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00:006th of June, 1944.
00:23The greatest machine of World War II springs into action.
00:27It is made up of thousands of ships and aircraft, tens of thousands of men, and millions of
00:34tons of steel and concrete.
00:35I never knew there were that many boats, landing craft, ships, barges, or whatever, anywhere
00:41in the world.
00:42This is Overlord, the invasion machine that will send Allied soldiers dropping from the
00:47skies and storming the beaches of Normandy.
00:50Each piece of this machine has been designed to fulfill a specific task in the air, on land,
00:56or at sea.
00:57The success of D-Day depends upon it.
01:01Interlocking with pinpoint precision, the men and machines of Overlord overcome not just
01:06Hitler's beach defenses, but nature itself in the greatest assault the world has ever seen.
01:11We didn't know whether we were going to land right in front of a German pill box or a gun
01:17emplacement or what.
01:20Using archive film and color re-enactments, Battle Stations reveals the phenomenal hardware
01:25that made the day of days.
01:321216 AM, 6th of June 1944, D-Day.
01:38Four years of trial and error had trained the men and built the war machine that would
01:43throw itself against Hitler's Atlantic wall.
01:47Ever since the Blitzkrieg of 1940, Europe had been under the iron heels of Nazi jackboots.
01:53Now the machine was in motion which would drive them out.
01:57Each element of this machine had been through intensive research and development to ensure
02:02it did its job to perfection.
02:06The first component of the invasion machine to go into action was the Allied Airborne Force.
02:11Highly trained paratroopers prepared to leap from their aircraft into the night sky over
02:15Normandy.
02:17Sound off for equipment check.
02:21So we know exactly what we were doing and to stand up, hook up and then check equipment
02:26and would check the equipment of the man in front of me and check my own equipment.
02:30And the idea was to get out of that plane, we were like, what's it called, an airborne
02:38shuffle.
02:39You had your knee and the next guy's behind and you were shuffling out so that when you
02:44landed you were close together.
02:46Carrying the first wave of paratroopers on D-Day was the C-47 transport aircraft.
02:53Well outside of the Model T-4, I think the C-47 was one of the great inventions of the millennium.
02:59The man behind this incredible aircraft was Donald Douglas.
03:03Asked by TWA to develop a passenger airliner to rival their competitors' Boeing models,
03:08his design was superb.
03:11Streamlined and wide-bodied, the fully developed aircraft took to the skies over America in
03:151935 as the DC-3 passenger airliner.
03:20The aircraft revolutionized air transport.
03:23Fast and powerful, with an outstanding safety record, the DC-3 soon came to the attention
03:29of the US Army Air Forces and entered service only 16 days after Pearl Harbor as the C-47.
03:35It was the ideal military transport aircraft and served all over the world.
03:42Now it was crucial to the airborne troops in the early hours of D-Day.
03:47It was the responsibility of the crew of the C-47 to make certain that the paratroopers
03:56were dropped as close to target as possible.
03:59And even a delay of three or four seconds in turning on the green light would have thrown them
04:07off their designated target zone.
04:10out we went.
04:37And the war's on.
04:40On D-Day, over a thousand C-47s carried 23,000 airborne troops into action.
04:55The ideally placed door in the C-47 meant that a full load of 20 paratroopers could leave
05:00the aircraft in just 10 seconds.
05:02The cargo carrying ability of the aircraft was also improved when this door was enlarged.
05:07This meant that heavy equipment and even wounded men on stretchers could easily be loaded aboard.
05:12We would haul litter patients, gasoline, ammunition, food, medical supplies, anything that had to
05:19be hauled to get to where it was destined to go in a hurry.
05:24Everything depended on whether or not the paratroopers could protect the flanks of the landing
05:38beaches and capture the routes needed for the advance inland.
05:42But the paratroopers could only carry light equipment and were vulnerable to armoured attack.
05:47A way had to be found to get artillery and anti-tank guns right onto the drop zones.
05:53The answer to the problem was the glider.
05:56Two types of glider were used by the Allied Airborne Divisions on D-Day.
06:00The British Horsa was 67 feet long, was built almost entirely of wood and carried 25 troops
06:06or a six-pounder anti-tank gun.
