- 5/25/2025
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00:30The Sinai Desert. In the 1967 war, the Israelis captured Sinai from the Egyptians and advanced
00:57here to the Suez Canal. Along the eastern bank, they built a fortification, a series
01:03of giant sand ramparts. They called it the Barlev Line. They believed it was impregnable.
01:10For the Egyptian army to retake Sinai, they had to breach the sand wall. Otherwise, tanks
01:16could not follow to support the assaulting infantry. Explosive was not the answer. This
01:25is the effect of blowing a two-ton charge. The gap is obviously not tankable. Yet in
01:32a single day in October 1973, the Egyptians did breach the sand rampart and get their
01:38tanks through it. The solution had been found by an Egyptian army engineer. It had a sublime
01:51solution. Water. Water from the canal was passed through high-pressure hoses and a way
01:58washed through to Sinai. A series of gaps thus made marked the start line for one of
02:09the most dramatic armoured battles of the last 40 years. The breaching of these ramparts,
02:22which are considerably lower than they used to be, and the bridging of the Suez Canal
02:26with pontoons was the work of military engineers who opened the way for their victorious army.
02:33Military engineers are the men who make warfare possible. They are the builders of obstacles.
02:39They are the Israeli engineers who constructed these ramparts. And they are the destroyers
02:43of obstacles. In this case, the Egyptian engineers who cut clean through these defences. The
02:50engineer will be in the vanguard of any army. For a general may have as many troops as he
02:56wants, as much equipment, as many guns or tanks, but if he cannot keep them moving forward
03:02over broken ground, shattered roads, through obstacles, and above all, across those waterways
03:09that cut through almost any battlefield, then he cannot win. It's the engineer who opens
03:15the way. Sand ramparts are but the latest in a long succession of military obstacles
03:23which the Sapper has learnt to overcome. He is also, of course, their inventor. Today
03:30there is the explosive mine, and also a different problem, the blown bridge.
03:34200 years ago, the Sapper's devices were simpler, but they had their own deadly effectiveness.
04:01The hand-scattered Keltrop, which left one spike sticking upwards however it fell, was
04:05a cruel menace to cavalry. The chevaux de frise, spikes revolving on a rigid frame,
04:12could disembowel attacking infantry. Later armies would adapt barbed wire as a barrier
04:17to infantry assault.
04:18Sappers were behind all these things. They were also behind their antidotes.
04:38The Bengal sappers and miners of the British Indian Army invented the first antidote to
04:43barbed wire, called the Bangalore torpedo. It was a pipe filled with explosive, which
04:49could blow a gap through an entanglement. Many brave Sappers died at the start of the
05:05First World War, attacking barbed wire with explosives, until the ever-growing depth of
05:10entanglements and the weight of fire covering them made Bangalore torpedoing pointless.
05:15In the end, the appearance of the tank solved the problem of gapping barbed wire. The obstacle
05:20that replaced it was the mine.
05:28The mines developed in the Second World War, whether anti-tank or anti-personnel, worked
05:32on the same principle. A thin casing contained an explosive charge, large enough to blow
05:37off a tank track or small enough to destroy a man's foot, as desired.
05:44A fuse detonated the charge when it itself was activated by a chosen degree of pressure.
05:53So, for example, the anti-tank mine would not go off merely when walked on. The fused
05:58mine was usually buried just beneath the surface of the soil and the digging disguised.
06:04At the beginning of World War II, the Sappers acquired a tool that would pinpoint the target,
06:09an electronic device that would detect the metal in a mine, even when it was buried.
06:14Mine clearing nevertheless remained one of the most dangerous jobs in warfare.
06:20You'd go to the site where the marker or someone had been blown up and commence to sweep the
06:26mines with your mine detectors until something buzzed in your ear, and then you would stop
06:32and your number two would deal with it, and you'd carry on like that until you cleared
06:38a way through.
