 |
|
|
THE PEOPLE'S D-DAY |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What did you do in the war, Daddy …and Mummy? It's the cliché of course. But for ordinary Radio 4 listeners who've contributed to THE PEOPLE'S D-DAY at 7pm on June 5th, the story of their war has been one long parade of the extraordinary....
Simon Elmes, executive producer of The People's D-Day has written a specially commissioned article that explores how the ordinary people contributed to the Normandy invasion.
|
From the man who spent months making giant hinges, not knowing what they were for - It was only later that he discovered that they were part of the mammoth floating harbour, codename 'Mulberry' that had to be towed across the Channel to give the warships and supply vessels of the invasion force somewhere to unload their material. To the young Welsh schoolboy who used to enjoy flattening coins by placing them on the local railway track, and couldn't believe his eyes in late May 1944 to see the huge convoys of trains endlessly passing on the way south for days on end…
|
It was a massive undertaking - hundreds of thousands of troops marshalled ready to take to the ships for Normandy, plus all the ammunition and supply lines. How, for example, were they going to get fuel across to France for the tanks, lorries and armoured cars? Build a floating pipeline across the Channel - that's how. Where were they going to moor all the vessels ready to sail in a single armada? At rapidly constructed special wharves and docks around Southampton and Portsmouth. And how did they manage to do all this without the Germans getting wind of it? Operation Fortitude was the answer. A carefully planned campaign of deception featuring plywood aircraft, an imaginary army and inflatable tanks…..
No wonder BBC reporter Frank Gillard, travelling through southern England on June 4th wrote in his memorable despatch:
England has become one vast ordnance dump and field park. I've driven through it today for the best part of a hundred miles. The roads crammed with military traffic and lined often enough on both sides with vehicles of all kinds just pulled-off and parked on the verges. Vast, really vast numbers of them. And great mountains of stores - weapons and ammunition, rations, bridging equipment, tyres, timber - millions of tons. And right in the middle of it all just as I turned for home, I passed a field where 22 men in khaki shirts and battledress trousers and heavy hobnailed boots were having a quiet knock-up game of cricket. They made me think of Francis Drake and Plymouth Hoe.
The People's D-Day tells the stories of some of those thousands of men and women who contributed to or experienced the build up to D-Day first-hand. Not so much the vast battalions of servicemen who led the assault on occupied France, though we hear from some of them too, but from the people who helped make it happen; who, for instance, made the detailed maps of Normandy by criss-crossing the enemy skies in unarmed reconnaissance aircraft to photograph the terrain. Or went out in mini-submarines to scout out the beaches under the very noses of the Germans…. And then there's the story of the seven million - yes - seven million post-cards and family snapshots that were sent in from ordinary holidaymakers from all over Britain to assist the D-Day mappers in gauging the shape of the terrain that the troops would be confronting when they got to France. No good if the little lane up from the beach isn't wide enough to take an armoured car and it gets stuck, after all.
The snapshots the War Ministry was asking for of course had to be of any location in the world - a little foolish to telegraph the fact that Normandy was what they were really interested in… But the People's D-Day has tracked down some of the folks who sent in family photos, and reunited them with their photographic memories of prewar holidays …when Arromanches-les-Bains was better known as a favourite sleepy holiday spot full of sandcastles and squealing children than one of the twentieth century's bloodiest battlegrounds …
THE PEOPLE'S D-DAY has been a unique collaboration by teams from BBC production departments in London and Bristol, whose producers used local knowledge to investigate the top secret communications hub buried deep in a cave at Porthcurno in Cornwall. Julian Richards, regular presenter of Radio 4's Mapping the Town has been underground in Cornwall to discover just how the web of communications that -in those days half a century before mobile phones and the internet - kept all the vital bits of the immense D-Day operation together and on schedule.
Then there are the incredible little stories of the backroom boys and girls - like the then BBC engineer, Trevor Hill, who found himself on shift playing the recorded reports of news correspondents in to programmes like Radio Newsreel on June 5th 1944. He was suddenly summoned to BBC Reception to receive a special package - it was brought by a despatch rider "from Bushey Heath", reports Trevor, "and I knew that that was where General Eisenhower (Supreme Allied Commander) was based". He took the big acetate disc into the studio, placed the pickup arm on the record turned up the volume and heard the immortal words announcing that D-Day had begun …several hours before the actual assault had started. As the weather closed in and the landings were postponed, Trevor found himself confined to the studio and unable to phone his mum to tell her that he wouldn't be home…
Then there's the story of the woman whose husband, whom she had got used to seeing only twice a year on army leave, turned up out of the blue late at night on the eve of D-Day. She thought it was the coalman delivering - even at that unearthly hour - and nearly fell out of her chair when her husband walked in through the door. He'd slipped away, complete with a huge tank recovery truck, from a secure camp where he was preparing with the other troops to go off to France.
All these stories came from an unprecedented response to a BBC Radio 4 appeal that brought nearly 1000 fascinating individual stories of having lived through the momentous events of June 1944. And none more so than our quartet of 'D-Day Nurses', Connie Rees MBE, Margaret Smith, Anne Wingate and Doris Low , whose preparations to receive the inevitable thousands of casualties are chronicled in a moving and at times amusing three-part 'serial' across the programme.
Keeping the People's D-Day in one piece and on track is presenter Libby Purves who, accompanied by historian Dr Adrian Smith of Southampton University, anchors the programme from various key sites in and around Southampton - the docks, the site of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Hoglands Park and the village of Sway in the heart of the New Forest. Here, sixty years ago, were camped thousands of young British servicemen, waiting and hoping. Many were to lose their lives in the unprecedented attack on the heavily defended Normandy coastline. Many more were to be wounded, never fully to recover. Theirs is the story of June 6th 1944. The story of the People's D-Day is the warp and weft of those lives that watched and helped it happen.
Simon Elmes
Creative Director, Features & Documentaries, BBC.
|
|
|
|