06:08The smaller American CG-4 Waco had a fabric and plywood fuselage over a metal framework and
06:15could carry a jeep or 15 men.
06:19The cheap, lightweight construction of both designs meant that they could easily be towed
06:23by the C-47.
06:25If necessary, two Wacos could even be towed at the same time.
06:30The pinpoint accuracy of these simple, throwaway aircraft also made them ideal for special
06:35missions on June the 6th.
06:38As US paratroopers hit the ground in the American sector, 50 miles away, two gliders carrying
06:44men of the British 6th Airborne Division, led by Major John Howard, were about to show
06:49what gliders could do.
06:51In what has been described as one of the greatest flying achievements of the war, they located
06:56the vital Orne Canal Bridge in pitch darkness and swooped in to crash land at 100 miles an hour.
07:03Then there was a great scramble to get out because, you know, the last thing you want to
07:07be when you just landed close to a guarded bridge is to be sitting on a wooden glider.
07:15Almost as soon as we cleared the glider, Major Howard, typical of him, he was up on the
07:20bank of the canal saying, come on boys, this is it, come on, and we all charged after him.
07:25The German defenders were taken totally by surprise.
07:30By the time we got to that end of the bridge, they decided it was not a good place to be
07:35staying around.
07:36We scattered either side of the bridge up and down the canal bank and took up all our
07:42defensive positions.
07:44As this actual photo taken on D-Day shows, the capture of the Orne Canal Bridge blocked
07:49the route to the D-Day invasion beaches for German armour.
07:54The men of the glider force were the vanguard of 150,000 troops who would land in Normandy
07:59over the next few hours.
08:02But after this promising start, things began to go badly wrong for the airborne invasion.
08:08Cloud banks over the drop zones caused the C-47 transports to veer off course and heavy anti-aircraft
08:15fire broke up their formations.
08:19The paratroopers of the American airborne divisions were scattered all over the Cotentan Peninsula,
08:24while vital heavy equipment was lost in swamps and rivers.
08:28Over the next few hours, small groups of men began to band together.
08:33Dick Winters was a young officer of the 101st Airborne and one of the first men on the ground
08:38on D-Day.
08:43He linked up with another paratrooper to work out exactly where they were.
08:48We exchanged greetings and in coming down the road he had been smart enough to stop at a stone marker.
08:57This stone marker said St. Muir Eglise.
09:01I was able to orient the map very quickly because the planes were coming in and they were flying from west to east.
09:09He had told me St. Muir Eglise is that town up there.
09:13There was St. Muir Eglise in my map. I knew exactly where it was.
09:18Winters and his men then began to secure the vital road exits from Utah Beach.
09:23By 3.45 AM, a huge fleet of C-47s had taken the airborne divisions to Normandy.
09:321,300 aircraft and 800 gliders had carried 23,000 men, 110 jeeps and 500 artillery pieces to drop zones deep behind enemy lines.
09:43The C-47s then became the paratrooper's lifeline, bringing in vital supplies and reinforcements until they could link up with the troops landing on the beaches.
09:52But the day had only just started. More men and more machines were about to roll into action.
09:58All of your heroic airborne guys dropping on the Cotentin Peninsula and heroically walking through the night, they are only part of a very big complicated system.
10:13Unless every single man and machine did their job to perfection, D-Day could still have ended in chaos.
10:20The scene appeared in front of stunned German soldiers manning bunkers along the Normandy coast.
10:2660 miles of ocean was packed with nearly 6,000 ships and craft of every shape and size.
10:3260 miles.
10:3360 miles.
10:34When the landing fleet arrived, it was unbelievably huge.
10:40We said, it can't be real.
10:43So many ships.
10:44And the horizon was black with ships.
10:47We said, we can do nothing now.
10:50We were actually threading through in daylight.
10:57These hundreds and hundreds of vessels, all in straight lines, a number that you couldn't have imagined.
11:06You'd look ahead and see these lines stretching way to the horizon.
11:12Seconds after appearing out of the mist, the invasion fleet announced its arrival with a terrifying bombardment.
11:18By clockwork, the battleships, cruisers and destroyers each added their contribution to the weight of metal smashing down on German beach fortifications.
