Dan Snow's History Hit - D-Day: The Sea Invasion

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

This is the often forgotten chapter of the D-Day story.To begin our series for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, we turn to the massive naval operations that made it all happen. On D-Day itself, 7,000 ships and 195,000 sailors undertook the gargantuan challenge of ferrying men, weapons and supplies ashore to begin the liberation of Europe. But that was just on the 6th of June - it was preceded by years of bitter warfare at sea, without which Operation Overlord could never have happened.Dan is joined by naval historian Nick Hewitt, author of 'Normandy: The Sailors' Story', who explains why Allied sailors were the bedrock for Operation Overlord. Whether it be through intelligence gathering, naval bombardment or sinking German U-boats, actions at sea were absolutely vital in paving the way for D-Day.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Few of the men held down their dinners that night. Nerves and seasickness proved a powerful combination. Vomit bags had been issued, and vomit bags were filled by many of the tens of thousands of men from 13 or so countries who were now waiting to play their part for the greatest air, land and sea invasion in history. The sea. There were thousands of ships. It was a floating city. Tons of steel. And in them, vast amounts of fuel, high explosives, food. There were floating harbours

being towed. It was seemingly an assertion of man's domination of the natural world. And yet nature refused to be tamed. The wind blew. The low clouds scudded as squalls vexed the dim seas. For all the enormous strides taken since the Industrial Revolution changed everything on this planet, the invasion would have to wait for nature. There were delays, and that meant more hours for the men on board to ponder the storm of steel they were about to march into. More time confined in cramped ships, bouncing around on the steep, choppy seas of the Channel. The men knew they were going back to Europe.

They were going to prize Hitler's grip from the West. They knew they were part of a massive enterprise. Over the years I've talked to so many D-Day veterans and a pair of commandos, Fred Walker and Roy Cadman, remember sliding out of Southampton water on their ship, knowing that they would be in the first wave. Other ships still moored up with reinforcing troops aboard, blowing their foghorns, sounding their sirens, soldiers lining the rails, cheering them as they went. Roy told me it was like running down the tunnel at Wembley with an England shirt on. And Fred assured me that he was so pumped up at that moment

that if his own nan had walked past wearing a German uniform, he'd have slotted her on the spot. And at dawn on June the 6th, 1944, as that invasion armada sighted the French coast, it was time for Roy, Fred, and thousands more like them, to go. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and so I'm going to bring you my biggest series yet. From now until May next year,

we'll be marking the pivotal moments from D-Day to V-Day, the death throes of the Third Reich, the inexorable yet costly advance of the Allies on all fronts in Europe. The process that saw the Allies advance from east and west to crush the Third Reich and hasten the finish of the most terrible war in history. You'll be able to recognise the series episodes in the feed from the special artwork. We'll be following the Battle of Normandy, the liberation of France, the disaster of Operation Market Garden, the terrible fighting in the Ardennes,

and we'll be tracing the Soviets too as they edged ever further west and closer to Berlin. And obviously we'll be marking the big anniversaries in the Pacific and Southeast Asian theatres as well. You can expect some epic storytelling, the best experts in the field. We'll be hearing from Nick Hewitt and James Holland and Jonathan Dimbleby and many others. And we're going to be hearing testimony from those who were there i was leaning over the side of the landing craft watching all what was going on

the battleships firing the rocket ships firing explosions on the beach you couldn't see much on the beach thinking it like bonfire night on the beach. Thinking it was like bonfire night, only a thousand times worse it was. This is your definitive guide. World War II, D-Day to Berlin. We're kicking it all off with a monumental breakdown of the invasion of Northwest Europe. D-Day from air, sea and land. We're going to explore how the invasion was planned, how it was executed, and what went wrong. This first episode is about Operation Neptune, the important bit that many often forget. The sea invasion that was obviously crucial in paving the way for the success of D-Day.

obviously crucial in paving the way for the success of D-Day, the gargantuan challenge of delivering the men, the weapons, the supplies, and the machines to those famous beaches. Joining me to tell that story is Nick Hewitt. He's a naval historian. He's the author of Normandy, the Sailor's Story. He's an old friend of mine. We presented a programme years ago on the Battle of Jutland for the centenary, and now he's on the podcast. He's going to tell us about the sea invasion, which was an enormous undertaking. 7,000 ships, around 200,000 men aboard, and those ships ranging from little plywood landing craft to mighty castles of steel, the big gunned battleships. So get ready, folks, for the big one. This is the story of D-Day.

Nick, great to see you, buddy. Thank you for coming on the podcast. You're welcome. Really good to see you again from so far away. Nick, D-Day, in naval terms, is one of the largest, well, you tell me, is it the largest operation ever mounted by the Royal Navy, but also by the US Navy and other navies? Why is it not remembered as a kind of naval event? It's the largest, most complicated naval operation in history, I would argue. I mean, obviously the Americans will throw battles in the Pacific at you and all that kind of thing. There are different levels of complexity. But amphibious landings are the most complex and risky of military and naval combined operations. And D-Day is the biggest by far by a

country mile. In the book, I talk a little bit about comparisons statistically with Desert Storm in 1991 and with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the numbers involved are tiny compared to this. So it's vast. Why is it forgotten as a naval event? I've got a lovely little quote that I conclude with actually from Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsey, who is the remarkable sailor who is in charge of it all. He's the Naval Commander Expeditionary Force. And he wrote on 30th of July 1944, because it all went so smoothly, it may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing. Nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution. And that I think is why it's been lost to history.