06:46I was afraid, very afraid. Everybody was. The feeling of fear was in the stomach, you
06:52know, wanting to yawn, and you could tell your friends were just as afraid as you because
06:57they were yawning and giggling at silly things. But it was a thing that had to be controlled
07:04because if you're lifting mines and looking for political traps, you had to control your
07:11fear. You were still afraid, but the worst part, fear was waiting to go and do the job.
07:21When I was wounded, it was up in Tilburg. We were clearing for shoe mines, which you
07:27can't detect because there is only one metal part in, which is a firing pin. And we used
07:35to prod for these with a steel instrument of some description. I used to use a German
07:41bayonet. And well, as I was prodding, there was just this huge explosion. Blew me back
07:49and couldn't see, couldn't hear, knew nothing.
07:53In the Falklands, many of the minefields have had to be left uncleared. The ground too soft
07:58for armoured vehicles, and the plastic mines themselves too difficult and dangerous to
08:02detect by hand.
08:08The most common of the anti-personnel mines are these, solid TNT inside, simply fused
08:15by screwing the pressure fuse on top of the mine. And sadly, over the last three days,
08:22two of my soldiers have lost feet on these very mines.
08:35And the latest antidote to the minefield, the giant BIPOC, a rocket propelled explosive
08:40hose, the modern Sapper's adaptation of the Bangalore torpedo.
09:03Demands of mine clearing are one of the factors which have turned the Sapper, like all modern
09:07combat soldiers, into an armoured warrior. One of his armoured tools is the mine plough.
09:12Others are even more ingenious.
09:37Oldest of the Sapper's armoured vehicles is the bridging tank. Armies come to a halt
09:57when they reach an unfordable river or a blown bridge. The latest tank with a scissors bridge
10:02can throw a trackway over a water obstacle in a few minutes.
10:06When an army hits a larger river, the Sapper's traditional response is to improvise a bridge
10:11of boats or pontoons, like these French Sappers replacing a bridge blown by the retreating
10:16Germans in 1914. But the technique is hardly new. When the Persian Emperor Xerxes invaded
10:23Greece in the 5th century BC, he bridged the Hellespont, separating Asia from Europe, with
10:29two spans of pontoons. Each comprised, the historian Herodotus tells us, 300 ships lashed
10:36together with cables of flax and papyrus.
10:43The bridge of boats remained the Sapper's chief means of improvising a water crossing
10:46for over 2,000 years. Caesar took pontoons to Gaul. Napoleon escaped from Russia across
10:52a pontoon bridge. These are believed to be German cadets learning pontoon bridging on
10:56the Rhine just before the First World War.
11:03Technology has transformed the pontoon, like much other Sapper equipment, but not made
11:07it obsolete. This bridge, being built by royal engineers across the river Weser in Germany,
11:12has M2 pontoons as its components. The M2 is a road vehicle that floats and keeps station
11:18when driven into the water, unfolds a trackway and locks into its neighbour.
11:27Sappers are not always in the vanguard of an army, but a moment must come when the cry
11:33from the ranks is, follow the Sapper, when the need to get forward is most urgent. It
11:38is the cry of an army in attack, when the way forward must be open and only the Sapper
11:43can do it. Clearing the way usually means leading the way, so the Sapper must often
11:49work under direct enemy fire, unable to take cover until his job is done.
11:57The most frightening work of a Sapper, I would say, is building bridges under fire. The reasons
12:02being that mostly you haven't got enough time, you're usually harassed by mortar fire or
12:09machine gun fire, sometimes not when there's heavy smoke around you, but usually you are
12:14harassed and the speed and the danger at night of trapping your fingers is very, very bad.
12:20Odd known fellows lose fingers when you're putting the barley panels together, and not
12:28their fault, you shout to the pin man, drop the pin, he brings up the panel with you and
12:34guides you to the other panel too, and he snaps the ends of your fingers off.
