- 7/12/2025
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00:00D-Day
00:23June the 6th, 1944. The greatest seaborne invasion in history.
00:29By the end of the longest day,
00:32more than 170,000 Allied troops had been landed on the Normandy beaches
00:37to launch the liberation of Europe.
00:43Thousands more would follow.
00:46But without a steady stream of supplies,
00:48they could not hope to secure their position and move inland.
00:53Every battle depends on supplies.
00:56Men, guns, ammunition, food.
01:00No supplies, no battle.
01:03To unload the vital cargo would need large harbours.
01:07But the Germans held the French ports,
01:10so the invaders simply floated their own across the English Channel.
01:15They were codenamed Malburys,
01:21gigantic construction kits of steel and concrete.
01:25Many said they would never work.
01:27Wind and waves almost proved them right.
01:30But ingenuity and determination saved the day.
01:40They just have to design from scratch and hope for the best.
01:43After all, the whole thing was a hell of a gamble.
01:48No one had ever taken a harbour across the ocean before.
01:54Using archive film and colour re-enactments,
01:58Battle Stations tells the story of one of the boldest plans ever conceived in wartime.
02:03The building of the Mulberry Harbours.
02:15In the summer of 1942, Adolf Hitler seemed invincible.
02:20His forces controlled mainland Europe and huge areas of the Soviet Union.
02:25Only the island fortress of Great Britain had managed to resist the German invaders.
02:33Now it would become the launch pad for the Second Front.
02:36The Allied liberation of Europe.
02:39It would not be easy.
02:44British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was a seasoned politician.
02:48But he was also a fighter who refused to contemplate defeat.
02:55He believed in plain speaking and direct action.
02:58He did have the most terrific effect on the morale of everybody.
03:05And he always seemed to say the right things at the right moment.
03:10What kind of a people do they think we are?
03:12Is it possible they do not realise that we shall never cease to persevere against them
03:20until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?
03:25We kept our spirits up.
03:30We knew that we were going somewhere in the right direction.
03:33And even when things were going wrong, he still encouraged us.
03:38He was a great man.
03:39He quickly established a close bond with American President Franklin Roosevelt.
03:45With these two formidable leaders of the helm,
03:48the Allies began planning the assault on fortress Europe.
03:52Here we are, together, facing a group of mighty foes who seek our ruin.
04:00Here we are, together, defending all that to free men is dear.
04:08Soon, American forces began arriving in Britain to create the huge build-up of Allied military power needed to liberate mainland Europe.
04:23Churchill knew that any invasion was likely to involve beach landings in shallow water.
04:29He also knew how easily things could go wrong.
04:33In May 1942, Churchill wrote an historic memo to his chief of combined operations.
04:39Fears for use on beaches.
04:41They must float up and down with the tide.
04:44The anchor problem must be mastered.
04:46Give me the best solution worked out.
04:49Don't argue the matter.
04:51The difficulties will argue for themselves.
04:54It's a truly Churchillian way of telling people to get on with things.
05:03The problem was passed to a department of the British War Office called Transportation Five.
05:08Its leader was a civil engineer with a wealth of experience when it came to building military ports.
05:14Brigadier Bruce White.
05:17He was a very dynamic person, not to say abrasive.
05:22And it was just what was wanted.
05:25In August 1942, the harbour project suddenly moved to the top of the agenda.
05:32When Allied forces attempted a seaborne attack on the heavily defended French port of Dieppe.
05:38The raid was an act of extraordinary heroism, which achieved nothing except to confirm the impossibility of capturing any port held by the Germans.
05:55They announced that if we hold the ports, we hold Europe.
05:58And they were absolutely correct.
06:00And that was the position of the planners in 1942.
06:05And they came to the conclusion that unless we can have a port, there will be no invasion.
06:14A beach landing with floating piers seemed the only answer.
06:19But would they work?
06:21Winston Churchill took a keen interest in the progress of his pet project and was constantly pressing for action.
06:28They began to realise that, bloody-minded though he was, he was really talking a lot of sense.
06:34And he did inspire people to give of their best.
06:38In June 1943, the coast of Normandy was chosen for the D-Day invasion, codenamed Operation Overlord.
06:48The American military planners believed that the operation could be supplied by landing craft, discharging directly onto open beaches.
06:56But Churchill still believed that his floating piers would be essential.
07:02In August 1943, he was crossing the Atlantic on board the liner Queen Mary, en route to the Quebec Conference with President Roosevelt.