For me, it's a lost naval action, a forgotten naval action. It was won because it was well executed. It was never an absolute certainty. It is the complacency of hindsight that makes us think it was easy. And so as a consequence, it's all being kind of compressed into a ferrari activity on D-Day and then nothing. The sailors disappear into the mist and we all rush ashore with the soldiers and that's the story we tell from that point on. It's a victim of its own success. I always think it's strange in military history in particular and lots of its history how we remember and celebrate the close run thing.

It's often close run because Elizabeth didn't invest properly in her navy before the armada or Shackleton made a total balls up and sailed his ship into a frozen Weddell Sea. And actually it's the kind of extraordinarily one-sided events that perhaps we remember less, celebrate less. But those are the ones that are the most effective, the ones where the preparation was properly done, where the investment was made, the leadership. It's so strange, isn't it? Okay, so tell me why amphibious operations, landing operations, are so dangerous. The Germans didn't have a huge navy at this point, did they? So what could have gone wrong for the naval side of things? They didn't, but I think it's all about supply and

logistics, and that gets dismissed easily as kind of, oh, it's only logistics, so therefore it's a bit dull. And actually, you know, there are some generals who are guilty of that. General Patton famously didn't have an awful lot of time to think about logistics. He didn't really care about it. The logistics are so vulnerable. Supply lines with about it. The logistics are so vulnerable. The supply lines with an amphibious landing are so vulnerable. So you've got that initial moment where you need to get the army ashore. And that, of course, is fraught with risk. But if you have the kind of overwhelming superiority and extraordinary planning that they had in Normandy, you can get past that bit. But then you have to maintain that level of attention

and rigour and strength all the way through for months. Because what in a land campaign would be the army's forward operating base, if you like, and its supply dumps and its fuel dumps, all of that is the other side of the sea. So you're introducing a new level of risk. It's a very thin cord that connects the army in Normandy to all its rear areas, which for quite a long time are in the UK. And if you cut that cord, suddenly the army is there, fine, but it's running out of shells, it's running out of fuel. And as we're seeing right now in Ukraine, an army can burn through those resources incredibly quickly. Ukraine, an army can burn through those resources incredibly quickly. So it's not a battle that you need to think about as an equivalent to Trafalgar or Jutland or anything like that. The Germans don't have to and never could utterly defeat the Allies and drive them from the sea in the same bay. That was never going to happen. But if they could cut those vital supply routes for, say, a week, the effects on the army

ashore would be absolutely disastrous. It would grind to a halt. And like the poor Ukrainians, they'd be rationing themselves to 10 shells a day or whatever. So that's the vulnerability, really. And not just the Germans, but the famous weather in the English Channel as well could cut supplies. As you see after D-Day, terrible, terrible storm. Yeah, I mean, the storm is a really good illustration of what could have gone wrong. And that does grind military operations to a halt for a while, because the fuel isn't there and the ammunition isn't there and the reinforcements

aren't getting in. So you're battling the weather as well. You're battling some more conventional attacks by surface warships and aircraft, but also mining is a terrible, terrible problem. And the German mine threat never goes away throughout the whole of the period that I write about. So Nick, let's talk about that. Let's talk about the crossing initially, what the challenges are for the British-American allies just crossing the Channel to get to those famous beaches of Normandy.

How does the planning take shape? There's no question that the Allies have got to get to Western Europe at some stage. When do they really start preparing for this cross-channel invasion? Yeah, that's such an interesting question. And you're right, they're never in doubt that they have to cross. And even as far back as when they're thrown out of France in the summer of 1940, even in the depths of despair, people are starting to plan for when they will go back. And that's when, in Britain at least, you get that remarkable

organisation, Combined Operations gets set up and they learn their trade slowly through small-scale commando raids and then through larger amphibious landings in the Mediterranean. But all of that really is a rehearsal for the main event. There's a lot of nonsense talked about that Britain was supposedly fearful of ever going back to France and were always looking for a way of nibbling around the edges through the Mediterranean. It was the Americans that wanted to push hard and get across the Channel as soon as possible. The Americans weren't stupid. They knew that they weren't ready. They knew that the assets weren't there, that it would take time. The British weren't stupid either. They knew that at some point,

they would have to return to France across the Channel. The arguments were there. The arguments were more about when and where, but not about the concept. It absolutely had to happen, whatever Churchill may have been saying. And he was undoubtedly very nervous of a cross-channel assault. When does the story start? I started at the Quebec Conference in 1943, which is when they finally decide on Normandy. A number of invasion sites are considered at the beginning. You know, the early years, it's everywhere from Norway, almost down to the Spanish border.

That gradually gets whittled down to the only two really practical sites, the Pas-de-Calais and the Normandy beaches, the Seine Bay. The Pas-de-Calais has a lot of advantages. It's the quickest, shortest crossing, so the shortest distance of water to get over. It's within easy range of Allied fighter airfields in the southeast of England. But the German defences there are absolutely formidable. And also the land routes out, the road routes out to get out further into France are not so great. So ultimately they decide on Normandy.

