand Strategy Series) paperback £7.99.
Imperial War Museum: The D-Day experience from the invasion to the liberation of Paris by Richard Holmes (Carlton Books, 2004) hardback £30.
Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the liberation of Paris by John Keegan (Pimlico, 1992) paperback £12.
The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan (Cassell, 2004) paperback £6.99.
D-Day: 6 June 1944, the climactic battle of World War II by Stephen E Ambrose (Pocket Books, 1995) paperback £17.
Major and Mrs Holt's Battlefield Guide to Normandy Landing Beaches by Tonie Holt and Valmie Holt (Major & Mrs Holt's Battlefield Guides, 1999) paperback £14.95.
The D-day Landing Beaches: The guide by Georges Bernage (Heimdal Editions, 2001) paperback £9.95.
D-Day Atlas: Anatomy of the Normandy campaign by Charles Messenger (Thames and Hudson, 2004) £24.95.
Michelin Historical Map 102: Battle of Normandy (Michelin Travel Publications) £3.49.
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
There are so many websites dealing with D-Day, Operation Overlord and the second world war that it is only possible to represent a small sample here. Each of these provide extensive links to other websites for those wanting to explore further.
D-Day Museum
www.ddaymuseum.co.uk
The D-Day Museum was established in 1984 to tell the story of Operation Overlord from its origins in the dark days of 1940 to victory in Normandy in 1944. The museum's centrepiece is the Overlord Embroidery, the largest work of its kind in the world. Inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, it is a moving tribute to the efforts and sacrifices of the Allies in defeating Nazi Germany.
The museum's displays and exhibitions are mirrored on its website, which features information on the preparations for D-Day; the channel crossing; the role of air and sea forces; countdowns on the day's events at each of the five invasion beaches; individual memories; and an informative 'frequently asked questions' (FAQs) section.
The museum website also features an exhaustive set of links to other websites. All in all, it comprises the best starting point for anyone with an interest in Operation Overlord and D-Day.
D-Day Museum links
www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/links.htm
The D-Day Museum's collection of links to other websites dealing with Operation Overlord and D-Day is the best on the web.
D-Day: A beginner's guide
www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/
history/heads/footnotes/d-day.html
Here you will find the results of our sifting through the thousands of websites that deal with the 'longest day' –Êfrom overviews of the massive operation to the spies who actively deceived Hitler.
Normandy 1944
http://normandy.eb.com
The Encyclopedia Britannica's Normandy 1944 website includes John Keegan's detailed history of the invasion, together with biographies of leading figures; maps; contemporary documents, radio reports, newsreels and newspaper stories; memoirs and oral histories; recommended reading; and links to other websites. Extensive, accessible and authorative, this is a multi-media treat.
D-Day 60 commemorations
www.d-day60.co.uk
The D-Day 60 website includes a guide to services, exhibitions, talks, activities and other commemorative events organised to mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day.
Second World War Experience Centre
www.war-experience.org
Biographies, audio-clips, documents and photographs of individuals selected from all branches of the services (Allied and Axis) and civilians at home and abroad, including conscientious objectors. The website's history section aims to provide a rich and varied source of information on the various campaigns fought during the second world war, as well as biographies on the key individuals involved in the conflict, supported by photographic images.