07:11One of the ship's bathrooms was used to stage an impromptu demonstration of the need for a sheltered harbour to protect the unloading operation.
07:19Several paper boats were launched in the Bath and were quickly swamped by creating waves with the aid of a roll-up newspaper.
07:31But when a loofer was placed across the Bath, to represent a breakwater, the boats survived the waves, and Churchill was convinced.
07:44Now he had to convince the Americans.
07:48Unsurprisingly, I think the American military had mixed views about the need for the Mulberry harbours.
07:54General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, mentioned in his memoirs that when the proposal was first broached to have Mulberry artificial harbours to back up the Normandy invasion,
08:06that it was greeted by hoots and jeers by the assembled military and naval officers.
08:11The American chiefs of staff were not very much in favour of it.
08:15They thought that they could do a landing over the beaches.
08:20They had great experience of their Pacific landings, but those had not been on the gigantic scale of the Operation Overlord.
08:29And they really believed that they could do it without a harbour.
08:34However, they gave way to Mr. Churchill and said,
08:37all right, if you want this project, we'll go along with you.
08:41They began to see that the harbour could provide a valuable insurance policy against bad weather,
08:47while also avoiding the need to capture a heavily defended French port.
08:51And Roosevelt saw no reason to antagonise his closest ally by opposing the British scheme.
09:00A joint plan was agreed.
09:02The components for two artificial harbours would be built in Britain,
09:06one for the British and one for the Americans.
09:09The top secret project, codenamed Mulberry, would be given the highest priority.
09:15The planners now faced a major challenge.
09:19And that was to design the pieces for two great harbours, to construct the pieces for the two harbours all over the United Kingdom,
09:31to assemble the pieces on the English south coast, to tow the pieces one by one through a hundred miles of German-infested sea,
09:44to the French coast, and to plant the pieces at Aramanche in the British sector and at Omaha Beach in the American sector.
09:53That was the operation which was codenamed Mulberry.
09:58This gave the green light for development work on a whole series of schemes.
10:03Some good, some wildly impractical.
10:06Tough decisions would have to be made and made quickly.
10:10The invasion was scheduled for May 1944.
10:15Two gigantic artificial harbours, each one bigger than New York Central Park,
10:20would have to be designed and built in just nine months.
10:25The invasion, what does it cost? What's the ransom for a continent?
10:37Weapons, 18 million tonnes, 50 million tonnes. Men, ships to carry the men.
10:46And two gigantic artificial harbours.
10:50A harbour needs a key which usually remains fixed, while the ship rises and falls with the tide.
10:56But this causes problems when unloading.
10:59And Winston Churchill had demanded a pier that would also float up and down with the ship.
11:06The Mulberry designers responded with the spud pontoon.
11:10These were massive floating pier heads, 200 foot long by 60 foot wide.
11:20They were to be built of steel and fitted with four legs, called spuds,
11:25planted firmly on the seabed and standing almost 100 foot high.
11:35Held in position by the legs, the floating pontoons would rise and fall with the tide.
11:41It was new, it was radical, and it was exactly what Churchill had demanded.
11:47He was an adventurer.
11:50And anything brand new and novel, he really thought was the cat's whiskers.
11:56They were a marvellous piece of engineering.
11:59And we saw these actually working.
12:02And they were extremely curious, very clever.
12:05Very clever indeed.
12:07But the pier head would have to be linked to the shore by a long roadway,
12:12strong enough to carry heavy vehicles and able to survive in a heavy sea.
12:17The problem was passed to a talented young bridging engineer, Major Alan Beckett.
12:26If you're going to make an invasion on a beach, you've got to get it right.
12:29You've got to have the tights right, the water depth right and the gear right and so on and so forth.
12:35It's no good going along with improvised gear.
12:40Within a week, he had designed a flexible bridge span to be carried on floats
12:45and produced a scale model to demonstrate how it would work.
12:49Normal girder bridges are firmly braced to resist distortion.
12:55The secret of Alan Beckett's bridge was its combination of great strength and flexibility.
13:01It was designed to carry tanks weighing more than 30 tons,
13:05while twisting, rising and falling as it rode the waves.
13:10The spans were to be linked together with steel cables and heavy duty ball and socket joints,
13:20which rested on the supporting floats, also designed by Beckett.
13:24These would be anchored to the seabed.