And at Quebec, they also set up a remarkable and unsung organisation actually called COSAC, which is basically a small staff under a man who is the chief of staff designate for the Normandy landings. He hasn't got a commanding officer. There's no commander in chief. General Sir Frederick Morgan, and he starts sketching out what the plans are going to look like, and the Cossack staff work all the way through to the end of 1943, drawing up a plan. Then at the end of 1943 and then early 1944, you get the senior commanders are appointed.

Actually, Ramsey comes first because the naval input is so significant. It's the sailor who's appointed first. Then Eisenhower and Montgomery, famously Eisenhower and Montgomery, both argue very convincingly that the Cossack plan is too small. It's a three beach landing, three division landing, and they extend it to five. So that's when your full panoply of assault areas, Sojourno, Gold, Utah, and Omaha appear. The invasion kind of spreads out towards Le Havre on the eastern side and runs up the coast of the Cotten Town Peninsula on the western side. And then the planning really begins in earnest. Ramsey issues his initial plan in the spring, late winter, early spring of 1944. The naval plan, the assault

plan is an absolute monster. And Ramsey is pretty firm that the plan drills down to the minutest detail. Every ship's movement is perfectly orchestrated. Some of the Americans see the little bit about that. The doctrine within the US Navy places a great moral emphasis on individual initiative. Ramsey's argument is that's all well and good, but when you've got more than 7,000 ships manoeuvring in a fairly congested, mine-infested piece of water under enemy fire, the last thing you can have is huge amounts of people running around making up the rules as they go along. So everything is orchestrated to the last T and I really. The plans are issued in April. They're not allowed to open them.

And at the same time, you have what's been months and months of increasingly complex training taking place, winding up to a series of huge rehearsal exercises that take place on the south coast of England, where entire assault forces with their supporting warships and their allocated troops, all working together, invading the south of England. So it's a huge complex process building up to May 25th, which is the date that Operation Neptune, the assault phase of Operation Overlord, actually starts. And at 2330 at night on the 25th of May, the sealed orders are finally allowed to be opened and all the troops are locked down into their transit camps and not allowed to go out. Let's quickly nod at the Dieppe raid on the way past because it's part of D-Day law and I'd love

to hear what the latest thinking is as a result of your research. August 1942, over 5,000 to 6,000-ish Allied troops land on the French coast at Dieppe. It's a bloodbath. It seems a catastrophe. How important is it? Does it change the thinking of the senior Allied commanders? Did it go about as well as expected? What did they learn from Dieppe? Dieppe is hugely important and they learn a great deal. We talked earlier about the risks inherent in an assault landing. The single most important thing you need to do at the end of your assault phase of an assault landing is secure a port because there's a certain amount that you can do by moving things with landing craft, which we all know, the flat bottom craft that can drop a ramp and you can drive over it onto a beach. But actually to really get the big bang and really start moving huge amounts of supplies,

you need to be taking things over in conventional merchant ships and that requires a port. The Germans are not stupid. The Germans know this and the strongest German defences are located around the ports, all along the French coast and the European coast. Dieppe primarily is an attempt to see just how practical it might be to take a port. As you point out, it fails disastrously. They do not take the port and hold it for a day, which is what they were supposed to do. The loss of life is extraordinary. The big lesson from Dieppe is it's not going to be possible to take a port. And that really is the moment where the Mulberry Harbour concept

is born because the remarkable ingenuity really is to say, well, if we can't take a port, we'll take one with us. And then you get the concept of the two artificial harbours, which we might talk about in a little bit. But there are other really important lessons from Dieppe that may be less widely spoken about. They learn a lot about bombardment. The bombarding warships provided for Dieppe are completely inadequate. There aren't enough of them. They aren't big enough. And naval bombardment really has a kind of minimal impact on the German defences there. So there is a pretty firm commitment that the bombarding forces for any future invasion will be much bigger and much stronger. There were issues around the assault

forces, which hadn't really worked together before. So they took away a lesson about the importance of the assault forces, so the groups of landing craft and landing ships working together as a coherent team. And actually, I'm pretty sure, but I've never actually managed to prove it, but I'm sure enough to have written in the book, Force J at Juno Beach. Actually, Force J is the oldest of the assault forces and the core of it is ships and personnel that took part in Jubilee. It was Force J before there was a Juno Beach, and I'm fairly sure that's because it was Force Che from Jubilee. So that concept is really important. They try out armed landing craft, so cheap,

expendable really, ships that can go close inshore and provide gunfire support to the army. They are proved to work at Jubilee. So then they develop far more of those and they really come into play at Normandy. So there are huge numbers of lessons, some small and not particularly well-known and then some very, very big lessons. If you're going to ask me was it worth the cost in life, I don't know. That's very much a subjective judgment. Certainly the Canadian official history broadly accepted that it had to be done. I don't know the answer to that.

