of Arromanches on the British side and the port of Omaha
on the American side.

Soon the weather worsened, and once again threatened
to compromise the operation.

Normandy hadn’t seen
a storm like it in 40 years.

Inside the anchorages,
ships were tossed around like rag dolls.

The wall of caissons
was unable to withstand the cataclysm.

Worse still, some of them broke away,
letting the waves surge into the port.

Floating docks
and gangplanks became detached and were swept away like flotsam.

The storm would last for a full four days, interrupting the supply
of materials and reinforcements.

On the morning of June 23rd,
clear skies revealed the sorry sight of hundreds of ships and wrecks
run aground along the beaches.

Although British engineers quickly
rebuilt the port of Arromanches, the US port of Omaha
remained out of commission.

The plan was running ten days late.

US troops had to capture
the deep water port of Cherbourg as quickly as possible.

Although surrounded,
the city was still in German hands.

Finally, on June 26th,
US Infantry entered the suburbs.

That same day, before a gathered press
he clearly seemed not to appreciate, Lieutenant-General von Schlieben, the commandant of the garrison,
surrendered.

Although this giant of a man
politely wiped his feet before his victor, the young General Collins, he nonetheless balked
on his oath made to Hitler to prefer death
over the shame of surrender.

Schlieben even surrendered before his men, who didn’t lay down their weapons
until the following day.

The Americans
weren’t always easy on prisoners, which is somewhat understandable.

Since D-Day,
they had already lost 22,000 men.

The average age of the prisoners,
some old, some very young, showed the decline
of the German Army in the West, while its younger, battle-hardened troops
were deployed in the east fighting the Red Army.

Thirty-six thousand prisoners
are at Cherbourg, a huge number
in terms of what cameras can capture, although they do often take us
by surprise and mark us forever.

With Cherbourg taken,
one of the last sections of the Atlantic Wall
had come tumbling down.

Unlike the faces of their men, those of the captured officers
maintained a degree of haughtiness.

Or was it perhaps shame? After Cherbourg, Hitler decided to personally oversee
the German Army in the West.

He removed Von Rundstedt,
who had suggested calling a truce, and replaced him with a more
obliging Field Marshal Von Kluge.

Rommel, dismayed
by the Führer’s hard-line policies, knew that all he could do now
was to delay the ultimate disaster.

Meanwhile, Eisenhower was also worried.

Yes, the Americans had taken Cherbourg, but Montgomery
was yet to have captured Caen, the planned launch pad
for an attack on German lines.

Installed inland,
the German Army had the advantage of space and the possibilities
of supplies and reinforcements, whereas the Allies remained hemmed in
along the Channel coast.

The Americans had no choice but to pierce the enemy front
in the Cotentin.

Not easy in a region of bocage
where the hedgerows made defense easier.

To see without being seen.

A big advantage for the enemy in a battle for which none
of the American youngsters were prepared.

In this huge checkerboard maze, a handful of resilient combatants
could stop an entire battalion.

When they did concede
one of these square fields, they simply had to come back
around the sides.

American tanks were obliged
to stick to the roads, making them easy targets.

Just as they were
when they had to cross levees openly presenting
their unarmored bellies to enemy fire.

These bocage traps
accounted for thousands of GI lives and resulted in a failed attempt
to penetrate what became known as: “this goddamn country!” With the Americans in difficulty,
the British simply had to capture Caen.

Montgomery finally decided
to employ considerable means.

He asked for backup
from the Royal Air Force.

Over 2,500 tons of bombs
were dropped on the city.

Some advance on Caen, as others leave it.

No point in even looking at each other.

That’s life.

After two days of fierce combat, 115,000 British troops
entered the east of the city, which was now three-quarters destroyed.

On July 13,
Montgomery arrived in the city.

It had taken him over a month
to capture only part of Caen, a city he had hoped to take in one day,
setting up the Allied push inland.

Clearly in the kingdom of the blind,
the one-eyed man is king.

