00:00At dawn on June the 6th, 1944, around 150,000 American, British and Canadian troops stormed the beaches of Normandy.
00:11Both sites took heavy casualties, but their successful landing marked the key turning point in defeating Nazi Germany.
00:20Very few of those who took part are alive today, but generations of visitors continue to visit the landing sites.
00:27We have to remember the sacrifice, you know, the thousands of people who came up this beach with very little, very little expectation of survival.
00:40It was very sad, actually. I felt quite tearful this morning, actually, when we went into one of the cemeteries and saw the graves of all the really young soldiers.
00:49There are monuments and tributes to those who came ashore all along the coast.
00:53This memorial garden is also the site of a massive 10-metre-tall statue dedicated to world peace by the Chinese artist Yao Yuan.
01:04It was gifted by Yao to mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day, with similar world peace statues erected in Korea, Russia and Friendship Square in Beijing.
01:16There are also dozens of military war grave cemeteries across Normandy.
01:20Between June and August 1944, an estimated 50,000 Allied troops were killed in the Battle for Normandy, along with 30,000 Germans, with thousands more injured or missing.
01:33There are far fewer memorials, though, for the 20,000 French civilians who died, many in Allied bombing raids.
01:40The nearby city of Caen, which was occupied by the Germans, was a key objective as it controlled the bridges and roads to the rest of France.
01:50The original orders were for the British and Canadian troops to push on and try and take Caen the same day, but it didn't work out to plan.
01:58What followed was weeks of intense fighting against stiff German resistance, but the Allies had air superiority, carpet bombing Caen and the surrounding towns and villages.
02:11By the time the Allied troops had entered Caen, the city was reduced to rubble.
02:16Today, it's home to the country's main D-Day museum, Memorial de Caen.
02:22Christophe Priem is the museum's historian.
02:24Look at the level of destruction.
02:28The level of destruction between 75 and 80 percent of Caen was destroyed.
02:3275 percent of the city was destroyed.
02:35Yes, and everything you see in front of you had to be torn down so we could rebuild.
02:40It took decades for Caen to recover and rebuild.
02:44Today, it's a bustling modern city, but one where memories of the Second World War remain deeply entrenched.