The loss of life and the impact on the Canadians was pretty extreme, but lessons were learned. So you mentioned mines earlier. Let's talk about, before we've even hit the enemy beach, let's talk about the challenges that the Navy had to face, apart from anything else, deconflicting all that shipping traffic as you say in the terrible weather in the channel what hardware what tools did the germans have to try and interdict to interrupt to even stop this great cross-channel armada you mentioned mines which are they're bombs that float around in the water and are detonated by contact with enemy ships hulls were there vast minefields in the channel?

There were vast minefields, and some of these euphemistically are friendly minefields, as well as enemy minefields. There is a mine belt around the British coast, protecting the UK coastal shipping routes, and then the Germans have a mine belt in front of the French coast, protecting their own coastal shipping routes. You can't clear your own mines too early, because it gives away where the invasion is going to come. So all of these mines have to be swept, whether they're supposedly friendly or enemy mines, and they all have to be swept pretty much at the last minute for security reasons. You mentioned that they kind of float

around in the water and hit ships. That's true for some of them. So your conventional contact mine is tethered to the bottom of the sea by a cable, floats around just below the surface and has the horns, sort of beloved of Hollywood cartoonists and all the rest of them. The horn hits the ship, detonates the mine. But the Germans and the Allies as well are also using ground mines, influence mines. Now they sit on the seabed and they don't have any form of cable at all. And they respond to lots of different things. You have magnetic mines that respond to the presence of a very large piece of steel, like a ship. You have acoustic mines that respond

to the sound of a ship's engines. And then in their back pocket, actually not deployed before the invasion on the express orders of Adolf Hitler, who doesn't want to compromise the technology, which is possibly a mistake. The Germans have also developed a thing called a pressure mine, nicknamed by the Allies an oyster mine, and that responds to changes in water pressure caused by a passing ship. And they turn out to be completely unsweepable. They get dropped in large numbers into the invasion area after the invasion, but they're not allowed to deploy them early. So interestingly, the British have developed those as well and they don't want to deploy them either. Both sides are nervous of using them in case the other side

capture one and then make their own. So there are huge numbers of mines and what that leads to there's so many superlatives when we talk about d-day and overlord and neptune it's the largest mine sweeping operation ever mounted they hoover up every mine sweeper that can possibly be found in uk home waters from old first world war coal burners modern fleet mine sweepers converted trawlers vast numbers of them and and some of the Americans as well. The Americans send over a minesweeping flotilla. The minesweepers set out first, along with some very courageous guys in small launches who will act as navigational leaders. So their job is to mark the entrances to the points that have to be swept for the minesweepers.

to mark the entrances to the points that have to be swept for the minesweepers. And they sit there all night broadcasting sonar pulses and also flashing lights so that the invasion force can see them. The sweepers come in and they are tasked with sweeping 10 clear channels all the way from the south coast of England, mostly running from a patch of buoyed ocean called Assembly Area Z, which is just off the Isle of Wight. Most of the invasion forces will pass through or near that. It's really misnamed. It's not an assembly area. I think people tend to think that the whole invasion armada was sitting in there at one point. They're not, but they do all pass through it,

all close to it. And from Assembly Area Z, you get these 10 channels, two for each assault area. So that's their first job is to sweep right up to the French coast until they hit the German coastal shipping channel, which is assumed to be safe. They then have to sweep big patches of ocean for the bombarding warships to manoeuvre in. And they have to sweep out the areas where the troops will board the landing craft for the bigger ships, known as the transport area for the Americans and the lowering point for the British, a sort of patch of ocean reasonably far away from German coastal guns. And then once that's done, their job is to sweep backwards and forwards until all of those 10 channels have joined up into one huge, very wide channel,

which becomes nicknamed the spout over time. So it's an incredibly difficult job. It's a complex job. It's exhausting and it's very dangerous. You listen to Dan Snow's history. There's more coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. Now, Nick, you, very excitingly for a story, you've invented a new battle. You call it the Battle of the Seine Bay, and I hope that that term catches on. It's the sort of naval battle that took place over the nine months previous to D-Day to sort of win, well, not just domination, but complete and utter control of the channel. We've got the mines. What are the key weapon systems that the Allies are worried about are trying to neutralise in this same battle. I mean, you've got a couple of German surface ships left. The Tirpitz has just recovered from a midget submarine attack in the

spring of 1944, so it's floating around up in Norway. But more realistically, the vessels that can intervene in the Channel, what are they? Schnellbooten, these so-called e-boats, these fast, very fast boats. Tell me about them. Yeah,called e-boats the fast very fast boats tell me about them yeah so yeah e-boat stands for enemy boats which is the nickname that the royal navy give them they are extremely capable well-designed fast motor torpedo boats they are a classic weapon for asymmetric warfare they're able to get in fast strike hard and get out very quickly and the british first and and then the Allies have been struggling to deal with these crafts since the beginning of the war, actually. They are very difficult to catch and their commanding officers operate under instructions and guidelines that

encourage them to stay out of action, actually, to go and find a target but not to waste too much time engaging British small craft. They are clearly designed as an attritional weapon against supplies. That's probably the greatest threat in the Seine Bay. The advantage is, like so many other bits of German technology, they're very well engineered, but they've gone for quality, not quantity. So they don't have enough of them. But the ones that are there are a huge threat. They're based all along the French coast,

but the flotillas that are the most immediate threat are in Le Havre to the east of the invasion area and Cherbourg to the west. They're not alone though. The Germans have some destroyers in the area that are a significant concern, big fleet destroyers. And they also have what are somewhat misleadingly named by the German Navy torpedo boats, which makes us think they're small craft. These are the equivalent to small Royal Navy or US Navy destroyers. So again, very capable small warships. And they have huge numbers of what they call their security flotillas.