11:29A storm of 15-inch, 8-inch and 5-inch shells.
11:33Joining these conventional fighting ships were new craft designed specially for this day.
11:54Rocket ships.
11:55Their decks were crammed with racks holding hundreds of rockets tipped with 5-inch warheads.
12:00A barrage from a single rocket ship could pulverize hundreds of yards of beach, shredding barbed wire entanglements and obliterating minefields.
12:11Under the cover of the bombardment, assault troops prepared to cross the last miles of sea to the shore.
12:17We climbed over into the landing craft and we were, you know, 10, 11 miles out and the sea was rough.
12:26And that's when everybody got wet and cold and you're getting seasick.
12:31The machines that carried men like Bob Slaughter to their destiny on the beaches of France had been years in the making.
12:37But without them, an amphibious landing, one of the most complex and dangerous operations in war would have been impossible.
12:43Not only do you have to deal with the land, not only do you have to deal with the sea, but in amphibious operations you have to deal with the interface.
12:54You've got to cross the line between the two.
12:58The first major amphibious landing in modern times dates back to World War One.
13:06In 1915, Britain used its naval power to bypass the deadlock of trench warfare on the Western Front in France with an assault on Turkey's Gallipoli Peninsula.
13:16Thousands of men stormed the beaches to destroy the gun positions blocking the route to the Black Sea and Russia.
13:22The assault was a disaster.
13:26No one had thought through how you do these kind of operations, how you coordinate the naval gunfire, how you coordinate the naval landings.
13:34They didn't have the equipment, so you're essentially jerry-rigging equipment for the landings.
13:40And none of the troops had been trained for it.
13:42The British Army, the Australians, the New Zealanders are all lined up on the beach coming ashore in small boats
13:48and being shredded by Turkish machine guns and artillery.
13:53So the story of Gallipoli is kill, kill, kill, and it's the Turks doing all the killing.
14:00Gallipoli made a strong impression on military planners in America and Britain.
14:05Both countries saw the potential of amphibious warfare if only the technology could catch up.
14:11Up to the early 1930s, infantry still had to land on beaches by jumping out of boats and wading ashore.
14:18By World War II, Allied designers realized that a brand new machine was needed.
14:24A machine that could carry troops across that deadly divide between land and sea.
14:29They need boats that are designed to come into shallow water, come right up to the beach, and get the cargo off quickly.
14:38And the Americans, among other places, turn to people whose job it is to design and build river craft.
14:48In 1938, the US Marines first tested a new shallow draft boat capable of landing troops and small vehicles.
14:56Made by a New Orleans-based maverick boat builder called Andrew Jackson Higgins,
15:01it was an early version of the landing craft that would be the backbone of the D-Day invasion.
15:07Britain, too, had been developing specialised landing craft to carry troops and vehicles.
15:12But these early craft were slow and awkward, and before they could be fully developed, Europe was once again engulfed by war.
15:25In 1940, Britain's tiny force of landing craft was destroyed, not in landing, but in evacuating troops from Dunkirk.
15:35Yet only a few weeks later, Winston Churchill ordered amphibious raids on occupied France to begin.
15:42A new organisation was set up to coordinate these raids and to develop the machines they needed.
15:47Newly trained forces of commanders would carry out these missions in what would become known as combined operations.
15:55I volunteered for combined operations because I thought I'd have more responsibility,
15:59and certainly it meant serving a small craft, which is what I wanted.
16:03But at that time, they needed plenty of officers, obviously, for what was coming in the next few years.
16:10These early commando raids were mere pinpricks against the Nazi war machine,
16:15but were key to working out every possible problem before D-Day.
16:19Meanwhile, the US pushed ahead with its own landing craft designs and amphibious invasion techniques.
16:25The basic landing craft that carried the assault divisions on D-Day was about 40 feet long, weighed 13 tons, and carried 30 infantrymen.
16:40The secret of the successful assault landing craft was the flat bottom, which stopped it getting stuck on shore,
16:46and a ramp bow, which allowed troops to disembark quickly before they became an easy target for enemy guns.
16:52In the United States, they were known as landing craft vehicle personnel, LCVP.