12:37Once it became dark it was a little easier, but then the Germans had moved a machine gun
12:42up along the river bank, and they couldn't see us at night, but they could hear us. And
12:47so as we put this military Meccano together, and it's a noisy business, you can't put the
12:53panels together, it says you must treat the bridge carefully and hit it with hide face
12:57hammers, we used to hit it with 14 pound sledges, because under pressure you'd get that bloody
13:02pin in, you see, and it was inevitably noisy and they could hear us. So the thing sort
13:08of inched forward through the night by men, each piece of the bridge, I mean a Bailey
13:14Bridge panel takes six men to lift it, so six men would pick it up and try and get it
13:18on quickly, and if they were fired at they would lie down, because there was a parapet
13:24that gave some sort of protection, and they would hit the bridge with hammers lying down
13:28so that the crowd could hear the noise, and he would fire away merrily, and then hopefully
13:33he'd reach a point where he'd have to change the belt on his gun, and then we could get
13:36the panel on. And it was like that, edging forward through the night.
13:42For secrecy and the hope of a little protection, bridging in the face of the enemy is usually
13:46done at night, with a heavy, sharp and complicated equipment often assembled by touch alone.
14:11This bridge has been built under cover of darkness in two hours. Once the armoured brigade
14:21that is to use it has crossed, it will be disassembled and the parts returned to the
14:25bridging column until next needed.
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15:26Bridges imply roads. The Roman legionaries, who were all trained as engineers as well
15:33as infantrymen, built the first comprehensive road network in the world. Its purpose was
15:38military, but its effect was to make a continent into a single political entity. This Roman
15:43road in Britain leads north to Hadrian's Wall, and south to a line with another in France,
15:49which connected Gaul with the Balkans, and so across the Hellespont to end on the Roman
15:53frontier in modern Iraq, 2,500 miles away.
15:58Music
16:08The pace of a campaign often demands that roads, like bridges, have to be built in a
16:12hurry. But bridge laying is child's play compared to road engineering. For this, enlisting
16:17local labour, the sappers must hack and cut and dig. They must work like navvies themselves.
16:23They must teach people to make a road who perhaps have never even seen one. This is
16:27the building of the Burma Road, driven over trackless mountains to save China from Japanese
16:32conquest in 1942. The military engineer, unlike the civil engineer, may be expected to create
16:41his road instantaneously. War will not wait on legal niceties.
16:46The principle of driving on, don't let yourself be stopped. Get on, get round, get through,
16:51get over. And I walked into this German farmhouse, Lieutenant Jones, Royal Engineers, and I said,
16:58you've got 15 minutes to get out. I'm going to blow your house up. I need it to fill that
17:02hole. Well, if anybody came into my house now and said, you've got 15 minutes to get
17:06out, I don't know what I'd do. I'd go and shoot myself, probably. But these Germans,
17:10I admire them as a race. They had every stick of furniture out of the house, all their possessions,
17:15and they even had the doors off the hinges. In fact, it took my sappers about 25 minutes
17:20to put the charges in. Then we blew up the house, then we bulldozed into the hole, and
17:24then the advance continued.
17:26War.
17:45Runways are roads for aircraft, the spearhead
17:48of modern armies. Scattered across the islands and coral atolls of the Pacific are the relics
17:53of the American advance towards Japan in the Second World War. The engineers who built
17:57these runways, often the famous Seabees of the U.S. Navy, were truly the architects of
18:02the counteroffensive. For these islands were MacArthur's stepping stones towards Japan,
18:08ports and bases, but also bomb-proof aircraft carriers.
18:13Well, we were bombed every day, I think. In the time we were there, we were bombed 133
18:21times, and we shelled practically every day out of the hills. One morning when we went
18:27to work, there was enough bodies on that. We had to stop and dig silos to bury the bodies
18:34before we could go to work the next morning.