13:27It was a bold yet brilliantly simple design,
13:30which impressed everybody who saw it demonstrated, including Churchill.
13:35He had also issued another challenge to the designers.
13:39To master the problem of anchoring the structure to the seabed.
13:43When Winston said something should be done, something has got to be done.
13:47And that's the way it works.
13:51The challenge was to hold the floating roadway firmly in position,
13:54without the anchors dragging in rough weather.
13:57It was a tough assignment.
14:02Once again, it was Alan Beckett who came up with the answer.
14:05By experimenting with models, made a thin sheet metal.
14:08He produced a novel design of lightweight anchor.
14:11A full-size version was then passed to the Royal Navy for testing.
14:17Much to their surprise, it proved to be far stronger than their own testing equipment.
14:23The harder it was pulled, the more firmly Beckett's anchor buried itself in the seabed.
14:30It was very, very clever, very clever indeed.
14:35And it didn't fail. It worked wonderfully.
14:39Churchill's anchor problem had been mastered by a young engineer with an inventive mind.
14:46The Royal Navy, for all its long seafaring tradition, could only watch and wonder how on earth the army had managed to do it.
14:53Alan Beckett and the other engineers and designers who were associated with the Mulberries project were absolutely brilliant in how they did their work.
15:08This was a phenomenal feat of construction, a phenomenal feat in British engineering history.
15:16To protect the pier heads and their floating roadways, some form of breakwater was essential.
15:21Obsolete ships would be sunk in a line to provide some shelter as quickly as possible.
15:27The line would be extended by sinking giant concrete blockhouses, known as caissons.
15:37These monsters, weighing up to 6,000 tonnes, would be built in Britain, floated across the Channel, and sunk end-to-end, forming a solid harbour wall.
15:46But although firm plans were now in place, the Mulberry Command structure was beginning to develop some serious fault lines.
15:55The Royal Navy felt increasingly excluded from the project.
16:03The Navy would originally have liked to design the whole thing, but they didn't.
16:08The Army designed the concrete caissons.
16:11The Army designed the floating keys.
16:14The Army designed the floating roadways.
16:17But the Navy felt that they ought to have something to do with the design.
16:26They decided to build floating breakwaters.
16:29Gigantic cross-shaped tanks, 200 feet long and made of steel.
16:34They would be anchored in deep water, forming a protective barrier outside the harbour wall.
16:39The Army was not enthusiastic.
16:47To help disguise their purpose, the components were given a confusing list of codenames chosen at random.
16:53Bombardons and phoenixes, whales and beetles, corncobbs and gooseberries, all went into the making of the Mulberries.
17:03I do remember at one planning meeting where quite a senior officer leant over to me and said,
17:13I can't remember these codenames.
17:14Write them out in English, which would have been fatal.
17:18Top secret, as we used to say lightheartedly, burn before reading.
17:24It was so secret.
17:26But that was the operation codename Mulberry.
17:31With the Mulberry plans prepared, it was time for action.
17:34There were now just six months left to build it.
17:42In May 1942, Mr Churchill wrote a memorandum on the subject of piers for beaches.
17:49A harbour was essential, but if we could not capture one, then we must build our own.
17:56We would build great harbour units in England, tow them across the sea,
18:02and set them down during the battle of the Normandy coast.
18:07Late in 1943, the huge task of constructing the Mulberry harbours got underway.
18:13The plan demanded 147 concrete caissons,
18:1810 miles of Alan Beckett's floating bridge sections.
18:2323 peer heads, the list was endless.
18:26Yet the whole vast undertaking was designed to be no more than a temporary solution.
18:32Mulberry had a planned lifespan of only 90 days.
18:35In the months before D-Day, of 45,000 workers employed on the Mulberry project,
18:42almost half were building the concrete caissons, codenamed Phoenixes.
18:48It is a remarkable thing that we managed to mobilise so many people.
18:54Finding the materials.
18:56How many thousands of tonnes, I don't know.
18:59And all the skill that's required, from the simple labourer up to the engineers.
19:06It was quite an achievement to build them, and to build them so quickly.
19:12Yet the planners of Mulberry often seemed more interested in obstructing each other
19:18than in getting the job done.
19:19As the caissons took to the water, the Admiralty claimed that, concrete or not,
19:28they were now ships, and under its control.
19:31Bruce White insisted that they still belong to the army,
19:35and flatly refused to hand them over.
19:38Tempers flared, and insults flew.