17:00Britain used a similar design, tested in early commando raids, called the landing craft assault, or LCA.
17:06The LCA was quite a good sea boat. It was low in the water, and specifically designed to come in at night as a surprise attack.
17:18But they were wider than the LCVP. They were a little bit lower, and they had more armor on them.
17:27It was probably a better landing craft than the LCVP.
17:31The LCVPs were made of plywood, and these were steel.
17:35When they left their motherships on D-Day, the landing craft headed to the beaches in long columns.
17:42Over the last few hundred yards, they would spread out to form a line, or wave,
17:47so that all their troops would hit the beach at exactly the same moment.
17:53To break up the wave formation, the Germans constructed thousands of obstacles along the beaches of France.
17:58These could rip the bottoms out of landing craft, or blow them and their human cargo to pieces.
18:05At dawn on D-Day, the coxswains of 2,400 LCAs and LCVPs knew that they were heading straight for a killing zone.
18:14Every man had to use all his skill to avoid the obstacles, and get his troops safely ashore right on target.
18:21Or the first critical moments of the invasion would be a disaster.
18:24Commanding 18 LCAs of the first wave on Omaha Beach was Lieutenant Jimmy Green.
18:30We had the easiest wave, I think, because we were clear of the obstacles.
18:35The second and third waves landed, actually, in amongst the obstacles.
18:39Some of our craft were hit and disabled.
18:42Of our 18 LCAs, we lost six.
18:44We lost six.
18:51We didn't know whether we were going to land right in front of a German pillbox, or a gun emplacement, or what.
18:57And I remember telling the rest of them, I said, we're going to catch hell.
19:03As they went up the beach, the Germans opened up with their machine guns and wiped them out.
19:08I think there was something like two wounded survivors when the second wave went in.
19:14The terrible casualties did not slow down the pace of the invasion.
19:18Each successive wave reaching the beach added to the overwhelming build-up of troops who held themselves against the German defences.
19:25But this was only the very tip of the Allied spearhead, and it could still be blunted by heavy attack on land, and above all, from the air.
19:34If the invasion was to be a success, the D-Day machine had to win control of the skies over Normandy.
19:41Midnight, 6th of June. Allied aircraft patrolled the skies high above the beaches, where thousands of troops were pouring ashore from landing craft.
19:52This was the most vulnerable moment of the entire invasion.
19:56If the German Air Force had attacked, they could have caused havoc on the beaches.
20:00My feeling was, I mean, if you see it, you go after it. Just be aggressive.
20:06I think we're about as aggressive as a unit as the American Air Force.
20:12Because an amphibious operation is so vulnerable to air attack, it is a necessary precondition to any amphibious operation that you have control of the skies overhead.
20:27Although fighter aircraft dominated the skies on the 6th of June, the story of the destruction of the Luftwaffe began months earlier with the heavy bombers of the US 8th Air Force.
20:38Their mission? To destroy the Luftwaffe on the ground.
20:42Every target that we had was German aircraft factories. Either the engine factories or the plane themselves. It had something to do with the German Air Force.
20:57Though the bombers caused severe damage, German fighters made them pay a heavy price.
21:01Listen, I'm telling you, those fighters sometimes, it just looked like a swarm of bees.
21:12They couldn't have any on the ground. They got them all up here in the sky, you know.
21:18And it was different groups come up at different times. They would be ME-109s at one time and then, you know, half hour later they'd be FW-190s from some other fighter group.
21:27And if you'd hit different ones, they would catch you at different spots.
21:32Until you got to the target, you were very fortunate that you got through it and didn't get something hit.
21:40To take on the enemy aircraft that attacked bombers on their way to the target, a high-performance, long-range escort fighter was desperately needed.
21:48Rolls-Royce engineers tried fitting a low-level American fighter called the P-51 with their famous Merlin engine.
21:55The result was the best allied fighter of the war and it would prove crucial to the D-Day invasion.
22:02The new and improved P-51 Mustang not only had extraordinary performance at high altitude, but fitted with extra fuel tanks had the range to escort heavy bombers to distant targets.