So these are the craft that are used for convoy escort. And again, these are pretty capable ships, some of them. Armed trawlers, big flak lighters heavily armed landing craft all of which can be a nuisance clearly they are outnumbered but they're not completely off the map you know there are significant german naval forces you've got significant coastal gun batteries some of which have very big guns indeed. And the other thing that, again, a lot of histories write off is the Luftwaffe. Now, if you're a soldier ashore, you probably would be forgiven for writing off the Luftwaffe because by day, the Luftwaffe pretty much has been driven from the skies. But at night, night is a great leveller. All those single-engined Allied day fighters, P-47s and the Spitfires, they can't fly at night. So the number of Allied aircraft that are able The Luftwaffe is out laying mines,

carrying out tip-and-run bombing raids and tip-and-run torpedo raids every single night. So there are significant threats there. It is an asymmetric threat. The German forces are far smaller than the Allied forces they're facing, but it is there. Tell me about your Battle of the Seine Bay. Is that an attempt to impose an attritional effect

and take out some of these e-boats, take out some of these destroyers? How do they do so? Do they tempt them out? What's going on? Well, they don't tempt them out. It's a defensive action. And actually, can I just very quickly touch on something you said earlier as well, that nobody is ignoring the remains of the German surface fleet at this point either. And one of the reasons why the British leave warships in Scapa flow with the home fleet is to keep an eye on that German surface fleet. And believe it or not, there is a plan. There's two pocket battleships. There's a couple of cruisers in the Baltic.

If they make a run for the landing area, there is a plan for the elderly battleships and other bombarding warships under Ramsey's command to form a fleet and go and meet them. So it's unlikely, but they have planned for every eventuality. Broadly, though, the plan in the Seine Bay is defensive. And there is a complicated system of interlocking defence lines that protects the flanks of the invasion area from German forces coming out of Le Havre and Cherbourg. Famously in the east, the easternmost British defence line is called the Trout Line. All the British codes are fish and the Americans have very American names like prairie. What the Trout Line is, is armed landing craft.

So the same ships that are doing bombardment by day are on the Trout Line by night and they get very, very little sleep, the guys who are crewing those ships. Armed landing craft motor launches, backed up by minesweepers. So again, as if the minesweepers. So again, as if the minesweepers haven't got enough to do, they're on the trout line at night. And the idea is to form a solid wall of small and horrendous, though it is to say, expendable ships between the Germans and the really vulnerable and really valuable transports. And that goes on on the western side as well. The Americans go for a slightly more fluid defence. So the British anchor their ships in a well. The Americans go for a slightly more fluid defence.

So the British anchor their ships in a wall. The Americans have them patrolling. But the idea is the same. And that's the Battle of the Seine Bay. That's every night protecting the flanks of the invasion, trying to stop anything from coming in. And we haven't really touched on what comes later, which is in July you get the Germans start to deploy

human torpedoes, explosive motorboats, what they call their Klangkampfverbande, which is small battle units. So there's a whole new threat coming in again, mostly on that eastern flank. So it's constant. There are very significant losses of ships and personnel in the Seine Bay. If they had all happened over a period of 24 hours in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere, there's no doubt that people would be calling it a battle. It's not a battle that the Germans could win in the conventional sense. They were never going to defeat that Allied armada and drive it out of the bay. But delaying that supply shipping for a few days or a week could have been absolutely

catastrophic in terms of its impacts and could have had long-term impacts in terms of delaying the land fighting and then delaying the end of the war. And there's all sorts of potential what-if knock-ons that could come from that. So it is a battle. And I don't think there was a sailor who was afloat in the same bay who wasn't aware that he was in the front line and was vulnerable. He was risking his life. But Nick, as we talked about before, that battle doesn't start on June the 6th, does it? Because the battle against the E-boats, the attempt to grind down German forces in that area is going on from, you say, the last bit of 1943 right into 1944. Yeah, really. And the Battle of the Seine Bay is not just in the Seine Bay,

it's the waters around it as well. And it's about trying to make that into a safe operating space for a huge amount of what is very vulnerable shipping. So there are a series of actions, for example, called Operation Tunnel, they're repeat operations. The second one famously involves the loss of the cruiser and is a bit of a fiasco where allied british mainly warships are patrolling aggressively close up trying to draw the germans out and engage them and the idea is to basically wear down the german naval forces in that area now that's broadly a good thing anyway the sailors who are carrying out this work don't necessarily immediately link it to

the forthcoming invasion their orders wouldn't say this is about making it a safe operating environment for the invasion. But there's no doubt that all of that work absolutely contributes to making it a safe space to launch the invasion across. Those operations have their own purpose as well, but they also contribute to a greater whole. And that really begins in 1943 when they're kind of operating aggressively in German waters. There's a moment, which the British official historian actually refers to, where naval warfare in UK coastal waters switches from being a defensive operation to protect UK coastal shipping to an aggressive operation to interdict German naval forces and interdict German coastal

shipping. And that all dovetails with the decision to go to Normandy and the real kind of build-up of momentum for the invasion. More preparation. The X-Craft, I was lucky enough to meet, I think you have as well, I think we were together, one of the last survivors of that extraordinary unit who would take these midget submarines into the beaches of Normandy, swim ashore at night, take soil samples and analyse the beach, then swim back out, spend all day on the bottom in their little midget submarines, then do the same the next night. Operations like that and intelligence gathering going on presumably for months before D-Day. Yeah, I mean, the intelligence gathering is phenomenal, the attention to detail and putting together this enormous jigsaw.