19:43To help restore the peace, Brigadier Mervyn Walter was appointed
19:46as Director of Ports and Waterways.
19:50It was a daunting task.
19:52Well, I went and saw Brigadier Bruce White that morning,
19:57and he told me,
19:59unless the project was under the control of the army,
20:03not the navy, it would fail.
20:06And after lunch, I had a meeting with the Admiralty,
20:09and they told me,
20:11the whole thing will fail,
20:13unless you get rid of Bruce White.
20:17But whoever was in charge,
20:19Churchill had no intention of letting it fail.
20:21Don't argue the matter, he had said.
20:24The difficulties will argue for themselves.
20:27Churchill was obviously the dynamic force behind the whole thing,
20:33and one felt right down at my level that he really was terribly interested in this thing,
20:40and it really would be a very good thing if it succeeded.
20:43The pace of the operation was relentless, and work continued round the clock.
20:48Many of the pier heads were built in Scotland.
20:52They were 200 feet long, 1,000 tons in weight.
20:55These boats weren't like beavers.
20:59People who had never been properly inside of the sea,
21:03building and launching boats.
21:08But that was the condition in which they were built.
21:12And we had eight months to do it, and we did it.
21:15The whole nation seems somewhere to be driven by another kind of women vitality.
21:25There's no doubt about it, the thing that kept us going was Winston Churchill.
21:30He was a great man, the man for the hour.
21:35Don't argue the matter.
21:37The difficulties will argue for them, and he was right, will argue for themselves.
21:41And he was right there, and they did.
21:44I felt they spoke for the nation.
21:48He inspired us.
21:50This had to be done.
21:52It was demanded of us.
21:54And by God, we felt his presence.
21:56As long as we have faith in our cause and an unconquerable willpower,
22:06salvation will not be denied us.
22:10But the pace was beginning to take its toll.
22:13Mulberry was straining Britain's industrial capacity to its very limits,
22:18and the schedule began to slip.
22:19The military planners became seriously worried and made desperate requests for early delivery.
22:29The Americans were concerned, as the weeks went on in May of 1944,
22:37that the materials would not be finished in time,
22:40that the organization would not be set in place to bring the material over to France.
22:45That was important because the American Seabees, the naval constructionmen,
22:50who had to install the American Mulberry, needed to train.
22:54And obviously the more training one has, the better prepared he is to carry it out.
22:59There was very little time toward the end of May to carry out this training.
23:04At the beginning of 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been appointed Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.
23:12His task was to finalize the plans for Operation Overlord,
23:19now scheduled for the beginning of June.
23:22Eisenhower believed that Mulberry would play a vital role in the onslaught,
23:27speeding up the huge supply operation as well as providing an insurance policy against bad weather.
23:33Meanwhile, across the channel, the Germans were also working round the clock,
23:43preparing for the invasion they all knew was coming.
23:47Hitler ordered his favorite general, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel,
23:51to strengthen the defenses along the coast of northern France.
23:54The Germans were missing two vital pieces of information,
24:01when and where the Allies would strike.
24:04But Rommel had one clear objective,
24:07to ensure that no man, weapon or piece of equipment would ever reach the shore.
24:12Never was any military project more thoroughly prepared than the invasion of Europe.
24:25Great storehouses are packed to capacity with engines of war and food for the enormous army now assembled in Britain.
24:30The well-nigh illimitable productive resources of the United States and Britain are behind the invasion.
24:36When the armies land in Europe, they'll lack nothing that it's in the power of Britain and America to provide.
24:43The supply operation was on a gigantic scale.
24:47Millions of tons would be needed as the beachheads were secured and the breakout began.
24:51As the Allied troops gazed in wonder at the sheer scale of the invasion build-up,
25:01mysterious floating shapes caught their eye.
25:04The first thing I saw was a huge office block with no windows, no doors.
25:12It was just a great big concrete box, 60 foot high, 60 foot wide and 200 feet long,
25:19and looked like a giant egg box.
25:23The biggest jigsaw puzzle ever created was starting to come together.
25:28They put me on board and I was given a delivery note, believe it or not.
25:35So I clambered up on the top, but quite honestly I didn't know what I was supposed to do.
25:40I had no instructions.
25:42It did not occur to us at that time that this thing floated.
25:45And we were amazed at the top that was tied up to us, suddenly started pulling and we moved.
25:57Well, having looked round at the situation I'd found myself in, I realised that I was the senior hand.