22:13Arriving in Britain at the end of 1943, the new Mustang squadrons were just in time to support the bombers, led by 8th Air Force Commander General Doolittle in the run-up to D-Day.
22:24General Doolittle said, now is the time for us to go after the fighters. The bombers had done their job, they destroyed the main targets, and they said from now on we're going to go get them.
22:37Of course, then it was dog-eat-dog, everybody was going after every damn thing that moved.
22:43We always attacked. We always attacked, no matter how many. And it shortened the war.
22:53In the months leading up to D-Day, more than 2,000 German fighters were destroyed in drooling air battles, crippling the Luftwaffe's ability to control the air over Europe on the 6th of June.
23:04With the Luftwaffe decimated, the next pre-emptive strike for the invasion could begin.
23:11A bombing campaign against the French railway and road system was launched, so the German reinforcements wouldn't be able to reach the Normandy beaches.
23:20They had us knocking out bridges and communications and trains south of the invasion.
23:31Now, the idea there was to prevent the Germans from bringing the troops down south up around to fight our boys when our boys went in. And we stopped them pretty good.
23:43To back up the bombers, fighters like the Mustang were assigned the task of attacking the trains themselves.
23:49In a single day, 46 locomotives were destroyed and another 32 damaged.
24:05On D-Day itself, as the invasion fleet neared the shore, a squadron of marauder bombers came in at low level just ahead of the first wave.
24:13The day that we hit, we went up and dropped 500-pound bombs in front of the cliffs, not on the Germans.
24:26We dug foxholes with bombs to where, when our troops came in, they could dive down in the hole and protect themselves.
24:36Beyond the beaches, 33 squadrons of fighters ranged inland, attacking German airfields and paralyzing attempts to strike at the invasion fleet.
24:45We were authorized to go down on the deck.
24:52And then you have a lot of fun there. Anything that moves, you shoot it.
24:56So we used up our ammunition, most of it, before we come back home.
25:02Without the work of the Mustang, the thousands of men who had fought their way onto the beaches from landing craft would have been sitting ducks for the Luftflat.
25:18By mid-morning, the aerial component of the invasion machine dominated the skies overhead.
25:23Over the channel, and over England, and certainly over the invasion, the skies were swept clean by all the fighters, but it was icing on the cake to have the P-51s also able to shoot against German bombers and shoot against German fighters during the D-Day time.
25:42On this extraordinary day, with the waters off the Normandy coast full of targets, the best Göring's once mighty Luftwaffe could do was a single brief sortie by just two fighters.
25:54In contrast, 3,000 Allied aircraft flew over 14,000 missions in support of the troops below them.
26:01Yet on the beaches, those troops were still under German artillery fire.
26:05More tanks, artillery, and vital supplies were now needed to establish a bridgehead.
26:09The next wave of machines, amphibious craft and tank landing ships, began to move to the front of the battle line.
26:17Without them, the D-Day machine would grind to a halt.
26:21Mid-day, 6th of June, 1944.
26:24Allied assault troops had successfully landed on the beaches of Normandy.
26:28They now needed vital supplies to help them push further inland.
26:32Coming in just behind the assault waves was one of the strangest craft to appear on the Normandy beaches.
26:37The DUKW, popularly known as the Duck.
26:41For driver Stanley Dobson, D-Day was not what he had expected.
26:46Nobody told you what it was going to be like when you got there.
26:48I remember looking over the sand dunes at the time they were unloading the D-Day and saw the infantry actually fighting to take a cottage.
26:57I heard this, what I thought was the sound of bees, and suddenly realised it was machine gun bullets coming, wasn't over the top.
27:08I suddenly realised, oh, what am I doing with here?
27:16The amphibious Duck was a revolutionary design, and answered another vital Allied need for a vehicle that could travel on land as easily as it navigated at sea.
27:25In 1942, the US Army had realised that even with a successful landing craft to get troops ashore, there would be a delay getting supplies forward to the front line.
27:36What they needed was another machine that could carry those supplies from transport ships inland to supply dumps.
27:41Leading yacht designer, Rod Stevens, was chosen to design this new vehicle.
27:47In just 38 days, he and his team transformed a standard army truck into an amphibian by adding a boat-shaped hull and a propeller.