18:37One day when we were working on Yontan Airstrip on Okinawa, which was the largest strip on
18:42the island, we heard a plane coming in. It sounded like a medium-sized bomber, and we
18:47assumed, naturally, one of ours coming in to land on the strip, which was usable at
18:52that time. And all of a sudden, we looked up, and it was a Japanese plane, a medium-sized
18:59bomber which had been converted for troops. And much to our amazement, with our mouths
19:05open, unbelievingly, we saw the plane land, stop, and Japanese commandos, approximately
19:1350 in number, began pouring out of this plane with their machine guns and their hand grenades
19:19and their plastic bombs, and shooting and throwing hand grenades, and instantly creating
19:27pandemonium all over the place. So, having recognized the insignia on the plane, and
19:34all of a sudden, knowing that we were being shot at by these commandos, we hurriedly raced
19:40to our weapons, as close as they were, and took about two hours to clear the runway again.
19:50During the Second World War, Gibraltar served the Allies as an unsinkable aircraft carrier
19:54at the mouth of the Mediterranean. But the airstrip here was only the latest in a long
19:58history of sappering achievements at Gibraltar. The Rock is the birthplace of the Royal Engineers.
20:05After their capture of the Rock in 1704, the British set about fortifying it against future
20:10Spanish attack. To assist them, they formed a company of Soldier Artificers and began
20:16to tunnel. In time, the Soldier Artificers became the Royal Sappers and Miners, until
20:24they, in turn, became the Royal Engineers. Two hundred years later, they're still burrowing.
20:35Today, the Rock of Gibraltar, just two square miles in area, contains thirty-four miles
20:52of tunnels. Yet it began almost by accident. Five hundred feet up the rock face is a protrusion
20:59known as the notch. In 1782, during the Great Siege, attempts were made to get a cannon
21:05onto the notch, so as to be able to direct flanking fire onto the Spanish lines, and
21:09a thousand pound prize was offered for a solution to the problem. A Sergeant Major in the Artificer
21:15Company came up with the answer, to tunnel inside the rock face until he broke through
21:20onto the notch. But tunneling was to generate its own problems. As soon as they'd gone
21:25a few yards, the smoke and dust made further progress impossible. To allow the fumes out
21:30and the fresh air in, it was necessary to blast a hole out to the face of the rock.
21:35But in doing so, they found they had unwittingly created the perfect gun emplacement. And so
21:41the tunnel continued, with cannon after cannon placed in the holes. In fact, they never bothered
21:49to break through on top of the notch, as planned, but instead excavated the space beneath, to
21:54create a magnificent windowed cavern, St. George's Hall. So spectacular is it, that
22:01it was to become the setting for receptions, including a dinner party given in honour of
22:05American President Grumman, by the Governor of the Rock. So began the tunneling, which
22:11was to continue for another two centuries.
22:24In these galleries, the sappers of the 18th century marked their work with the date of its completion.
22:39But there are other signs, too, of a much later occupation. The gun embrasures in this
23:04gallery, built in 1790, have been reinforced in 1941 to take machine guns. Above the gun
23:10ports, now bricked up, are the range cards painted by the gunners. The view is across
23:15the Isthmus to the frontier. The purpose of fortification in 1941 was no different from
23:27that in 1791. In the early years of the war, Churchill had received intelligence that Hitler
23:32was negotiating with Franco to allow German troops through Spain to attack Gibraltar from
23:37the mainland. Accordingly, he instructed that the entire garrison, no fewer than 17,000
23:42people, should be accommodated inside the Rock. And so the tunneling began again, in
23:59the early years. Everything which existed outside the Rock was duplicated inside. Barracks,
24:28stores, hospitals, workshops. The tunnel system became a self-contained fortress. This
24:35was once the Rock's power station. And at the very centre, more than a thousand feet
24:47below the summit, the headquarters of General Eisenhower. From here, in 1943, he planned
24:52the conquest of North Africa, Operation Torch. But the work continues to this day. Down this
25:09tunnel are the magazines from which the ships of the Falklands Task Force were stocked.