Although the inhabitants
raised the flag of the Cross of Lorraine, much of the city
was still in German hands.

That didn’t prevent
the British propaganda machine from having people
believe that the inhabitants of the City of a Thousand Steeples
and British troops were happy to drink a toast together.

“Goodbye, thanks again.

” “Don’t mention it, pleasure was all mine.

” Were such intensive bombing
and the 2,000 deaths it caused when the German defenses were placed
around the city really necessary? The debate still rages today.

Each man and woman
reacted in their own way.

Who was this German playing the organ
in a ruined Normandy church? A madman? A filthy Jerry? A music lover? Or a lost soldier of Hitler,
now weighed down by his leader’s excesses, simply enjoying a moment’s escape
from this holocaust scenery.

A few days later, it was the British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill’s turn to land.

He wanted to check the state of operations
ongoing in the Caen sector in person.

However much Montgomery
played the good tour guide, he only dominated his car
and not the plain of Caen, which was still under German Army control.

Ten days after taking the city, the British were yet to break
through German lines, and Churchill’s agitation
wasn’t about to change that.

For Eisenhower, who had hoped
for a breakthrough in this sector, it was a total failure
considering the huge means deployed.

The supreme commander
placed more and more trust in the discreet three-star general,
Omar Bradley, who had organized the landings at Omaha
and Utah before taking Cherbourg.

Eisenhower appreciated his calm,
his clear-headedness, and his effectiveness.

Bradley thought the Americans could break
through enemy lines in the Cotentin.

The operation codeword: Cobra, like a snake that leans back
then goes for the jugular.

To help his men get out of bocage country, Bradley had planned to crush
the German positions on the front line with precision bombing raids.

Once the breach had been made, his troops would simultaneously advance
on Brittany, the Seine, and the Loire.

On July 25th, Allied bombers attacked the road
between Saint-Lô and Périers, where the two armies faced off.

The famous armored division
of General Lehr, Field Marshal Rommel second in command,
was wiped out.

American troops could finally leave
the hell of the bocage and force the breakout.

It was a long-awaited breach
in the enemy’s front line.

Moreover, seeing the numbers
who surrendered, they made a good catch, even if many in the net
were only small fry.

In the bestiary that Normandy had become,
tanks were now fitted with blades to cut down hedgerows
and cross the last miles of bocage.

Even before July was over,
once the breach had been achieved, American armored divisions
had reached Coutances, Avranches, and Granville, the last ports
in Normandy before Brittany.

In early August, the 2nd French Armored Division
landed at Utah Beach.

For months, even years,
these Frenchmen had left everything behind to fight the Germans
and Italians in North Africa.

Only this time, they were ready to be as victors
on their beloved French soil.

Leading them was General Leclerc,
as thin as his cane, but valorous and upright.

This aristocrat had all the attributes
to have sided with Vichy, but he chose to follow de Gaulle
as early as June 1940.

Now he was landing
as his homeland’s liberator.

His division was integrated
into the American Third Army, with which he would finally be able
to take part in operations on French soil.

General Bradley’s headquarters.

Before the lens
of American filmmaker George Stevens, Montgomery, as always aware of the camera,
decorates a handful of Yankee soldiers.

That is something he was good at.

Under pressure from Eisenhower,
the British Field Marshal had agreed to leave the organization
of the final battle to the Americans.

For a successful outcome, Bradley was also counting
on a certain General Patton.

The man who wore a Colt 45 in his holster,
was a go-getter.

“At the first fart, they expect me
to get them out of their shit,” he was famously quoted as saying, and just as well… At dawn, the Germans
tried a last throw of the dice.

From the plain of Caen, they launched
a counter-offensive on Mortain, hoping to drive
the Allies back to the sea.

The attack, planned in person by Hitler, was soon curbed by the rockets
launched from the Allies’ Typhoons.

“It had no chance of success,” Von Kluge would write
before taking his own life.

It would be the last
German offensive in the West.

Worse still for the Germans, at Mortain, Bradley had willfully allowed the enemy
to make inroads into the Allied flank.