27:56It was built for whatever you're going to use it for, whether it be land or sea.
28:01You didn't have to worry about where you're going, you know you'll get there.
28:04It's just simple engineering when you get down to it. It may seem complicated to some people, but in theory most of it is simple.
28:16The Duck could offload equipment from the heavy transports at sea and carry it inland, right to its target.
28:22On D-Day, the astonishing versatility of the Duck was vital to the success of the Allied landings.
28:28I've been dropped somewhere in the region of three or four miles from the shore.
28:32Our ducks were all loaded up with stores, a little of each.
28:43The idea, of course, had been one of the first ducks onto the beach was that we had something for everybody.
28:49We had petrol and rations and ammunition, tank shells, things like this.
28:54We had a little bit of everything.
28:56It was amazing, I think, the organization that went into that.
28:58While the Duck carried urgently needed supplies to the troops already in action, waiting offshore were larger transport craft, carrying the thousands of tanks, guns and trucks that have been stockpiled in Britain for the invasion.
29:11They would make all the difference to the fight on the beaches, but they needed a completely different kind of craft to get them ashore.
29:18As early as July 1940, Churchill had sent a note to the Minister of Supply.
29:23What is being done about designing and planning vessels to transport tanks across the sea for a British attack on enemy countries?
29:33The response in November of the same year was the landing craft tank, the LCT.
29:38Early models could carry five tanks, but later versions held double that number.
29:44With a crew of 12 and a speed of 11 knots, they provided the heavy lift necessary to carry tanks right up onto the beach.
29:51But to carry both troops and tanks in larger numbers, the only solution was the much bigger landing ship tank, or LST.
29:59The vast majority of LSTs were built in the dockyards of America.
30:05These 4,000-ton ships had two decks with room for 20 Sherman tanks and 200 troops.
30:12Just as important, they could act as motherships for the assault landing craft, carrying them on the upper deck and lowering them into the water like lifeboats.
30:21And like the smaller landing craft, the LSTs were flat-bottomed with a ramp and bow doors.
30:28They could go right onto the beach to unload their cargo.
30:31The landing ship tank is so mind-bogglingly useful that everybody wants one.
30:37In fact, they want a few hundred of them.
30:39The LST is the most popular girl at the dance, and her dance card is full.
30:44Builders worked around the clock to roll out over a thousand LSTs.
30:47Though demand for them came from the Pacific as well as Europe, planners knew that they were essential for D-Day.
30:54Even the date that the invasion could be launched depended on these priceless vessels.
31:00The availability of amphibious landing ships dictated the tempo of the war in the European theatre.
31:07The Americans wanted to go cross-channel in 1942.
31:11They were persuaded out of that simply because we didn't have the landing craft to go cross-channel.
31:19Off the Normandy beaches, the LSTs lowered their bow ramps to allow ducks to drive straight onto the cargo decks for more supplies.
31:27In a few hours, the LSTs would be able to go right onto the beaches to unload themselves.
31:31But this was a slow process, and the beached LSTs were easy targets for gunfire.
31:38The only way to speed up the unloading process was to have a fully functional port.
31:43Knowing that a port was so essential to an invasion of France, British combined operations planners executed a large-scale commando raid to test defences around the French port of Dieppe two years earlier.
31:55Now, we ran into a convoy about half an hour or so before we were supposed to land.
32:01The port was then alert, was well defended, and all hell was that loose.
32:05The tanks put ashore, and we weren't able to get off the beach because they didn't have any grip, and it was a complete disaster.
32:25It's something which I'd rather forget, but it did teach us a lesson not to attack a port.
32:32The tragedy of Dieppe was a major setback.
32:36Out of a raiding force of 6,000 men, more than 3,000 were killed, wounded, or captured.
32:42The Germans were now alert and expecting the Allies to attack a port as part of any invasion.
32:47Allied engineers had to find a solution to the port problem, or the invasion would be impossible.
32:51You can't get large quantities of supplies ashore from transport ships onto a beach.
33:00So if you are not sure of getting or holding an existing port in working condition, you've got to bring your own.
33:10Taking a port to France was such a radical solution to the problem that many believed it was pure fantasy.