25:13The ammunition being taken direct to the dockside. Moles End Way, it's called. The last tunnel
25:19to be built here by the sappers of the Royal Engineers. Gibraltar is a natural fortress,
25:25but in the absence of such suitable geographical features, the engineer must build his own
25:30fortification. Jericho, the oldest city known to man, is a fortified stronghold. Its defences
25:41exhibit the twin features common to all fortified places. The wall, designed to keep attackers
25:47out, and the power raised to dominate their attack should they try to break in. To match
25:58the power of the defence, the attacking sappers would often build their own towers, hoping
26:03to overtop the defenders. Their ultimate aim was one of two things. Either to climb the
26:13wall or to break it down. Many of their wall breaching devices, like the battering ram
26:20and the giant pick which dislodged stones from the wall's face, were particularly favoured
26:25by the Romans, the greatest siege engineers of antiquity. A favourite siege engine of
26:38theirs was the ballista, which threw stones at or into the enemy's defences. It worked
26:43on the torsion principle, like the suspension of a modern car. The arm was cranked down
26:48against the tension of twisted sinews. When released, it threw a missile with great force
26:53and fair accuracy three or four hundred yards. This is Masada, by the Dead Sea in Israel.
27:06It's a spectacular example of the two sides of the engineer's art. On top of this six
27:11hundred foot rock, the engineers of King Herod built a fortress. It was here, during the
27:16Jewish rebellion against the Romans in 70 AD, that nine hundred zealots made their last
27:21stand. It seemed, from a military point of view, an impregnable position. They had strong
27:26fortifications and a double wall made from stone quarried on the site. They had food
27:31in storerooms and water in cisterns carved out of the rock. The Roman engineers faced
27:49a formidable challenge at the foot of the rock down here. They started their siege conventionally
27:54enough. You can still see the remains of the encircling wall and the eight fortified camps
27:59they built. As well as the stones, their catapults hurled at the defenders. But to storm the
28:04fortress, they had to get their siege towers and batting rams close enough to breach the
28:09walls. Their solution was simple, if monumental in execution. It was this. A colossal earthen
28:16ramp to bring their siege engines to the level of the fortress. It took many months
28:20and who knows how many lives to complete. But it worked. The breach was made and Masada
28:26fell. Nearly two thousand years later, the ramp still stands. An inspiring monument to
28:32the engineers' art. Where soil formation and the water table permitted, a favorite
28:38sapper siege technique was mining. It was employed here at Rochester, in the civil war
28:43between King John and his barons. Indeed, until the invention of gunpowder, it remained
28:53the best method known of collapsing a wall. Mopes and ditches, which appear to be defenses
29:00against surface attack only, were actually also intended to make mining difficult or
29:05impossible. Miners nevertheless often succeeded in finding a way under. The technique was
29:13to sink a shaft out of range of the enemy's missiles and then drive a gallery to the foot
29:18of the wall. Once they had tunneled under it, the miners enlarged the chamber, shoring
29:26up its roof with timber to support the wall's foundations while they worked. Kindling was
29:32then packed in and ignited. When the timber burned through, the chamber collapsed, bringing
29:38down the wall above. Explosives, when they appeared, obviated the need to use fire. Otherwise,
29:54mining techniques remained identical. It was practiced extensively on the Western Front
29:58during the First World War, when coal miners, enlisted as soldiers, dug mines against each
30:03other. The mine that produced this gigantic hole in the ground took months to build. The
30:09men who dug it, starting from an entrance almost a quarter of a mile behind the British
30:12front line, were members of the 179th Tunneling Company, Royal Engineers. Miners in civilian
30:18life who hacked their way through the chalk of the Somme countryside as through a coal
30:21seam. At one time, the British had brought in mechanical diggers of the kind used to
30:26carve out the tunnels of the London Underground. But in the end, it was found that human labour
30:30was quicker and more effective, and so the men forced their way through by shovel and
30:34pick. Disposal of the subsoil was another problem. The sudden appearance of dumps of
30:39chalk behind the lines would have been spotted by enemy observers, so every last piece of
30:43chalk was taken away in sandbags. The perpetual danger was of being overheard as they dug,
30:49and the perpetual anxiety was of being counter-mined by the enemy. Well, this mine was in the end
30:55a complete success. Packed with 60,000 pounds of explosive, it was blown at two minutes
31:00before zero hour on the 1st of July, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme,
31:06and took perhaps as many as 100 Germans with it.