26:04In other words, I was the captain of the concrete.
26:06The final destination for the caissons was still top secret.
26:13They were to be towed across the English Channel to form the harbour walls of Mulberry B at Aramanche,
26:20and Mulberry A at Omaha Beach.
26:23Brigadier Mervyn Walter was to be in charge of assembling and operating the British harbour, Mulberry B.
26:31The British Chiefs of Staff wrote this.
26:34The Mulberry project is so vital that it must be considered the crux of the whole operation,
26:41and it must not fail.
26:45And that, those high and fluting words were drummed into me from the start,
26:52that this project must not fail.
26:54As the first waves of Allied troops hit the Normandy beaches on June the 6th, 1944,
27:09to begin the liberation of Europe, they carried basic equipment and rations for only 48 hours.
27:17To back them up and secure the invasion beaches, a huge supply operation was already on the move.
27:24It was a wonderful sight. You couldn't move for ships.
27:31And obviously something very big was on, and we were part of it.
27:36But we still didn't know what part at that point.
27:40It was quite a calm sea, but it was a lovely dawn,
27:45and the spectacle of these ships in convoy going across, it was really most encouraging.
27:55And the aircraft going over above us, plane after plane of the Allies,
28:01and gliders, oh, it was a wonderful sight.
28:04If I had been the Germans, I should have been very worried.
28:11And possibly very confused, for behind the warships and the troop carriers of the invasion fleet,
28:18came a procession of tugs, hauling some of the most unlikely-looking objects ever to put to sea.
28:23There's one thing I've never forgotten to this day, and that was, of course, the sound of the waves banging against the side on the front of these caissons.
28:37It was like a huge drum, and there was a huge boom, boom, boom going on all the time.
28:46We sailed, actually, on D-Day, but we didn't get there till D-Day plus one.
28:51And there was still a lot of fighting going on, and one or two explosions.
28:56It was quite frightening at times.
28:59And the other thing that we'd noticed as we came into Aramage was the bodies in the water.
29:05That was not a nice sight.
29:07After more than 24 hours at sea, the Mulberry harbours had finally reached the enemy coast.
29:18Now, Brigadier Walter's task began in earnest.
29:22I've never forgotten my very first sight of Aramage that morning,
29:27exactly like the photographs we'd studied before D-Day.
29:31And I can still remember my excitement, because the challenge was on.
29:35It was very exciting.
29:37One of Brigadier Walter's first tasks was to breach the sea wall at Aramage,
29:42and to demolish buildings on the promenade to create exits for the floating roadways.
29:49The quiet seaside resort was about to be transformed into the busiest port in Europe.
29:56Mulberry's moment had come at last.
30:01The first sections of breakwater were formed by sinking lines of obsolete ships with explosive charges.
30:07The first sections of breakwater were formed by sinking lines.
30:10Then the concrete caissons were moved into position to extend the breakwaters to their full length of more than two miles.
30:17There was already a couple at least there in line, and the tug nudged us into position.
30:26And with ropes and tackle and so forth, between the different ones, we lined them up and we heaved and we pulled and straightened things up to make a huge wall to this harbour.
30:41And all the sluices were opened, all the sea valves, and she gradually settled down onto the sandy floor.
30:49And that was that.
30:51And then we'd fetch another one.
30:53And so it went on.
30:54I don't think it really sank in until we saw things unfolding in their proper order that we realised that this was a harbour we were building.
31:08Meanwhile, along the coast of the American harbour, Mulberry A, the construction battalions, known to every GI as the Seabees, were working flat out to get the floating piers operational.
31:26Even if it meant cutting a few corners in the process.
31:28The Seabees soon outpaced the British Royal Engineers, and within two days, American tanks and trucks began rumbling down Alan Beckett's floating roadways.
31:47It was a great thrill for me to see it actually, as I thought it would be, built early, immediately after the landing.
31:58With very, very little time interval, because that time interval is the time that the enemy will regroup.
32:09And the idea behind the whole of Mulberry Harbour was to get armour ashore quickly, before the counterattack.
32:17And they did that.
32:19They did it so quickly, within two days.
32:23Incredible? Yes.
32:24Even to Americans steeped in traditions of pioneer courage and mechanical genius.
32:29Almost unreal.
32:31But real enough to the trucks that rolled down the sturdy ramps with their rations.
32:35And big guns and shells made in America.
32:38On tyres made in America.