33:19Mervyn Walter was a young brigadier chosen to turn fantasy into reality.
33:23His ultra-secret project would go down in history as Mulberry.
33:29To design the pieces for two great harbours.
33:32To construct the pieces for the two harbours all over the United Kingdom.
33:38To assemble the pieces on the English south coast.
33:41To tow the pieces one by one through a hundred miles of German-infested sea to the French coast.
33:52That was the operation which was codenamed Mulberry.
33:57Each Mulberry Harbour had to enclose an area as large as New York Central Park
34:03and handle as much shipping as a major port.
34:05Within the harbour wall would be the pier heads which were essential features of the Mulberry.
34:12This is where the LSTs would discharge the cargo that would be the deciding factor in the success of D-Day.
34:18Mounted on legs which extended to the seabed, the platform between the legs was raised or lowered with the tide.
34:26From the pier heads to the shore were steel roadways.
34:30Each span connected to the next with flexible joints which allowed them to follow the movement of the waves.
34:35Altogether some 10 miles of floating roadway would be needed.
34:39To create the sheltered water for a harbour breakwaters would be built out of 147 enormous concrete boxes called Phoenix caissons.
34:49Able seaman Ken Bungard was amazed by his first sight of a caisson.
34:54The first thing I saw was a huge office block with no windows and no doors standing by the quayside.
35:04In fact it was 60 foot high, 60 foot wide and 200 feet long and looked like a giant egg box.
35:13It did not occur to us at that time that this thing floated.
35:18And we were amazed that the tug that was tied up to us suddenly started pulling and we moved.
35:23Over 22,000 men worked around the clock on the caissons.
35:29Astonishingly they were completed in only nine months.
35:32Mervyn Walter's work was at the heart of the D-Day invasion.
35:35The British chiefs of staff wrote this, the Mulberry project is so vital that it must be considered the crux of the whole operation and it must not fail.
35:50By early afternoon on the Normandy beaches, the LSTs and Ducks were working desperately to get supplies ashore.
35:59Now the prefabricated Mulberry harbours would take centre stage.
36:04Without a steady flow of heavy equipment, the men who had fought and died on the beaches would have fought in vain.
36:09But would this huge revolutionary apparatus stand up to the pounding waves off the Normandy coast on D-Day?
36:18The Mulberry fleet, the anchor of the D-Day machine, churned towards the Normandy coast.
36:24Engineers were already ashore marking out positions for the harbour's massive components.
36:28First to arrive were the 63 obsolete battleships and cruisers and worn-out merchant ships making their final voyages to France.
36:38After being towed into position, they were sunk to form breakwaters off the landing beaches.
36:44At the same time, the crews of the Phoenix caissons were crossing the channel on their lumbering concrete vessels.
36:50There was one thing I have never forgotten to this day, and that was of course the sound of the waves banging against the side of these caissons.
37:02It was like a huge drum. It was a huge boom, boom, boom going on all the time.
37:13Once into position, the crew aboard each caisson opened the valves which allowed the sea to rush in.
37:20Thousands of tons of concrete settled on the seabed in carefully marked sites to form the outlines of the two harbours.
37:27Finally, looming over the horizon came the strange shapes of the pierheads, ready to put down their legs and form the mooring point for the floating roadways.
37:36At these pierheads, the transport ships would unload their troops and supplies directly into trucks.
37:42They would take them along the roadways and across the beaches to marshalling areas inland.
37:46The naval construction battalions at Omaha Beach, the Seabees and the Royal Engineers at Aramarsh on Gold Beach worked day and night to get the harbours ready.
37:57The harbour itself was about the size of Dover Harbour.
38:02And considering how long it took to build it, it was quite a remarkable feat.
38:06In an incredibly short time, both Mulberry harbours were completed. The heavy supplies, tanks, trucks, bridging and airfield construction equipment all started to dock.
38:18Most of this heavy equipment was unloaded at the vital LST piers.
38:22The landing ships could come onto the end of the roadway, the doors opened and the tanks just ran ashore.
38:29And they ran ashore from two levels. And we were able to discharge a complete landing ship tank in 40 minutes.