Now, they were trapped
by the Americans to the south and the British to the north.

Bradley would finally
be able to use the maneuver he had been planning for a long time: to catch the enemy in a pincer movement between the British divisions
advancing from the plain of Caen and the US armies in the south,
trapping the retreating Germans between Argentan and Falaise.

As soon as the German counter-offensive
had been stopped short at Mortain, Patton and his divisions headed
to Le Mans in the direction of Paris.

However, some of them
suddenly turned off towards Argentan and made a wide, sweeping movement
that encircled the Germans.

While in the north, the Anglo-Canadians
formed the lynchpin between the Allies.

The German Army was annihilated.

Eisenhower later called
the battlefield at Falaise the biggest bloodbath
that any warzone had ever known.

He added that only Dante
could have been capable of describing it.

For hundreds of yards,
without interruption, he stepped over dead and rotting flesh.

Between 5,000 and 6,000 Germans
were killed.

From the look of those
who were taken prisoner, it seems as though Ike
wasn’t exaggerating.

It would take several days to evacuate the 30 to 40,000
prisoners of war from Falaise.

For them, captivity was a victory: that of life over death.

The German Army had mobilized a number
of men in the countries it occupied.

Not all of them were prepared to defend
the Third Reich with their lives.

The German Army was finished in Normandy.

With the Battle of Falaise won,
and the prisoners dispatched, Patton’s armies
crossed the Seine and the Loire.

Eisenhower had now attained
the two geographical limits established in Operation Overlord.

Now he wanted to move on to the next step,
the push towards Germany itself.

On August 19th,
a blanket of smoke hung over Paris.

On the ground,
with news of the Allies’ approach, the city had risen up.

It was the German Army itself which decided
to abandon the French capital.

Seen from above,
convoy after convoy leaves Paris, heading east without caring too much
about barricades in the way.

Footage of a real-life event
that lives long in the memory: five Germans in flames.

It takes nothing away
from the men and women who rose up against the occupiers
before the Allies’ arrival and the dozens of them who died
fighting the retreating German Army.

The next day, de Gaulle showed up
at Eisenhower’s headquarters.

Ike wanted to avoid turning Paris
into another battlefield.

He preferred to surround the capital,
forcing the Germans to surrender and to pick the city like a ripe fruit.

But the eloquent French leader managed to persuade Eisenhower
to enter the city in order to avoid a possible bloodbath, but also to quash the rise
of Communist resistance members.

Ike yielded, and Bradley agreed
to detach Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division, which had won renown at Falaise,
so that it’d be the first unit into Paris and would accept the German surrender.

After several fierce battles,
south of the capital, the suburb’s sky turned blue.

Women wore red
and the men sported white shirts, forming a tricolor world to welcome Leclerc’s boys
at the gates of Paris.

Now, in the city itself,
it was time for jubilation.

On that day, the gamble of the man
who had appealed to the French people back on June 18th, 1940, had paid off.

The miracle had happened: France, once crushed and humiliated, now stood shoulder to shoulder
with the victors.

Now for the victory parade
down the Champs Elysées to reinforce the legend, but that’s a very French story.

Our story ends the following day
on a less magical Place de la Concorde.

At the head of a country whose political
future was still uncertain, de Gaulle had asked Eisenhower to back his authority
before the French people.

Eisenhower happily obliged,
as did General Bradley.

However, it was modesty alone
that kept him in the background as de Gaulle took center stage.

Eisenhower was intent
on holding a march past of the US troops who would continue the fight
against the Third Reich.

The Americans astutely knew
that in the post-war period, when the world
would be politically divided, they needed France
on their side in Europe.

Our story has been high in color, but the original images,
are often in black and white.

In the end,
whether in color or black and white, each piece of footage has tells
about the fate of all those men who took part in the Normandy landings, so many of them anonymous
amongst the massed troops.

Who were you:
lost amongst the crowd of faces? Or you, turning around? Whoever you are, thank you.

 

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