Catch up TV

Series 46: 19. D-Day

Fiona Bruce is in Normandy in France for a special edition of the roadshow to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in June 1944. Filmed in Normandy and at the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth, the episode features remarkable first-hand testimony from those who were there, including veteran Ken Cooke.\n\nAcross five beaches, codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, ‘Operation Overlord’ was the largest seaborne invasion in history – an event that would turn the tide of World War II and lead ultimately to the defeat of Germany and victory for the Allies just under a year later, in May 1945.\n\nWith Fiona in France and our roadshow experts at various locations in the UK, we unfold the story of D-Day through items brought in by our visitors and rare artefacts held in various museums. \n\nThis episode includes eyewitness accounts from those who played a part in D-Day itself. Marie Scott, a radio operator based in secret tunnels beneath Portsmouth, describes listening in to the invasion as it happened. Colette Marin-Catherine, who helped the French Resistance in her village outside Caen, recalls the last German soldier she saw. Ninety-eight-year-old Ken Cooke, a private in the 7th Battalion Green Howards, movingly recounts landing on Gold Beach on the morning of D-Day itself. \n\nIn Normandy, Fiona tells the remarkable story of Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis, seeking out the very German pillbox which he stormed single-handedly. For his actions, which included rescuing his men under fire, Hollis was the only soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross on D-Day. The VC is now on display at the Green Howards Museum in Richmond, Yorkshire, where militaria expert Bill Harriman meets up with Hollis’s granddaughter Amanda Hart to hear about the man behind the medal. \n\nAt the D-Day Story Museum in Portsmouth, Siobhan Tyrell is charmed by a coat festooned with badges from 89 different regiments, which were collected by a five-year-old girl on the eve of D-Day. Paul Atterbury discovers an original dummy ‘Rupert’ paratrooper – one of 500 decoys dropped over Normandy to deceive the Germans. Mark Smith steps on to a fully restored landing craft tank or LCT – the only example surviving from a fleet of 800. Frances Christie takes a look at the monumental Overlord Embroidery – a series of 34 hand-stitched panels which take their cue from the Bayeux Tapestry – in the company of its original designer Sandra Lawrence. General Montgomery’s grandson Henry shows us one of Monty’s famous berets. Piper Bill Millin’s grandson John talks about his father’s heroic landing on Sword Beach, armed only with a set of bagpipes and captured in an iconic photograph. And one of our visitors brings along a wooden pull-along toy made from the debris of landing craft by her grandfather for his one-year-old daughter back home.\n\nIn Wales, we hear from the family of a Black American serviceman who bravely set up barrage balloons over Omaha Beach, and at the Met Office in Devon, our expert Cristian Beadman takes a rare peek at the original weather charts drawn up by Eisenhower’s chief meteorologist James Stagg, whose forecast altered the beach landings by 24 hours and with it averted certain disaster.

Source: BBC 2