31:16But with the appearance of gunpowder, the walls of the fortress were now as vulnerable
31:19to collapse above ground as below. Artillery revolutionised siege warfare. Walls once
31:26built high to keep infantry out were now built low, and depth rather than height became the
31:31principle to keep the attacking gunners as far away as possible from the heart of the
31:35fortress.
31:39During the 17th century, fortress design in Europe was refined into an exact geometric
31:44science, displayed here in the fortress models from the French Royal Collection, a secret
31:49archive for which an enemy would have paid a king's ransom.
32:14The uniqueness of their design lay in the elaborate construction of bastions and outerworks,
32:24hornworks and ravelins, which both gave the defenders the maximum possible fields of fire
32:29and at the same time formed a maze of death traps for the attacking infantry. So to protect
32:36their infantry and to advance the firing platform of their own artillery, the siege engineers
32:41had to dig their way forward almost inch by inch. The trenches they dug were called
32:45saps, which is why military engineers to this day are called sappers.
32:51The first step in one of the classic sieges of the 17th or 18th century was to dig a parallel
32:56just out of range of the enemy's guns. It ran parallel to the length of the defences
33:01chosen for attack. From it, the sappers dug forward in a zigzag, protecting themselves
33:07with gabions, earth-filled wicker baskets, while they did so. When they were close enough,
33:12they started the second parallel, along which were constructed artillery positions, so that
33:17the duel between attacking and defending artillery could be intensified at closer range.
33:22Then the sappers sapped forward again, in zigzag, to construct a third parallel for
33:27the final stage of the siege. Digging this third parallel was intensely dangerous work,
33:32so dangerous that the sappers who did it were volunteers paid danger money. The scale went
33:37up from 40 sou for every two yards dug in the first parallel to five times as much for
33:42digging forward of the third parallel. Once the gunners got their guns into the third
33:48parallel, the decisive artillery duel could begin, which was supposed to end in the chosen
33:53bastion being battered shapeless and its guns silent. The sappers could then begin sapping
33:58across the ditch and constructing positions for the final infantry assault. No wonder
34:03they got danger money, and no wonder too that the cry in siege warfare was, follow the sapper.
34:16So siege warfare became an exact science, a matter of detailed planning and precise
34:21calculation. The most famous of siege engineers, the Frenchman Vauban, could estimate to the
34:27day how long a siege would last. Here at Montmedie, it took him 57 days in 1657 to
34:35sap and bat his way into this fortress. And then once inside, he so improved its defences
34:40that its former owners, the Habsburgs, were never able to recapture it.
34:5820th century engineering in steel and concrete created the strongest fortresses yet seen.
35:05Some, like this vast Belgian blockhouse at Ebony Mail, were believed impregnable. But
35:11sappering ingenuity proved the belief wrong. In 1940, German engineers found a chink in
35:17Ebony Mail's armour.
35:20You will notice that this assault engineer knows exactly where to put his high explosive
35:26charge in order to destroy the blockhouse.
35:38In an assault of great daring, they landed by glider on the fortress roof and cracked
35:43it open with hand-placed hollow charges.
36:20...
36:30...
36:41...
36:49...
37:06With the coming of modern warfare, the scale of the battlefield was to change out of all
37:11recognition. And with it, the scale of the sapper's job. Here on the coast of Normandy
37:17in 1944, in what promised to be a titanic struggle, the two opposing arts of the military
37:22engineer were to be pitted against each other. For the German engineers, whose job was defence,
37:28was no longer a question of castles or fortified towns. It was nothing less than a fortified
37:33continent.