32:40Real enough to the men who are America.
32:43And to the 90,000 troops on shore who waited for all these.
32:46The Americans did it the right way.
32:49Handled the thing the way I thought it was going to be handled.
32:53The Americans, because they had come to the war with untold resources, were not as conscious of losing this material.
33:01It was considered battlefield expendable.
33:03So the Americans did not spend the time to anchor the equipment and really lavish concern on it.
33:10Because once it had served its purpose, that is, getting ashore tanks, that was very critical.
33:17Tanks and equipment for the first one or two weeks, the Americans were less concerned about the follow-on than the British.
33:24At the British harbour, the construction rate was slower, but the work was far more thorough.
33:36Mervyn Walter ensured that as each new delivery was towed into position,
33:40the whole gigantic construction kit which formed the piers and their roadways
33:45was securely lashed together and firmly anchored to the seabed.
33:49Unloading from the main pier was just beginning.
33:51Then the wind began to blow.
33:55And on the 13th day of the invasion, the treacherous sea became Hitler's ally.
34:00Unloading on the open beaches ceased.
34:03Yet somehow or other, the work of unloading in the port went on.
34:10The American harbour was in a more exposed position than Mulberry B.
34:15Yet its builders seriously underestimated the power of the ocean,
34:19despite urgent warnings from Alan Beckett.
34:22Becket warned them.
34:24He said, we must put anchors on every pontoon of our floating roadway.
34:31But they thought they knew better.
34:33And they only put anchors every sixth pontoon.
34:39Thirteen days after the invasion, the worst storm in living memory hit the coast of Normandy.
34:45And the Mulberry Harbours.
34:48As storm force winds lashed the Normandy coast, Brigadier Walter's men at Mulberry B now risked their lives to save the harbour they had worked so hard to build.
35:02With the roadway doing this and this, and eight-foot waves coming over it. Pure purgatory during that time.
35:13I lost about eight sappers, drowned, washed overboard, but they stood by. Absolutely wonderful.
35:21The lads who were on Mulberry, as far as it had been built then, just worked their guts out to save it.
35:36Soon, many of the 300-tonne Bombard and floating breakwaters snapped their moorings and began drifting towards the fragile concrete caissons that formed the harbour wall.
35:46Unfortunately, they got out of control and they more or less smashed things up.
35:53There were no help whatsoever.
35:56That was very unfortunate.
36:00For four days and nights, the pounding continued.
36:03I was so tired. My officer said to me, I said every order twice or three times to make sure I said it right, you know. One was so tired. It was every man jack of that port construction force threw his heart and soul into saving the harbour.
36:24But it was a very, very testing time.
36:42Yet even during the height of the storm, more than 6,000 tonnes of vital supplies were unloaded and sent to the front.
36:48They were still able to get things ashore in that storm because the harbour wall held on Mulberry B. Otherwise, they could have been shoved back into the sea because they ran out of bullets or they ran out of food or they ran out of something or other that they needed.
37:06By June 22nd, the storm had eased at last, and it was possible to take stock of the situation.
37:15The Navy bombarders, I saw the other side of Aramosh against the cliffside.
37:25The harbour was badly damaged, but thanks to all the precautions, Mulberry B had survived.
37:40Along the coast at Omaha Beach, it was a very different story.
37:44I went over to Omaha on the 23rd of June to see how they got on, and it was just a tangle of steel completely wiped out.
37:59The floating breakwaters had come crashing in to shatter the concrete caissons of Mulberry A.
38:05The poorly anchored floating roadways had also broken free and drifted into a tangled mass of twisted steel.
38:14Two entire pier heads had been swept ashore.
38:17The weather had done what the Germans had failed to do.
38:33Eisenhower was left with no choice.
38:36The floating piers at Mulberry A would have to be abandoned.
38:41Their surviving sections could help restore Mulberry B,
38:44but the damaged harbour wall still provided enough shelter to unload ships directly onto the beach,
38:51and huge quantities of supplies continued to come ashore in spite of the devastation.
38:59As the British harbour at Aramosh was reinstated,
39:03a steady stream of vital war materials poured from the holds of the freighters and landing ships
39:09that now shuttled across the English Channel.
39:14It was really most encouraging, because up to that moment there had been sporadic landings of stores,
39:22but nothing very much.
39:24And when you once saw what the capacity of the harbour itself was,
39:29it was really terribly encouraging.