The guys you're referring to, the euphemistically named Combined Operations Pilotage Parties, which is terrific, and a combination of sailors and raw marines going ashore, looking at beach gradients and sand samples and in all the different invasion areas and also everywhere else. Because that's the other important thing to remember is you can't give away the invasion area by just visiting the area you know you're going to attack. So they're taking samples from all up the French coast and everywhere right up to Holland.

And in fact, the only copies to be captured are captured in Calais, which is terrific really from the Allies' point of view because it sends a signal that they're going to the wrong place. But you also have the French resistance providing intelligence, Frenchmen cycling along, measuring the distance from a beach to a gun bunker, that kind of thing, really kind of informal intelligence. You have that remarkable effort, it's probably a book in its own right, to harvest family souvenir postcards from holidays on the continent before the war. They put out an appeal. But again, we can't say we want postcards from holidays on the continent before the war.

They put out an appeal. But again, we can't say we want postcards of Normandy. So they basically say to anyone who's visited anywhere on the European coast, if you've got any postcards, send them in to us. And they're all held at the Imperial War Museum. Actually, there are vast numbers of them still today. You have aerial photography. The Americans develop a particularly good technique of low-level oblique photography where they start to put the plans together for Neptune,

the intelligence picture that is provided to the invading troops and the sailors is phenomenal. The level of detail they have is really extraordinary. Okay, let's move to the day of days, Nick. Let's do this. People are so familiar with what happens when that ramp goes down the landing craft and the young men jump out on the beach. But let's take it back. Let's talk about the naval efforts to get those young men onto that beach, which were formidable. What happens first? So what happens first, and broadly all the assault areas are similar. The precise times vary because of different tidal patterns in different beaches. But the broad pattern of events, what they're intending to do is the same. Obviously, the way it plays out varies slightly from beach to beach and dramatically in the case of Omaha, but it's supposed to all roll out the same way. After the minesweepers have

done their bit, they go out the way. You then get the bombarding warships move into their freshly swept bombarding area. And behind them, the transports are moving into the transportation area or the lowering point where they will put the troops into landing craft. The bombardment starts around five o'clock, depends where you are. Again, there are many, many arguments about which ship fired first. You will never get to the bottom of that because they don't all go off at the same time. There isn't a single moment where someone pushes a button and all the ships fire. The bombardment plan is incredibly complex and detailed. The bigger ships, the battleships and cruisers, all have specific

targets that have been allocated to them as a result of this amazing intelligence gathering. And they tend to be focused on the big German coastal defence batteries. So they start pounding those anywhere where there are big guns that are a threat to the fleet. You then have the smaller warships, the destroyers. Again, they have allocated targets and they are firing at things like pillboxes and machine gun nests. And again, you have the armed landing craft. Even some of the coastal forces craft have allocated targets. craft even some of the coastal forces craft have allocated targets so there's this very kind of precise bombardment going on right across the invasion area while the troops are getting

into their their landing craft behind let's look at that process for a little bit the tank landing craft and things like that they're they're relatively easy they go over with their loads the small wooden assault landing craft beloved of filmmakers very few of those actually cross the channel under their own steam and the ones that do are special purpose ones they're armed and they're for fire support the assault infantry board from larger ships some miles offshore and there's two ways they can do that both are equally grim they either climb into the landing craft and then they're swung off the side of the ship on davits and dropped into the water, or they climb down scrambling nets down the side of the ship. So we haven't really mentioned the fact that D-Day was

delayed for 24 hours because of bad weather. And the weather when they choose to go is still described as marginal by all the assault force commanders. It's not a great day. It's just a better day than 24 hours before. So you can imagine scrambling down a net down the side of a ship and then the last minute what you have to do is jump from the end of the net into your assault landing craft. So you have to wait for it to come to the top of a wave and then jump into it with all your kit. And then the little assault landing craft steam round in circles

while all of them get loaded up. Once they're all loaded the little assault landing craft steam round in circles while all of them get loaded up. Once they're all loaded, the assault landing craft shake themselves out into a line and they start to head to the beach, accompanied by the famous swimming tanks, the DD tanks, which as we know, are successful in some areas, less so in others. And then landing craft carrying mainly specialised armour in the British sector. So things like mine clearing tanks and Royal Engineers armoured vehicles that are used for clearing pillboxes. And that's the assault wave. Meanwhile, the bombardment is still going on. The bombardment goes on until the very last minute. What they do at the end of the bombardment, really for those last minutes as