37:35...
37:43This is a section of Hitler's Atlantic Wall on the north coast of France. The wall ran
37:48from the Spanish frontier to Norway and opposite the British invasion force was studded with
37:53strong points and heavy artillery. If the Allies were to get ashore here, the artillery
37:58would have to be neutralised and the strong points broken open. That, in part, was a problem
38:03of firepower, in part a challenge to the Liberation Army's engineers, British and American.
38:08New weapons, machines, techniques would be required for the laying of smoke screens and
38:13trackways, the scaling of obstacles and the moving of men and vehicles on and off beaches.
38:18To make matters worse, in early 1944, Hitler sent Rommel to the invasion coast to galvanise
38:24the engineering effort. Rommel had the obstacle belt carried down to the low water mark and
38:29began to lay more mines. Two million had been laid since 1941. In six months he had
38:35laid another two million and planned a further 200 million.
38:42The Germans had already experienced one attempt by the Allies to land on the northern coast
38:46of France and had taken much comfort from its failure. In August 1942, a large force
38:53of Canadian infantry and British commanders had gone ashore at Dieppe in an operation
38:58intended to test the possibility of capturing a port intact from the enemy. It had been
39:03a catastrophe. Few troops got off the Dieppe seafront. They lacked the weapons to destroy
39:08the German strong points and their assault vehicles could not negotiate the beaches.
39:12Only 2,000 of the 5,000 Canadians who took part returned. The Germans exulted in their
39:18triumph and concluded, wrongly, that they would be able to repeat it.
39:23The disaster at Dieppe had taught the Allies two expensive lessons. The first, that with
39:31such effective defences it would not be possible to capture a port intact. The second, that
39:36before they decided on a landing site they would have to know everything that was possible
39:40to know about the beaches. From the depth of the water at low tide, to the suitability
39:44of the sand, to tank tracks, to the number and type of mines and booby traps strung out
39:50along the shore. With intelligence almost impossible to come by, any scrap of information
39:57was put to good use. Even a medieval manuscript which confirmed that in the 11th century,
40:03William the Conqueror had been able to cross this bay at low tide on a submerged shoal.
40:08The BBC broadcast an appeal for postcards or snapshots of pre-war holidays in France.
40:14Anything which could help build up a picture of the far shore. But some intelligence was
40:19gathered at first hand. Under the noses of the Germans, divers were landed at night from
40:24midget submarines. Here, on the beaches, they gathered samples of sand and sawed off sections
40:31of the anti-armour defences. These they took back to England, where the engineers set to work.
40:49As so often before in warfare, the ingenious efforts of one-army sappers to make its defences
40:54impregnable were to be negated by their opposite number's success in inventing the appropriate
40:59antidotes. In this case, a whole stable of entirely original assault vehicles. Some,
41:05like the flail tank, which exploded mines without damage to itself, were brilliantly
41:09successful. Some earlier models proved gallant failures.
41:19When the invasion finally came, the success of the infantry owed much to the skill and
41:46bravery of the engineers. You actually had white tapes laid down at the starting line when
41:53you're going in to put in an attack. And white tapes through the minefields, the engineers
41:59and the scorpions, they were sort of tanks with flails on the front, used to throw out the mines.
42:04And they would go through and lay down a path through the mines, which again were marked by
42:11white tapes. There was so much confusion that there was people hurting, there was people
42:17crying, there was people screaming, fellows, that you just had to concern yourself with
42:22yourself. That was all there was to it. You were faced with a bunch of cliffs. You couldn't
42:33climb above them because they were mines. Every minute was like an hour to spend. You
42:38can imagine spending a full night on those cliffs until the engineers would get above
42:44and clear the mines so we can continue on.