38:36Whereas it took six hours on the beaches. That was the difference between a port and the beach.
38:41Within the sheltered waters of the two harbours, the hundreds of landing craft could beach.
38:52Simultaneously, hundreds of ducks scurried back and forth, keeping up a constant traffic of smaller loads to and from larger merchant vessels offshore.
39:01It seemed as though the Mulberry project was working perfectly.
39:04But then, disaster struck.
39:12On the 19th of June, one of the worst gales in living memory threw up huge waves against the prefabricated harbours and shipping massed offshore.
39:24When the gale came, we had something like 200 craft moored inside the harbour, taking refuge.
39:31Every so often, one of them drew its anchor and started to wander.
39:37They would be taken in charge by a tug and prevented from rolling onto the long floating roadways which were so vulnerable.
39:46And he even had to sink two ships to prevent them from going on the road.
39:52With supplies slowing to a trickle, the advance inland had to be suspended while the storm lasted.
39:56It seemed as though the overlord invasion machine had been stopped in its tracks.
40:04The seas finally subsided, but the damage to the Mulberry Harbour at Omaha Beach was immense.
40:10The concrete caissons had crumbled under the pounding of the waves, and even worse, ships disabled by the storm had been driven into the harbour like floating battering rams.
40:19Whole sections of floating roadway had been hurled onto the beach, along with the wreckage of landing craft and small ships.
40:26In the midst of the destruction, the ducks rose to the challenge.
40:34They worked their way round the wreckage, drove out to ships whether they were beached or afloat, and then went inland to offload precisely where supplies were needed.
40:43In no time at all, the remains of the mulberry A at Omaha were salvaged to repair the almost intact mulberry B at Aramanche.
40:54Supplies started to flow again, and the vital heavy equipment used the mulberry while the beaches handled the increasing flow of troops.
41:02Savage fighting held back the enemy while the supply build-up went on.
41:13C-47 transport aircraft continued to provide the armies with supplies and act as flying ambulances to get the wounded back to hospitals in Britain.
41:23At the same time, squadrons of Allied fighter bombers dominated the battlefield.
41:27The Allied armies, tanks, infantry and massed artillery drove forward to liberate town after town.
41:38Two and a half million troops, half a million vehicles and four million tons of supplies were delivered to France.
41:50It was an achievement unparalleled in history.
41:52Two words sum up the D-Day machine's performance.
41:57Mission accomplished.
41:59You know what the great hero of Normandy was?
42:03The one thing that made it all work?
42:05There isn't one.
42:07Normandy is an example of a system of systems.
42:12It is an example of many little moving parts brought into a single system through careful coordination.
42:25The level of coordination in both time and space was the largest effort ever undertaken by mankind.
42:34However small our part was, a very small cog in a very large machine, afterwards we began to feel very proud of what we'd done.
42:46The landing craft they developed and the cooperation that existed between the three services came to fruition on D-Day.
42:54Well, I think as far as the D-Day is concerned, if they hadn't had the D-Day, we wouldn't have had Normandy. It's as simple as that.
43:03These pilots and crew of the C-47 would go about anywhere and do anything. They were just wonderful people and very courageous.
43:11We all knew our job and we performed as best we could. Every crew member on every aircraft in our outfit did a tremendous job.
43:22The missions with the P-51 were more or less cut and dry.
43:26It's probably a horrible thing to say, but I got a hell of a kick out of it, particularly when you're winning.
43:32Ingenuity, imagination and sheer hard work by dedicated teams had created one of the most complex and sophisticated war machines in history.
43:45The D-Day machine, a machine of men and metal, pushed the boundaries of engineering and defined freedom over 60 years ago.
43:56While in the marketplace in yo-dah, they would only have a lot of people who wanted the D-Day,
43:59They would go to the P-51, so that was a good day for them.
44:01And they would love to be with the D-Day.
44:04Just two titles.
44:05And that was a great idea.
44:07But if you want to make a living meeting, you can have a living meeting here.
44:11Some people would like to be among other people.
44:13The D-Day.
44:14You can do some things.
44:15The D-Day.
44:16The D-Day.
44:17Most people with the D-Day.
44:18The D-Day.
44:21You can do some things.
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