the assault craft are approaching, is they switch to a process called drenching fire which is a sort of a mad minute really the idea is to completely cover the beaches with as much high explosives as possible nobody is really under any illusions that the bombardment is going to kill many germans but the idea is that it will just so demoralize them and basically have them cowering in the bottom of their bunkers with their hands over their ears at that crucial moment at the end when the landing craft are at their most vulnerable. And it's interesting, years ago when I worked for the IWM, I actually got to do this. I got to go and sail on Salisbury Plain and be shelled by the Royal Artillery in a concrete

bunker. And even just that very limited, very controlled experience, it was absolutely deafening. I couldn't imagine sitting under that for an hour, knowing that somebody is actually trying to put the shell on top of me instead of putting it five metres away at the front where they were actually doing it. So that bombardment then lifts and the assault forces hit the beach. With them, not before them, go the sailors from Land and Craft Obstacle Clearance Units and Royal Engineers, whose job is to clear the beach obstacles. We haven't really talked about those, but one of the changes that General Rommel makes

when he takes over the German defences is he doubles down on the introduction of obstacles on the beaches. Essentially, there are many different forms of them. They're all designed to rip the bottom out of landing craft and drown soldiers. That's their job. There are various forms of steel and wooden obstruction, tipped with explosives, old artillery shells. And there is a plan. Broadly, it is not very successful to have these dismantled in the very brief window they have before they get covered up by the tide again. These guys are supposed to go ashore alongside the assault troops, defuse the explosives or blow them up and then blow up the obstacles. And then other sailors are going ashore with the troops to spot for the naval gunnery,

because at the point now, you can't just have that kind of bombardment without seeing what you're firing at, because the risk of friendly fire is too great with the troops ashore. So you get sailors going ashore with the troops to spot. And other sailors and airmen as well, flying aircraft above the top, also spotting for the bombardment ships. So there were sailors involved at every single level. They're not just driving landing craft. The midget submarines are back involved, aren't they? The coppists, as you call them. They actually acted as markers, didn't they, through these swept channels through minefields so the landing craft knew how to get to the shore in relative safety. They absolutely did. Operation Gambit, the irony

of which wasn't lost on them, because that is a chess term for a sacrificial piece. Yeah, they're used to mark the extreme ends of the British sector. So there's one at each end of the British assault area, and they go in early. Now they go out, because they're so slow, they go out and they're there all the way through the weather delay. So they're sat out there for the best part of two days in very, very grim circumstances, rarely able to surface. I was lucky enough years ago to make a TV program and I went out there with a chap called Jim Booth, who was one of the coppists.

He was there on the 6th of June and we did a dive in a small submersible to one of the wrecks. And at that point, Jim told me the last time he was in a submersible was when he was in an X-Craft off the Normandy beaches on the 5th of June, actually, watching German soldiers playing football on the beach through the periscope. Remarkable, remarkable people. George Arner, obviously, is the most famous,

and his diaries and his oral histories are at the Imperial War Museum. So, yeah, you have those, but you have other navigational leaders as well that are less well-known. Coastal Forces craft in Portsmouth, we have Medusa, don't we? HTML 1387, she was a navigational leader for the Normandy landings and actually in Omaha area. So they're out there again with visual signals, so flashing lights, but also sonar signaling, basically.

Again, always to make sure that the invasion forces follow the correct route. And the Americans have a similar thing. They're using small Coast Guard cutters, again, as navigational leaders. Slightly problematic in the American sector because those Coast Guard cutters are introduced very late in the day. And they haven't had that long familiarity of working with the assault forces that the British have had. So there's a little bit of confusion there with the navigational markers. details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions,

and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. and then how quickly after those initial landings boots hit the shore does the navies start to um bring up these mulberry harbors these uh if you can't capture a port build your own port extraordinarily are those being assembled almost straight away off the coast yeah so i mean they've been building them for months they are huge construct constructions. There are two Mulberry Harbours, one at Saint Laurent, which is in Omaha area in the US sector, and one at Aramulch in the British sector. And they are each the size of Dover. So they're huge constructions. They are all made out of the same key elements. There is a break water code named Gooseberry that's made out of old sunken ships. There is a breakwater, codenamed Gooseberry,

that's made out of old sunken ships. And actually every beach has a Gooseberry. There are five of those. That's intended just to provide a patch of sheltered water. You have the Phoenix Cassoons, which are the huge concrete blocks that are going to form the outer harbour. And then you have pontoons called whales and roadways that are the piers that are going to connect the shore to the sea. Basically, just like a pier, the merchant ships can tie up alongside and tank landing craft can unload onto. And the process of taking that kit over

really begins by the end of D-Day, they're starting to take that stuff over. So towards the end of the 6th of June, the lines of the block ships are being scuttled and the first transports start to arrive towing over those components. And it all has to be towed. They're too big to be carried on the decks of ships. The use of tugs is another. There are many superlatives with Neptune Overlord. We talked about the minesweeping, the sheer scale of everything. The sheer scale of tug use is another. There are many superlatives with Neptune Overlord. We talked about the minesweeping, the sheer scale of everything. The sheer scale of tug use is phenomenal. They hoover up every tug that they can possibly find and use that for towing mulberry and towing everything else they

do. So they start to build the mulberries immediately. They take some weeks to build. The Americans built theirs first and it's possibly, maybe we should nail that a little bit. Legend would have it, the Americans built theirs in a hurry because they're Americans and they're always in a hurry, aren't they? And they cut some corners. They got all the harbour working much quicker than the British, but then the storm knocked it out because they hadn't built it properly. That isn't quite fair. The Americans did cut some corners. We must remember that the Americans are building theirs under fire and the front at Omaha is a lot closer than it is at Aramonch.