39:30One of the most successful features of Mulberry was the LST pier head, designed for unloading the big tank landing ships.
39:41Vehicles could be driven off the lower and upper decks at the same time, which speeded up the whole operation.
39:47And Mulberry also provided shelter for the versatile amphibious trucks known as ducks,
40:03which were able to operate a non-stop shuttle between the ships and supply dumps inland.
40:07Soon they were transporting even more material than the floating roadways.
40:17Two and a half million personnel passed through the harbour both ways.
40:23Half a million tanks, guns and vehicles came down Allan's floating roadways,
40:28and over four million tonnes of supplies came through the harbour.
40:35If it hadn't been for Mulberry, there would have been a devastating gap in the flow of supplies to the armies on the ground.
40:44And what effect that would have had, I don't know, but it would certainly have slowed up the advance.
40:48It might even have caused some tactical disaster.
40:54Winston Churchill's floating piers had ultimately done the job,
40:58and Mulberry soon became known simply as Port Winston.
41:05He came to inspect the Mulberry Harbour,
41:08and, of course, I gave him a cracking salute,
41:12and he said,
41:13Well done, my boy.
41:14That moment I was up in the clouds.
41:19For the first time in history,
41:22a harbour had been built in sections,
41:24towed across the sea,
41:26and set down during a battle on the enemy's shore.
41:32Throughout the summer of 1944,
41:34stores continued to pour through the harbour at Aramange,
41:38before it finally ceased operations on November the 19th.
41:40By this time, the Allied advance had reached Holland,
41:44and the major port of Antwerp had been captured.
41:49During the breakout phase, and this is from June all the way through November of 1944,
41:55Mulberry Bee kept functioning,
41:57and kept equipment and wheeled vehicles, supplies,
42:02were coming ashore through Mulberry Bee,
42:04and then pumped forward to sustain the offensive that ultimately defeated Germany.
42:08The Supreme Allied Headquarters said this of Mulberry Bee,
42:15Mulberry Bee did far more than the job for which it was intended,
42:21and in spite of storms, far greater than those for which it was designed.
42:26It is the success story of a military and naval operation unsurpassed in the history of warfare.
42:37Today, visitors to the peaceful seaside town of Aramange may not realise that it once bore the name of Port Winston.
42:50But they can hardly miss the monuments to Churchill's vision that still survive, cast in reinforced concrete.
43:01They are Phoenix caissons, the last surviving fragments of the greatest feat of military engineering in modern times.
43:13Mulberry, the harbour that went to France.
43:19Afterwards, we began to feel very proud of what we'd done.
43:24However small our part was, a very small cog in a very large machine.
43:29But nevertheless, it was necessary.
43:32Down to the man who mixed the cement and built the damn thing.
43:37I was a very minor, tiny part of it.
43:40But I give a right arm to do it again.
43:43We are all extremely proud of being Normandy veterans.
43:54Because of the success of the whole thing.
43:58It was an amazing feat.
44:01Absolute amazing feat.
44:02.
44:13.
44:18.
44:22.
44:24.
44:25.
44:26.
44:27.
44:28.
44:53.
44:54.
44:55.
44:56.
45:08.
45:09.
45:10Early in February 1944, I was serving in Delhi as Director of Transportation Southeast Asia Command
45:22Under Admiral Mountbatten.
45:25And one never to be forgotten, early evening, I received a signal which said,
45:34Report to the Director of Transportation War Office immediately.
45:40I naturally wondered whether my sins had caught up with me, because it was a very peremptory signal.
45:46Anyhow, two days later, or two and a half days later, it took that time in those days to go from Delhi to London, via Cairo, Malta, Gibraltar, and so to England.
46:03I arrived in London and found myself posted as the Director of Ports and Inland Water Transport of the 21st Army Group, which was the British and Canadian half of the operation.
46:20.
46:21.
46:22.
46:23.
46:24.
46:25.
46:26.
46:27.
46:28.
46:29.
46:30.
46:31.
46:32.
46:33.
46:34.
46:35.
46:36.
46:37.
46:38.
46:39.
46:40.
46:41.
46:42.
46:43.
46:44.
46:45.
46:46.
46:47.
46:48Basin, which was on our right flank, and Wiestrom, which was on our left flank, if possible,
46:54to open those ports, and also to operate the Wiestrom-Corn Canal as a line of communication.
47:04That was how I came into the operation.