42:51But breaching the defences, though a formidable task, was only half the battle. An army once
42:56ashore would need supplying almost immediately. And if it was not going to be possible to
43:00capture an existing port intact, then the only solution was to build your own, which
43:05was exactly what the engineers did. Except that it wasn't quite that simple. It wasn't
43:10here that they built it. They built it in England and brought it with them.
43:15Moulbury was the code name for the project, a prefabricated harbour built in kit form
43:36to be towed across the channel in the wake of the invasion and assembled on site.
43:41Early on in the planning, a memorandum from Winston Churchill had made it clear that whatever
43:49the technical problems, they would have to be solved.
43:52My senior officer, Colonel Everall, was asked in the war office whether he could contribute
43:58some proposals towards a minute. Winston Churchill was saying that he wanted to pierce the flat
44:06beaches that must rise and fall with the tide, and the anchor problem had to be mastered
44:10to enable the follow-up of an invasion with all the equipment an army needs. In the beach
44:17rather than in the harbour, which would be too heavily defended to take without heavy
44:21loss. And my colonel came back to Derby, where I had been posted to him, asked whether I
44:28got any ideas. And I suggested that the pontoon bridge was the best option, one which was
44:34sufficiently flexible, especially designed to accept movement of sea without damage to itself.
44:43The building of the Mulberry harbours was a monumental achievement, involving the labour
44:47of some 45,000 men for nine months. Only when they reached the coast of France did all the
44:52pieces, codenamed Whale, Bombardant, Gooseberry, finally come together in one place.
44:58It took about 24 hours to get there, two nights and one day, and arrived early in the morning.
45:05And that sight was one which you'll never forget, because there were ships close together
45:10in hundreds, whichever way you cared about. All of them, for the most part, British.
45:15Regrettably, some of them were not in floating conditions, some of them had sunk to make
45:19the breakwater, and some of them had been sunk in the wrong places as a result of enemy
45:24attack. But there were ships floating, ships on the bottom, and everybody seemed to be
45:30knowing what to do. There was enemy attack going on, aircraft, but not as much as I expected.
45:38And soon I realised why, because a fog started to develop, and we assumed that this was being
45:45put down by the Navy to give us cover against enemy air attack, which made it very difficult
45:51to see what we were doing, but we were grateful as well as annoyed with this particular tactic
45:58of the Navy. Of course, the Navy is very well known for making smoke, and in this case,
46:03they made it in plenty. So one minute we were wishing to goodness we could have a clear
46:09view of how to couple these bridge spans together, each 500 foot long, and to be lined up and
46:14angled, so that we couldn't see more than about 50 feet. The next minute, when the fog
46:19had cleared away, we had started work, and everybody got high morale and started the
46:23bombing and the shooting, and they wished for a little more fog. The greatest thing
46:30about it all was the satisfaction when we got it working. There were people who came
46:34over, an enormous number of troops, who thought to themselves, how on earth did this come?
46:38Asked questions, and we said, well, you should have a separate sheet of these things for
46:42you, and make it comfortable. You didn't want to get yourself wet, did you? And this was
46:47probably the most satisfying part of the whole experience, to see it being used, and
46:51to see it being appreciated by our own troops who didn't even know it existed.
47:00The great siege engineers of the 17th and 18th centuries calculated the breaching of
47:04a fortress in weeks or even months. Modern sappering permits no such luxurious use of
47:10time. On D-Day, the Allied sappers cleared this beach of the elaborate German defences
47:16in just a few hours. And the great harbour, the size of Dover, towed piecemeal across
47:22the channel, was in operation within a week, and complete within a fortnight. And all this
47:27under fire, without the opportunity to defend oneself. Not for nothing did one of those
47:3318th century siege engineers say of the sappers, they need a quite extraordinary valour. Unlike
47:40other warriors, they do not have the satisfaction of exchanging blow for blow, while they have
47:45to remain cool in the midst of the most alarming dangers. The engineer, he said, must be outstandingly
47:52bold, and outstandingly prudent.
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