And the pressure to have that harbour working in a beach that's still quite vulnerable is pretty extraordinary. So they didn't do it in some sort of gung-ho Hollywood. It was a calculated risk. It was a decision that they took that they were going to get this thing running as soon as possible because the situation at Omaha is precarious. They're also building it on a less sound footing. It's a much more sandy beach. The British have the benefit of some offshore rocks, which provide a little bit of shelter to their harbour. The Americans don't have that. reasons. But nevertheless, when the Great Storm blows up, the American mulberry is complete, but is absolutely hammered by the storm to the point where it's rendered unusable. So much of it is wrecked. The British harbour takes a battering, but is still there. So after the

Great Storm, they take the decision to recycle the reusable components from the American mulberry into the British mulberry and just have one harbour. And it's a huge contribution. Again, people sometimes tie themselves up in knots arguing about, well, you know, was it the mulberries? Was it the beaches? Was it the ports they captured? It was all of these things. Those are the three pillars of logistics and they're all important. The beaches remain in use, well, some of them right through to the end of the period that I'm writing about. The Mulberry Harbour, which is only supposed to last through the summer, is still in use at the end of the war. The least effective is actually the ports that they eventually capture because they are so battered by the Germans. The Germans are not stupid. So

when they capture Cherbourg, for instance, the Germans have completely trashed the place and it's unusable for weeks. And the same is true in the case of as they start to liberate the Channel ports, they've all been completely wrecked by the Germans. far away that actually the problem is not getting stuff ashore, it's getting them from the port to the army. And by that point, they've liberated Antwerp and they've liberated the ports on the south of France, actually with Operation Dragoon, that also come into play. And actually, that's the importance of Dragoon is it gives them port capacity. So all of these things, the amount of war material that they're trying to bring into France to build this huge army is absolutely enormous and they need every option they can to bring things ashore. So Nick, at the end of D-Day, well not the end of the D-Day itself because as you point out the operation goes on a lot longer than that, Allied naval planners and indeed everyone involved including the young men and the young women who took part in operations ashore and at sea had a lot to celebrate. They did. And they did celebrate. So actually, I chose to end the story on the 12th of September,

and that's when Le Havre falls. The fighting on land has moved quite a long way away by that point, but Le Havre is still holding out, and therefore there's still a German threat into the Seine Bay until that ends. So there are many dates you could apply the end of the Battle of the Seine Bay to. That's the one that I've chosen. I had a lovely quote, actually, that's quite a nice one to finish on. This is a Wren called Ginger Thomas, and I follow her throughout the story, actually. She's part of the planning staff, and she goes out when Ramsey flies out on the 8th of September to set up his headquarters ashore for the next bit of the job. He joins Eisenhower and Ginger Thomas comes out and joins his staff shortly afterwards and she writes,

We landed on the wonderful Mulberry Harbour. We'd typed about it hundreds of times but we were now seeing it for the first time. I remember travelling through Sanlo and being astonished at the amount of damage there had been to the places. I was used to bomb damage but the devastation here was breathtaking. As we travelled through Normandy, troops would stand outside their tents waving at us. They probably didn't see many girls around there. It was a really triumphant period. And Thomas goes on to say that morale next to the staff was excellent. There was a real feeling of a job

well done. And certainly at the time, there's no doubt that the soldiers knew the debt that they owed to the sailors. And if you can forgive me just one last quote, this is by Montgomery. I think we can probably agree, Dan, Montgomery, not a man who's renowned for giving praise to others, but he wrote in May 45, any success achieved by the British armies has been made possible only by the magnificent support given us by the Royal Navy. It didn't work without sailors. Boom. Reminds me of that quote that Wellesley and Wellington wrote about the Peninsula War after that had been successfully concluded as well. Never forget the Navy, folks. The root of all success. Nick Hewitt, what a tour de force. Thank you very much. What's the book called?

It's called Normandy, the Sailor's Story, A Naval History of D-Day and the Battle for France. And it's out now with Yale University Press. Thanks very much, Bud. I'm looking forward to coming and seeing you in Orkney for a history adventure soon as well. Can't wait. Thank you very much for listening to this first episode of my D-Day to Berlin series.

Make sure to follow wherever you get your podcasts, and you can listen to the next one tomorrow. We're going to trace the air operation of the invasion. It was the largest day of airborne operations in history to that point. My local airfield, very near to where I'm recording this, now reclaimed by gorse and brambles and marsh, it saw aircraft take off and land every few seconds for 24 hours straight. So tomorrow we're going to be delving into the meticulous planning

and the tenacious execution of this operation. We talk about the American Airborne. If you're a Band of Brothers fan, this one is for you. Make sure you watch out for it tomorrow. See you then. you