47:10Well, as you know, every battle depends on supplies, men, guns, ammunition, food.
47:21No supplies, no battle.
47:24That's the basic basis of war.
47:29And when the planners were planning, I call it the invasion, in 1942, the question of supplying
47:39the forces over the beaches was a very serious problem.
47:46They decided, on looking at the problem, that they dare not risk an invasion which depended
47:55only on supplies coming over the beaches, and there were two reasons for this.
48:02On the Normandy beaches, there's a 23-foot rise and fall of tide.
48:06The tide goes out half a mile at low tide.
48:10Now you can only discharge a landing craft to the beach, an hour or so, either side of
48:16high tide, otherwise you'll be, depending on your draft, but otherwise you'll be grounded.
48:24Now that meant that the hours in which you could discharge supplies was very limited.
48:31Not 24 hours, but just the limit at either side of high tide.
48:35And that would be insufficient to support a major battle at its start.
48:44That was one reason.
48:45The second reason was that in the event of a storm, you can't discharge over the beaches
48:51at all.
48:52And in the event, as it so happened, there was this unexpected gale which started on
48:57the 19th of June and raged for four days, and no supplies came over the beaches.
49:04Now had we been dependent on the beaches, the battle could have dried up.
49:09So that was the position the planners found themselves in 1942.
49:15We dare not risk having an invasion which depended only on supplies coming over the beaches.
49:21And there was only one solution to that, and that was to have a port which could operate
49:2724 hours a day at all states of the tide.
49:31Now the Germans knew that, and so they fortified the French ports very heavily.
49:36They prepared them for demolition to make sure that even if you captured a port, you wouldn't
49:42be able to use it for two or three weeks, which is what happened when Cherbourg was captured.
49:48And in fact, at the time, they announced that if we hold the ports, we hold Europe.
49:53And they were absolutely correct.
49:55And that was the position of the planners in 1942.
50:00And they came to the conclusion that unless we can have a port, there would be no invasion.
50:10Well, one day after a morning of meetings with Captain Petrie, he and I went to the In-N-Out
50:22Club in Piccadilly to lunch.
50:24He was a member and he took me to lunch.
50:28And it was customary in those days when you went out to lunch to take your locked black
50:34bag, the ordinary standard dish with all your documents in it, and to put them under the
50:43table between your legs to try and remember that they were still there.
50:48Well, we had our lunch.
50:51We got up and went back to Norfolk House, which was about a quarter of a mile, which is in St.
50:56James Square, to a—he'd brought his bag, but I'd left mine behind.
51:04And I can still, to this day, tremble as—as I remember my feelings that morning when I rang
51:17up the club and the hall-porter in a very calm voice, I said, I've left a bag, but—yes,
51:26sir, thank you very much.
51:28We found a great—a black bag, and it's here in my, you know, Nepal.
51:35I can't tell you my relief to know that it was there.
51:39I literally, I'm not exaggerating, ran the quarter of a mile, don't know what anybody
51:44thought of me, seeing a galloping brigadier, but from Norfolk House to the club to retrieve
51:51the bag.
51:52It was still locked, and I opened it and checked the documents that I'd had for the meeting.
52:02I reported to intelligence, thinking and hoping, literally hoping, that I would go to the tower
52:11and be shot, because the strain was so terrific, because in the bags were plans, which showed
52:19where the landing would be in Normandy, not the Carpard de Calais.
52:27Well, I moved down to Selsey, lived in a beach house there for about three days before D-Day,
52:36and then embarked with Captain Petrie and his ship, HMS Aristocrat.
52:42We embarked at 2.30 in the afternoon of D-Day in his ship, HMS Aristocrat, a highly noble
52:51ship to embark on.
52:53And we arrived offshore in the darkness the next morning.
52:57And I've never forgotten, or I've often looked back at my very first sight of Aramanche that
53:05morning, as it was, exactly like the photographs we'd studied before D-Day.
53:11And I can still remember my excitement, because the challenge was on, which was very exciting.
53:17And that was, that's how I arrived there.
53:22As I've said on, in another film, when you asked me about D-Day, what was it like?
53:29I can remember a little of D plus one itself, but for most of the time, I can remember nothing.
53:37I was, now, I was so tired, my officer said to me, I said every order twice or three times
53:46to make sure I said it right, you know.
53:50One was so tired, it was, every man jack of that Port Construction Force threw his heart
53:57and soul into saving the Harbour, and we did.
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